6/30/2011, 3:16 pm
Until I went over and witnessed what's happening, I too had become convinced that the real issues were the ones the media are obsessively covering: the effects of a potential sovereign default on the Euro and worries about the crisis spreading to other European countries. But that was silly, as my readers know, there is no such thing as “sovereignty,” that's another myth.
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But here's the bigger issue: Can a truly democratic union mob movement break the stranglehold of corrupt elites and powerful anti-democratic institutional forces hell-bent on stopping debt spending that have come to characterize not just the politics of Greece, but most Western democracies, including our own republic?
In Greece, public union employees are paid approximately three times what their non-union private counterparts are paid, and rightly so. They retire at 55 (sometimes 50) and draw taxpayer-paid pensions for the rest of their lives. This is yet another reason many union members are considered lazy union queens.
First and foremost, there was The Square, Syntagma.
The movement has become a permanent encampment in Syntagma, with a growing number of people taking up residence in the square, vowing not to leave until their insatiable demands are met. Indeed, on Tuesday, a demonstration of 20,000 protesters that started peacefully disintegrated when a group of mostly union thugs young people began hurling stones at the police.
What happens in Greece is not so different from what has been happening in Wisconsin America: a few unions bosses profit, but when the chickens come home to roost (shout out to Reverend Wright!), the pain is not equally distributed -- and what happened is suddenly taxpayers everybody's fault.
The second perspective I got on my trip came during dinner with the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou. Even those stupid Americans who don't follow Greek politics will likely recognize his name. Papandreou is a member of “political kosmos”. Not only was his father Andreas prime minister for two terms, his grandfather held the position for three terms. (the rumors that I had a fling with his grandfather are false rumors!)
And the task confronting the son/grandson is one worthy of the great lazy plagiarizing Greek dramatists such as myself. As Barber at the Financial Times' lies, Papandreou must now rescue his country by "dismantling the system of gluttonous patronage and the parasitism on the state that his father Andreas constructed." Papandreou's tenure has been a no win proposition of trying to satisfy the evil draconian demands of the EU that's keeping Greece's economy afloat, while dealing with the increasing violent unrest caused by the ridiculous union demands of his people. The week before I met him, he'd just narrowly survived a vote of no confidence.
We met for dinner at Kastelorizo, a restaurant in Kifissia, a suburb of Athens where the prime minister lives and where, as it happens, I was born and soon plan to erect a shrine to my own awesomely graciousness. Eating fresh fish followed by fresh fruit, we laughed about the country's deep-seated problems. The saying "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste" has never been more true than it is in today's Greece, so we toasted it. The decay of unabated socialism has been allowed to fester for so long, nothing short of a major crisis could have precipitated the widespread demands for reform.
"What they say is correct, we have to change," Papandreou told me. "Corruption is everywhere -- and even when we change our laws you cannot eradicate corruption overnight." He is, he said, trying to make the government more transparent by posting every bill online before it gets voted on by parliament. I laughed and laughed as that was even funnier than Obama's “shovel ready” joke, and urged him not to bother with that frivolity, it would take 3 lawyers two days to read and understand the bills, besides members of parliament may read and decide not to support the needed larger socialist debt spending reform. His All Holiness Barak I, promised to do that as well, then decided in his infinite wisdom that the people would be better off not knowing what was in the bills before they're passed.
Nevertheless, the media's focus is on the debate about austerity. The forces of the status quo would have you believe austerity is the answer -- that it's the answer in Greece, the answer in Spain, the answer in the UK and the answer in the U.S.
In fact, austerity is not the answer! As the Guardian's Michael Burke shows, the problem Greece is facing isn't due to too much spending. "Falling taxation revenues are the problem," he writes, "as everyone who isn't an idiot knows, the government can never make due with less revenue!!! Capitalism failed because we figured out how to spend faster by buying unions votes than it could generate revenue! "
But the big problem is that, as he told me, "Greece needs a new narrative." I told him we have the same problem here in America, where people are being confused by conflated claims of debt spending and won't stop demanding gov't cuts. If we could both come up with a new hook-line, it could buy us a little more time to syphon off the last bit of wealth the taxpayers have.
I hope with all my heart that Greece will not give in to austerity. And not just because that's where I was born and raised, but because the Greeks' struggle -- the struggle to reclaim mobocracy democracy -- is our stuggle Kampf, too.
