We hoped we would get a new government here in Greece. We were to be disappointed. We have the same old catastrophic team, particularly in the Ministry of Finance, and only a new Prime Minister. Well, the good side is that at least this new man in charge, Loukas Papademos is intelligent, honest, methodical and as an ex vice governor of the European Central Bank and more, knows his stuff (whereas the previous lot didn?t have a clue about anything) and, we hope, will be better able to handle a modicum of negotiations.
The bad side is that as long as Frau Merkel insists on her one way street austerity (as David Harvey puts it in his excellent book, The Enigma of Capital: Save the banks screw the people!) things will continue getting worse and worse. I have also said and continue to believe, that the way things are now, if God himself (or even Zeus come to think of it except he was always more wily) took charge of the Greek government today, it would be impossible to carry out the Merkel dictates.
The whole of the public sector is in a state of disintegration and hardly anything is running any more, nor will it when the employees are continually being threatened with the sack on the one hand and further reductions in salaries, indiscriminately.
This is also a wonderful recipe for the self destruction of the Banking System (with capital letters), because it doesn’t take an economist to see (of course the economists are the ones who don’t ever see) that if you ?save” the banks through austerity which leads to recession which leads to the destruction of the economy (as is happening here in Greece and has begun in the rest of Europe too), then how will the banks have been saved when there is so little economic activity that they fail anyway through lack of business? You would have thought that would be simple enough to work out. But no, alas, it seems not to be so.
Something else I can’t help grinning at is the following: The Euro geeks were so terrified of Greece holding a referendum because for all Papandreou’s being in denial of what the result would have been, they at least knew well enough that we would have returned a resounding NO! Which is also why they don’t want elections now either. A democratic right now denied Italy as well. Interesting.
However, they cannot do any more than try to keep putting the inevitable off by, as has so often been said, kicking the can further down the road. But time is running out for us all. The funny thing is (in a tragicomic way that is) that since elections appear to have been scheduled for Feb (i.e. when the present government will have safely ratified the new loan ‘package’ and even harsher austerity measures that go with it) the left as a whole will have won a good deal more of the votes than Frau Merkel would find comfortable for one. And this is probably the best case scenario. As for the worst case scenario, well. Traditionally Europe has endeavoured to solve its differences in less civilized ways than elections. Lets hope we have at least grown out of the play ground brawl.