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With
Greek workers bracing themselves for more announcements of privatization of
public services and industries, the fight among political factions continues.
But the drama that is unfolding proves that Greek Parliament is but a puppet
regime for an occupying force known as the troika: the International Monetary
Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank.
The
pro-austerity government (led by the conservatives, New Democracy) installed
this summer is already on shaky ground. With three ministers already having
resigned, the country is just a few rowdy demonstrations away from new elections
in the fall. The troika is using its
leverage to arrange the debt-ridden country’s economy and governance as it sees
fit, which, as shadow justice minister and Coalition of the Radical Left
(SYRIZA) parliamentarian Zoe Konstantopoulou said, constitute “violations of
our international obligations,” and amounts to the nation being “a guinea pig
for Europe, and the experiment has failed again and again.”
Common
sense says that lower wages means people would spend less money, hurting the
retail economy and giving the government less through value-added taxes.
Unemployment is above 20 percent, and left-wing activists and politicians note
the country is already experiencing pain in the healthcare sector because of
medicine shortages and delays in surgeries due to cuts in spending. While the
International Labor Organization recently stated that these austerity measures
will only cause even more unemployment, European Commission President Jose
Manuel Barroso told the Greek government to “deliver, deliver, deliver” on the
cuts.
Greece
has seen its fair share of foreign occupiers and home-grown tyrants: the
Ottomans, the Nazis and the military dictatorship that fell in 1974.
Geopolitically, Greece is the West, considering its ancient contributions to
its early entrance into NATO. But in other ways, it is more like an small
nation in the Global South. It’s been occupied, but never an empire in modern
times. It shares a religion and borders with Eastern Europe. And like Jamaica
or Argentina, it is enduring a political crisis as it copes with its debt. When
the country came into the European community, it was told that it was poor, at
least in terms of its industrial output, despite its agricultural
self-sufficiency. The new European order would integrate it into the modern
economy, which of course wouldn’t work for geopolitical reasons, so now the
lenders get to auction off its assets through forced privatization.
“We
were self-sufficient in bread, sugar, olive oil and meat,” Liana Kanelli, a
member of Parliament from the Communist Party (KKE), said of the country before
2001. “We survived under German occupation by just eating olive oil. Now we
import everything. We have three state-owned sugar companies--they will be
[liberalized], and the price will go up.” Kanelli believes that unless Greece
leaves the Eurozone and the entire European community, the "loan
sharks" of the troika and Northern Europe will continue to come and impose
hurtful economic policy onto Greeks.
Yet,
the mundane punditry about the crisis focuses on this myth that Greece suffers
from a bloated public sector and a backward private sector that consists of
nothing but tourism and feta cheese--there is also shipping and steel, and as
some activists point out, the often overlooked fact that the Greek Orthodox
Church, despite being a major land owner, doesn’t pay enough taxes, they say.
It is true that the public sector is rife with corruption, but activists point
out that cutting people’s wages doesn’t address that problem.
And
like any other colonizer, Northern Europe has found allies in the Greek 1
percent. As Konstantopoulou explained, one of the most curious things about the
austerity plan first implement by the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK)
led government is that its mandates for labor reform in the private sector went
beyond what the troika asked for. “There are very strong internal interests who
have found their way into the troika,” she said.
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