Yes, the ball is rolling.
UPDATE: 1 Nov 2011: Greece’s president has announced a national referendum on whether to accept the austerity measures attached to the great bail-out offered by the EU central banks.
Most analysts think, like California, the Greeks will vote No to the bailout, which means they will default, as many expect to happen anyway.
On news of this, and the tangential (criminal?) failure of John Corzine’s MF Global, markets in the US plunged, erasing all the gains from the euphoria of last week’s announcement. (Remember, Wall Street makes out just as well selling as it does buying, and it’s gangbusters in a roller-coaster market.)
As noted in the title, riots work, and mobs win when facing down tiny people. Like Pilate 2000 years earlier, hoping to placate the mob, Greece’s leaders have handed Greece over to it to do as it would. I assume a basin of water and a quick scrubbing of the hands was involved.-VB
Yesterday the European Union announced a sweeping bail-out package for Greece in which the banks bought off (a TARP-like fix) 50% of Greece’s debt, reducing it from 160% to 120% of GDP.
Gleaming as they strode before microphones to announce the deal (done with German money, the only truly solvent Euro nation at this time) by whoever it was in charge in whatever commission the thousand-fingered EU appointed to work this deal out, world markets soared on the good news.
Meanwhile the EU has sent yet another commission head to China to urge them to buy their Stability Bonds offered by the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), whoever/whatever that is, as they need to sell $1 trillion of these to shore all the other looming national bank failures my mid-2012.
(At first glance, I’m sure the Chinese already can see Europe’s problem: when you have so many commissions formed to solve problems it’s impossible to figure out who’s in charge when dozens seem to be charge. Such thousand-headed beasts virtually scream out for a strong central authority, which a Hitler, Stalin or the first Caliph of Europe would be happy to oblige.)
Ooops!
But during all the sighs of relief and whooping it up in New York as Wall Street jumped 300 points, few paused to notice that Greece still has given no indication of actually curtailing its spending, or cutting it payroll, the size of its government, or the promiscuity of its opulent benefits packages for state workers.
So the beat goes on. The can is kicked once again…what is this, the third or fourth time?… and once again Europe can nestle back into their warm, comfortable existence until they are rousted out of it again in a few months, eventually to face one of two or three certain fates.
You see, Greece is just as the Occupy Wall Street see themselves, not to mention the other poor and downtrodden of America, as one unfairly treated, not by capitalism, mind you, but Nature. Greece has no “comparative advantage” (David Ricardo) that can justify them living the way they do.
No matter what they do, their means will never be huge. They have very little to offer the world that the world wants.
They have nothing to offer the world that justifies a high national income. Consequently, the size of its government, and the opulent benefits packages for state workers are all paid for by other people in other EU nations.
Sound familiar? They want to live the uptown lives of Sachs Fifth Avenue with only Walmart assets, complete with designer glasses, diamond studded fingernails, and a fistful of Irish Sweepstakes tickets.
With yesterday’s bailout, Greece has officially become the EU’s first true client-sector, run by their own CGC (Congressional Greek Caucus) at the behest of the “whiter” EU social democrats, on the sole stipulation to make sure the Greeks keep voting, and never, never, never let them leave the plantation).
The European grand councils, much like Mayor Bloomberg, fearful that if they don’t keeping paying those poor Greeks to stay in Greece, they might just leap the wire and pour over into Italy and France and burn other places down. Gad, there goes the neighborhood.
So, riots help.
You have to feel a little for the Euros. On a 6o-year spending spree, after America rebuilt their war-torn cities and factories, and funded by the US nuclear shield, allowing them to maintain almost no military defense, taking on new members starting about 10 years ago, (Greece came in 2000), the Euros suddenly face now a slow retrenchment to what Europe used to be before the war, a class-based hierarchical society, or let go all the class pretensions and allow the people to truly be free and pursue “life, liberty and happiness” with all the same verve and vigor the Yanks had for two hundred years. Or become undone.
They have chosen the last option, out of vanity, incompetence and sheer, unadulterated fear…
…from not only are those millions of guest workers (mostly Muslim) they’ve invited in to keep the dog poop cleared from the streets, and who, over years developed a political (and religious) agenda of their own, but also those dratted communists unions…who can shut down any and all of Europe’s communications and transportation with a flick of the switch. Who knew they’d team up?
Didn’t we see this episode on the original Star Trek? … a superior class of people living above ground and all the worker-drones living below ground.
Our lesson?
Riots can work, unless headed off at the pass.
The bailout for Greece was “awarded” because riots work. And there will be more next year as we approach Crucible #5, and the whole problem of spending and pensions have to be approached again.
Think California.
As in all things unnatural, this condition has to be met eventually, in one way or the other. Europe has chosen the slower, more cowardly, but in the end, more devastating way to approach it, for what could have been as easy as a childhood inoculation thirty years ago will now require major surgery. I doubt they’re up to it.
European society is on the verge of barbarism, and European governments are on the verge of forcing tyranny on them to prevent it.
Why I think this is because the European system prohibits strong leadership, witness the hydra-headed monstrosity mentioned in the opening paragraphs. This cannot be cured unless the individual nations disband and go their own ways. A little injection of free market optimism wouldn’t hurt either. Each nation will then return to a practical existence based on their individual comparative advantages.
As unfair as that might sound, it is a law, not just a theory, as Europe is proving now.
As America is constituted today, we merely discourage strong leaders. To prevent what we are seeing develop in Europe we must first lay the groundwork by electing strong leaders, not just in the White House, but in the Congress, for the process will be long and hard to head off our own crucible at the pass.
We must be able to prove that riots won’t work, and that the American people will have none of it. We still have the chance to fix all this with inoculations instead of surgery.
