GREEK COCKPIT

‘It's clear that there is no alternative to austerity. Angela Merkel's most important allies, the ratings agencies, would immediately and mercilessly punish countries that run up excessive new debts.’[1]

When I was young it was the ‘gnomes of Zurich,’ now it is the faceless, unelected, unaccountable, often feckless and reckless Credit Rating Agencies who hang like a spectre over democratic politics. We are now entering the age of democratic structures that offer it citizens the Henry Ford choice, you can have any colour you like so long as it’s black.
Yesterday on the news programmes out popped the pundits, insouciant to the claims of democracy, declaring that it did not matter which way the French people voted it would be the markets that dictated the direction of the French economy.[2]
Throughout Europe it is the unelected bureaucrat, the academic, the business tycoon and the men, and occasionally  women, deemed to be ‘above politics,’ whatever that might mean, who are presenting their credentials at the door; unaccountable and indifferent to the demands of ‘the mob,’ they are only too eager to decide our fate. It seems that we the people have been overly feckless and irresponsible, overpaying ourselves, demanding too many rights at the workplace and generally expecting ‘the state’ to have some responsibility for our welfare.

It is in Greece that it is possible to see this grotesque drama being played out most starkly as hospitals go without basics, pensions are cut to the barest minimum, whole rafts of welfare provision abolished and pay and conditions eroded.  Whole segments of Greek society have now been plunged into absolute poverty. This not merely whilst being a part of the European Union but with a degraded perversion as the price exacted for continued membership.
In the face of this onslaught the Greek people have opted for resistance.
These struggles don't just represent ‘events in a far away country of which we know little,’ they are the struggles for the very continued existence of what remains of the achievements of the post war social democratic settlement. It is not I hope too romantic to propose that the French have now elected to join that struggle. Is it too much to hope for that we too are now waking up to the realities of this struggle?



[1] Der Spiegel 07/05/12
[2] I am reminded of Brecht’s remark some party hack decreed that the people
had lost the government's confidence
and could only regain it with redoubled effort.
If that is the case, would it not be be simpler,
If the government simply dissolved the people
And elected another?
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