The Eurozone crisis is over! We are told. A statement that is then qualified with reassurances that “we are on the mend”. Modest recovery (note not growth just recovery) has begun. We can see the first green shoots sprouting and so on and so forth.
In reality nothing much is improving at all, and how could it possibly be when every single member of the Eurozone signed on to Frau Merkel’s ludicrous pact that budget deficits should be abolished on pain of punishing penalties. This little pact ensures that austerity will be a permanent features in the Eurozone, that the weaker economies will remain under perpetual supervision, and by supervision we mean one that will only ensure that any possibility of growth is nipped at the bud.
One witty analyst at the time of signing this heinous document, with broad smiles around the tale, described this particular little piece of Mekelian idiocy as akin to “outlawing heart attacks”. We all know they are bad but how are you going to stop them by passing an unenforceable law?
Another straw being clutched at is Ireland. Ireland has made it! She has exited the bail out programme! She has proved this policy was a great success! You don’t have to speak to the man in the street in Dublin to realise that this too is a pack of nonsense. The Irish economy will remain constrained and under austerity for years. She has to pay back the “generous” loans at a rate in no way commensurate to the ability of her economy. She has suffered recession which she will be hard put to make up, in other words she is set to stagnate for years, as is the whole of the Eurozone, not to mention a debilitating brain drain of her ablest and best young people.
And that is the successful poster child of the German led brain (dead) wave for fixing Europe through austerity alone. Not to mention the Greek “Success Story” where that hapless country was subjected to such inhuman policies for several years because it’s debt had soared. Now, about four years later the country’s debt is much higher both in absolute terms as well as a percentage of GDP, it’s economy has collapsed, unemployment has gone up to nearly 30% (and everyone rejoices because it has “stablised”…. only it hasn’t even done that) and it has lost one quarter of its GDP through the recession purposely inflicted to achieve another idiocy that can never work dubbed “internal devaluation” , a recession that has not yet “stablised” either.
Yet still the Brussels Commissioners, the ECB and above all the instigators of this disaster, are celebrating that the Eurozone crisis is over. Why? Professor Yannis Varoufakis for one makes an excellent case that they are all in collective denial over the disaster they have wrought and the lack of any prospects of real recovery. I believe it was the LSE economists in Britain who pleaded something like being in “collective denial” when a little old Lady (Queen Elizabeth) asked them oh so nicely why it was that none of them, not one, had foreseen the bursting of the 2008 bubble.
But apart from this denial of the realities of what they have wrought, there is also another human failing in play here. Selfserving egoism. No one wants to admit that they have made one hell of a mess entailing suffering and a humanitarian crisis in the south. Everyone wants a) to insist that no! this is not a disaster at all! Look! We have succeeded, Ireland is out of the woods, Portugal will exit this year, even Greece is stabilising and on the road to recovery!
They think that if they go blue in the face insisting that black is really white, this will, in the end, be believed, in accordance with Goebbel’s theory of propaganda . And unfortunately, a great number of people are indeed being induced at the moment to clutch this dangerous straw. But failing universal acceptance of this criminal misrepresentation of facts they then turn to the time honoured fall back position of blaming everyone else but themselves. We did absolutely everything completely right but that damned Greek government did not carry out the programme as planned!
And perhaps the crowning glory of adding insult to injury is today’s statement by Herr Reinchenbach the German official heading the so called “Task Force” here in Greece. Now lest blame should be pinned on him, heaven forbid, he claims that Greece has been a great success. Many necessary reforms have been passed through. They have been keen to take and act on the Task Force’s advice and in so doing have succeeded in setting up… wait for it… The best national health care system in Europe. One that will be a model for health care systems across the whole of Europe!
Whoops! The fact of the matter is that the whole system is in a state of collapse, there is no health care system left at all on the islands, hospitals are being closed down, doctors persecuted, hospital staff are being laid off. But then this is precisely what is needed all over Europe. No more public health care for anyone at all! Then the poor can die off in droves and relieve us of these unnecessary expenses and the rich can pay for it through the nose.
But to end with some bitter mirth an anecdote that best depicts what health care has come to in Greece in 2014. This is a true story. A gentleman on one of the islands needed to have a catheter (a medical draining tube) inserted, but there was no doctor on the island at all. What to do? In the anxiety and the fuss a solution was found. The local plumber did the job for him.
This may be saying a lot for Greek ingenuity but not much for Herr Reichenbach’s model health care system, now is it?