In a recent interview, prime minister George Papandreou said:
Rather than a “third way,” I would say that we need a “fourth way.” ..... The “fourth way” depends on responsible, democratic institutions that put global solidarity above national interests. We need to get hold of globalization and decide ourselves where we want to take it.
That means a number of things. We need global governance. Multilateral institutions like the G20 and UN must be more inclusive and more representative. We need to decide just how much interdependence we want and how much self-sustainability we want. More autonomy means more control.
........
There is also the question of cultural globalization. Just because the younger generation has assimilated global culture through the communication of common symbols, popular music and a common grasp of global problems does not mean they are empowered.
Such slow-revolutions gibberish, if uttered under different circumstances, would have most probably landed Papandreou at the bottom of an average graduate school class, but, unfortunately, with him currently touted by a very persistent network of international “friends” as perhaps the best thing after Gibbon, Kant, Disraeli, and Mahatma Gandhi all wrapped into one, we are forced to face a critical question: how does this country defend against the fickle elementary school fixations of Papandreou’s “philosophy” when it is already exhausted, divided onto itself, and with a tragic dearth of alternative leadership capable of rousing the people in what increasingly looks like a battle for national survival?
This is no theoretical essay question. Papandreou, and his team of robotic economic confederates, are well on their way of dismantling an ailing edifice without offering even the slightest notion of a sound alternative that would safeguard the longer term welfare of Greeks and GUARANTEE that this country remains intact and domestically cohesive.
Papandreou’s politically autistic “modern mindset,” so dear to many abroad, translates into the worst nightmare borne out of the politically correct aberrations that have already consumed a large part of western Europe and methodically continue to undermine western democracy as it developed in the last 200 years.
In the case of Greece, the combination of the search for the “fourth way” and the current transformation of the Greek people into guinea pigs in the lab of horrors of the EU and big European banks and other institutional investors, rests on the following main dorsal beams:
1. Rapid de-christianization of the country on the pretext of “religious freedom” and respecting the faiths of “others,” who appeared, uninvited and en masse, in recent years inside Greece.
2. “Integration” of these masses of undocumented aliens, almost universally bottom skilled, and hardly agreeable to anything that could be even remotely defined as “Greek,” through rapid processes of naturalization and “adjustment” so that they obtain equal rights with all the rest of us second-class natives.
3. A great sweep to “de-sensitise” and “decontaminate” modern Greek history and incorporate into it elements of “even handedness” forcefully recognizing that this country has committed many atrocities of its own, so that Greece is pushed into the community of self-flagellating western European countries sweating at the effort to welcome and accommodate every enemy of and every opposed to western democratic values in the name of “human rights.”
4. Systematic weakening of the country’s military defense capabilities because of some fictitious “peace dividend” that cannot, and will not, be realized as long as Greece willingly assumes the status of a pariah, fearful, post-colonial entity.
5. Systematic convergence with even the most hideously naked “grand strategic plans” of bigger powers that place Greece’s national interest in the Lost & Not Claimed section and focus on how to use this country as a convenient pawn in promoting their own visions for power and dominance, and
6. Constant covert activity through illegally empowered, shadowy “special envoys,” paid out of “black funds,” and answering only to the prime minister himself, to serve these various foreign strategic schemes which, more often than not, involve the presence and active role of rogue “non-government organizations,” “international interlocutors” who better remain unnamed, and other elements that habitually survive and feed in the opaque bottom slurry mixture of “international diplomacy” that brought us, among other things, the highly successful and richly beneficial undertakings in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
What is increasingly striking, and indeed fuels suspicions that the Papandreou government acts on a hidden political agenda that ignores the ultimate impact of “change” on the country’s stability and social survivability, is the apparent oblivion that surrounds the prime minister as the country implodes around his administration; as Leigh Phillips observed recently, “Papandreou.... appears unmoved by the civil unrest he has unleashed. He is tearing his country apart.” The prime minister of “roll up the sleeves and go to work,” of “put your shoulder to the wheel,” and of “we will bleed in order to save the country,” has been on almost unbroken happy island, kayak-filled vacation away from Athens for nearly a month.
This tearing apart of Greece, it is now more than clear, does not make economic sense either. The Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research has methodically debunked all the government-inspired myths that have sustained the introduction of the IMF/EU/ECB auditors to Greece, with the Papandreou administration throwing the gates wide open, after a persistent international campaign by the prime minister and his finance minister both to present Greece in the most diseased light possible and decry, at every whistle stop and in front of every camera, how the country is the impending Titanic of Europe.
The report, titled “Greece and the IMF: Who Exactly is Being Saved?” puts all the right (and simple) questions that the Papandreou administration flagrantly continues to ignore:
This long drawn out process of unwinding sovereign debt raises the crucial question of whether
Greece will be able to regain financial market confidence in time, i.e. by 2014. From that year on,
Greece will have to return to the markets and find the financial means to pay back the 110 billion
euro loan rescue package, representing some 40% of Greece’s GDP. On top of this, Greece will also
need to repay those debts that are set to come due in the rest of this decade. With debt having
exploded to a level of 145% of GDP, it is likely that financial markets would continue their refusal
to roll over Greek debt, thereby reviving the specter of exceptionally high interest rate charges
bankrupting the state and the economy.
And further down:
Even if financial markets often behave in an irrational way, they do understand the basic principle that in order to repay debt, one needs to be able to generate sufficient revenue. They also understand that a policy of slashing deficits can be self-defeating. Negative feedback effects from deficit cuts to economic activity, and from there to lower than expected tax revenue, can force the economy into prolonged stagnation. This stagnation will make it more difficult to repay debt, especially if it is associated with deflation and therefore falling nominal revenue flows. With economic activity as well as prices being pushed downward by aggressive fiscal cuts, the denominator effect of falling GDP pushes an already high debt ratio even higher.
And here’s the rub that Papandreou & Co so eagerly conceal from the guinea pigs of the domestic front:
[The EU willingness to offer 110 billion to Greece] raises the core issue of the so called rescue package: If market confidence is not being restored while the Greek economy is at the same time being pushed into recession, double digit unemployment and rising poverty, then what is the point? Who or what exactly is being saved?
In the end, the purpose of the rescue package may boil down to a huge shift of debt from (mostly)
private banks into public hands. The 110 billion euros now being lent to Greece by the IMF and
European governments will be mainly used to pay back the banks and institutional investors who are
now holding Greek debt. Banks, insurance companies and pension funds are the real beneficiaries.
.....
Europe and the IMF are not so much providing Greece with fresh finance but, most of all, shielding the European financial system from up to 200 billion euros of losses that could result from a Greek default. Curiously, almost one quarter of Greek debt is located in the UK (and Irish) financial sector. The obvious beneficiaries of the Euro Area governments’ package are not Greek workers and citizens who will suffer from severe budget cuts and recession, but financial centers such as the City of London.
[Emphases added].
A word is here due for the minority that has closed ranks around the Papandreou government and discovers that all’s well and the ship is sailing smoothly -- mainly business, some “enlightened” academics, and the usual politically correct crowd.
They should all pause and think what will it become of this country if this vicious slash-and-burn operation and the persecution of those who have the least role in the Greek collapse, now under way, succeed in essentially extinguishing hope for the majority part of the Greek people.
History is rarely the subject of accurate prediction but we are willing to suggest the outcome won’t be either handsome or a textbook case of stability. The ugliness of mass despair has never been the best of counselors during all-round, end-of-times crises. And when the knives are bared, and the teeth begin to grind, no “market indicators,” no “business community,” and no “investment for growth” can stop a country from becoming a graveyard of all good (if a little profiteering) intentions -- alongside thousands (?) tens of thousands (?) or millions of its inhabitants.
In the end, what is presently official is that Papandreou, in his added tragically ironic capacity as president of the Socialist International, supposedly the one organization against all that is being imposed on this country either by its own government or the EU “partners,” is pushing with all of his might to unhinge this country completely in order to “save” it.
His true motives, and his real interlocutors, would be subjects for the future historian to discover. Right now, the emergency at hand is how his “memorandum government” could be controlled before we end up another sorry wreck on the rocks of “sustainability,” “fiscal responsibility,” and “prudent management.” The terms, so hackneyed in the vocabulary of “free marketeers,” are now persecuting us like plagues.
Between the “fourth way” and the mysteries behind the manic government assault on all of us, Greece is in its worst peril since the last world war -- and, perhaps, even worse.