GREECE: SPOT SITUATION REPORT, SEPTEMBER 20, 2010
A new barrage of taxation is fomenting renewed popular unrest. Thousands of citizens, not to mention professional and trade associations, plan to resort to courts immediately to gain relief from the regime’s attempt of effectively confiscate private property that has been already taxed repeatedly from the minute of laying the foundation stone through every step of construction, sale, and transfer.
With the Greek economy projected to slump even deeper during 2012, and the sovereign debt to reach 189% of GDP despite the Greek people being bled white by Troika and Papandreou regime “rationalization,” putting an estimated 1.5 million Greeks out of work, the regime has just announced more slashing of incomes and is ordering the sacking of tens of thousands of public workers out to 2014 -- one year beyond its constitutional term ending in October 2013.
It must be understood that all these decisions, just like the wave of austerity legislation that engulfed Greece since May 2010, have been reached without the slightest serious understanding of the medium and longer term impacts on Greek society and prepared in the most amateur, haphazard, and injurious way possible.
The Papandreou regime is now established in the role of the Troika’s contractor, obeying without the slightest negotiation lists of demands by foreign auditors, who have been instructed to gain as much time as possible for Eurozone “central powers” in order to minimize the effects of the inevitable Greek fall.
Speaking in parliament on September 19, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos announced: “The drama of this country is that no solution can be achieved either via a democratic way or via elections.”
Venizelos, a constitutional law professor himself, unconsciously perhaps, put thus the current political impasse in perfect context.
Pressure on Greek society is such that the very stability of the entire system is now in question. So far, Greeks have absorbed immense punishment with comparatively low level protest. However, with millions of families now pushed deliberately into destitution by a regime that has lost every last shred of political legitimacy in the eyes of the whole of Greek society, “solutions,” like those implied by Venizelos, may not be entirely unthinkable.
The regime continues to ignore a desperate society on the verge of insanity and the death throes of the economy. It appears prepared to cling to power with every means possible. It has already trampled the constitution beyond recognition, in the process of “saving” the country, and it continues to veer off into blatant illegitimacy. It should not feel surprised therefore if, soon, this catastrophic process is reversed and Venizelos’s disarmingly, although thoughtlessly, honest conclusion as above becomes reality -- but with the regime on the receiving end and standing alone in the face of the oncoming charge.