A German Satire On A Greek Stage

Germany is staging a satire in burning Greece. While school children there go unfed and homeless increases in number bankers punish the exhausted Republic by imposing harsh, humiliating conditions to take last cents away from the bankrupt capitalist state in Europe.

“Socialist” Koutsoukos, the Greek deputy labor minister resigning in protest to the EC, ECB and IMF dictated package, accused the troika of “shameless extortion” in its policies towards Athens while Karatzaferis, the extreme right leader and coalition partner, spoke of national humiliation and Greece “under the German boot”. Samaras, the New Democracy leader, said “Today we are in danger of losing our freedom and independence.” With the power of trampling sovereignty bank capital unites “socialists” and far-right in humiliation, subservience and anguish. A satire with a German lead role it seems.

As riot police clashed with protesters on Athens streets five ministers resigned in protest at the scale of the spending cuts and police ringed the parliament building to secure it from citizens’ wrath. Finance minister Venizelos said an unruly default would take the country to the brink of civil war and the country would be bought under colonial terms. He was scared of “total dissolution of the economic, social and institutional web of the country.” This led prime minister Papademos and former prime minister socialist Papandreou to sell out their right and left hearts! The price is a new support package, a haircut of debt, and a population’s plight.

But the rescue cash is not at sight. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, demands more. Days back, Merkel, the German Chancellor, turned impatient with her Greek debtors. It is time, she said during a joint press conference with Sarkozy, the French president, for Athens to accept the tough austerity measures being demanded as a condition for a second bailout package. Should Greece reject the demands, she almost threatened, insolvency and an exit from the euro zone could come quickly. Sarkozy lent his tough voice: “They have no choice.” The bank bosses told bluntly: No new bailout unless there are further budget cuts, on top of the already promised austerity measures. Otherwise, Greece will go bankrupt. The Greek government agreed.

On the austerity program, EU demands signed, irreversible, binding pledge from the three coalition partners, regardless of winner in the next election. The austerity-pledge includes chopping out 150,000 public sector jobs, cutting down the minimum wage by 22%, and reducing pensions. It is, in summary, people are to pay, pay for plunder and wrong doings of elites, pay for inefficiency and accounting corruption of dominating interests.

With an emerging underclass, the Orthodox Church feeding 250,000 people a day, 20.9% unemployment, 48% youth unemployment, all Greek families hit by joblessness, 20,000 shelter less citizens, more than 10,000 on Athens pavements, park benches, in metro stations and shopping arcades, doorways and cars, 25% “new homeless” – evicted from home, 27.7% of Greek citizens staying on the brink of poverty and social exclusion, and hard-hit middle class having no savings an acute social crisis is brewing up. Among social groups, Crete Gazette reports, pensioners suffer most from low income and high cost of living while 33% of poor are over 65. Almost 60% of Greeks are afraid of falling into the poverty trap in the next few years. According to the Hellenic Statistical Authority the country’s manufacturing output contracted by 15.5% in December from a year earlier and industrial output fell 11.3%.

Press reports say “[e]ducated professionals, too shamefaced to want to speak, now stand in line with immigrants from developing countries waiting for food handouts from the town hall.” Citing relevant source McClatchy said: In the relief organization Doctors of the World’s Perama clinic more than 80 patients seek help three days a week. To cope with demand, the DW plans to operate the clinic seven days a week. The number in the clinic has quadrupled in the past two years. Eight in 10 patients now are Greeks, four times what it had been. The Greek chapter chief of the DW told McClatchy “The state doesn’t know who’s poor or who’s vulnerable. People used to be able to get money and find a doctor. Now everything is breaking down.” Citing a teacher BBC said: “In schools we didn’t have books up to the middle of the school year and not only that - we have children that do not really care about the lessons, because of all the problems at home.” The narratives, it seems, are from Third World or from any failed state. Helena Smith in a report in The Guardian describes a desperate, unhappy father, life in mess, deep in debt, owing money to butcher, baker and grocer “took the decision to put in an official request for three of his boys and one daughter to be taken into care.” “The crisis had killed us. I am ashamed to say, but it had got to the point where I couldn’t even afford the two euros needed to buy bread,” the father said. The local Deputy Mayor and director of social works said: “Requests for support have shot up. Last year, we sent food to 400 families [..] This year, 1,200 asked for help and they weren’t […] low-income people. Many had good jobs until this year when their shops and businesses closed, but to be asked to take children away was something new.” The deputy mayor visited the poor father’s home and “saw the situation […] the third-world conditions, the poverty and filth, [that they] couldn’t believe […]” Charities, doctors and unions suggest this is not a single case. […] “People are going hungry, families are breaking up, instances are mounting of mothers and fathers no longer being able to bring up their own kids,” said […] general secretary of the civil servants’ union ADEDY. “Until now, there has been a conspiracy of silence around the tragic effects of the austerity measures the IMF and EU are asking us to take.” From cases of newborn babies wrapped in swaddling and dumped on the doorsteps of clinics, to children being offloaded on charities and put in foster care, the nation’s struggle to pay off its debts is assuming dramatic proportions […] (“Poverty in Greece forcing parents to give up their children”)

Archbishop Ieronymos, the country’s spiritual leader, in a letter to the prime minister, a rare public intervention, said: “Homelessness and even hunger […] have reached nightmare proportions. The medicine we are taking has proved fatal for the nation.”

The situation is breeding protest, even from part of the ruling machine. A Bloomberg report said: The Greek Police union called for arrest warrants to be issued for EU, ECB and IMF officials negotiating austerity measures. In an open letter to the troika the police union said: “[W]e warn you that you cannot make us fight against our brothers. […W]e will issue arrest warrants for […] legal violations [including] blackmail, covert abolition or erosion of democracy and national sovereignty.” Mighty bank capital demolishes all barriers and unites all including priest, police and people. Athens braced a 48-hour strike fringed with violent protest, petrol bombs. It’s not only an economic crisis. It’s also a social and political crisis, a crisis in democracy a republic practiced with its dominating class mooring. The dominating interest is now passing over its burden of failure on the people.

In response to these human sufferings the dominating interests now have two memorandum agreements made between the Greek government and the troika, or imposed on the Greek people in a finance-democratic way: The 51-page Greece — Memorandum of Understanding on Specific Economic Policy Conditionality, Feb. 9, 2012, and the 31-page Greece — Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies, Feb. 9, 2012. Still there will be fresh conditions from financers that Greek people and their elected representatives have to meet before the bail-out is endorsed. Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister and head of the euro group, did not find “all necessary elements on the table to take decisions […] In short: no disbursement before implementation.” The ECB, as Mario Draghi, the bank’s boss, feels, would not step in to ease Greece’s burdens through a tricky debt swap with private creditors. The Greek republic now has to negotiate a debt relief agreement with private creditors worth 100 bn euro if it is to receive the EU-IMF aid package. If not, Greece could default as early as next month, when 14.5 bn euro in Greek government bonds turn due. The financers are demanding greater sacrifices from Greece, ultimately the people.

The Greek government has urged the ECB to forego profits on its Greek bond holdings. The bank’s governing council discussed the issue. But the ECB sustaining any loss has been ruled out. Profits on Greek bonds would have to pass on to governments when they are realized. The financial bosses are concerned with the issues of “tensions in euro area debt markets and their potential spillover to the euro area real economy.” It is their problem.

In fifth straight year of recession in Greece, a Reuters report said: Protesters compared Greece’s plight to its seven years under military dictatorship. Then, the fact comes to light: money is not less mighty than military, and domination is not only made with weapons; there are mighty arms of money and market to dominate and stomp down democracy, even money’s system of governance.