I run the risk of being upstaged by events by the time this piece appears, but the socio-political drama that continues to unfold in Greece and the economic luna park it has all developed into can hardly be ignored or overlooked.
Greece gave us European civilization. Europe is now using that very civilized machine to push Greece back into the wilderness unless she agrees to keep on bludgeoning her people. Alexis Tsipras and his open-necked comrades came on to stop the massacre and have now ended up cluelessly cleaning away the blood when they know the haemorrhage is beyond their control.
It is easy to accuse them of having been naive, egoistic and utopic in thinking they could take on the rest of Europe and convince it they had the solution to the country’s socio-economic ills, a cancer that first started to spread when one Greek administration after another, of the Right and the Left and the self-anointed Centre, chose to win votes by pumping unsustainable funds into civil service salaries and pensions as well as gradually turning the Greek people into a growing nation of early retirees.
Following this week’s quick developments, according to IMF estimates revealed in a set of documents obtained by a German newspaper, it is now agreed that even if Greece accepted all of the austerity measures demanded by its main creditors, the Troika, it still would not be able to make ends meet by 2030,. The Germans are of course the most interested in this Greek tragedy as it could hit them the most in what has been described as a boomerang effect.
In fact, the most optimistic scenario now shows that Greece would face an unsustainable debt in 2030 even if it agreed to the package of tax increases and spending cuts proposed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF in exchange for a five-month €15.5 billion loan from its creditors. These prospects were outlined in six documents that were part of the “final” proposal offered to Greece by the three main creditors the previous week. The papers were obtained by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and seen by The Guardian.
As we have all been told ad nauseam, having failed to pay the €1.5 billion due to the International Monetary Fund by the end of 30th June (Brussels time of course! Remember how the British colonies, wherever they were in the world, used to have to stick to Greenwich Mean Time?), Greece became the first developed country to default on its international obligations.
Is all hope lost? One ardently trusts not. The Greeks know they have to take extremely difficult measures to gradually, decade after future decade, ease their way out of the situation. After all, the working classes there have been suffering for many years now, in contrast to the rich and the successful politicians who, you can rest assured, knew better than keep their assets in a Greek institution.
This means that only those who have suffered most will continue to suffer. That is the way with capitalism abetted by the process of globalisation. Bankers and financiers, politicians and other money princes and princesses decide over the heads of those whose only source of revenue is a living wage. You see, the IMF cannot issue new loans to a country that, like Greece, is in arrears, so it’s just good luck to the flesh-and-blood element of the story.
Unless something even more dramatic occurs, the question now is what’s next for the country’s financial system, the people and its membership of the eurozone. We don’t need reminding that Greece became a eurozone member when it was already going through an economic trauma. Why did the EU accept them in the first place?
In the meantime, other events in the world economic scene show that the world economic order we have known since WWII is being questioned and an alternative is at last emerging. Communism did not provide the answer. It was never given a chance, anyway. Will the same aggressive and hostile attitude be used by the American nose-led West with regard to such initiatives as BRICS Development Bank (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) that was conceived as an alternative to the World Bank? Contrary to Western modes, each BRICS nation will have an equal say in the bank’s management, regardless of GDP size.
Oh oh, that’s too fair by Western thinking... but more Greek tragedies need to be avoided.
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Those EU dummies....
In this whole scenario, it is comforting to each and every Maltese citizen to know that the island’s economic performance continues to exceed expectations. This is not Joseph Muscat saying it or Edward Scicluna or the Labour Party’s efficient statement machine. It is the European Union’s own field experts who monitor and assess all member states’ economies regardless of their political or ideological environments.
But it seems that for Tonio Fenech, the ex-Finance Minister who had taken the country to the brink with his D&D – deficits and debts – policies, and his band of merry men in government employ, those EU experts and analysts are dummies who dance to the Maltese government’s tune!
One also needs to bear in mind that while Malta’s economy seeks to go into full throttle, the austerity measures of yesteryear under the Fenech/Gonzi economic tandem have long been done away with. The working poor need more time to recover, but the required injection has already been applied.
Not so in the case of other economies that are supposedly doing well. Britain’s most influential business lobby group, for example, has said it supports the Conservative government’s continued austerity measures, despite cutting its own forecasts for the UK’s economic growth. The Confederation of British Industry has said that cutting the deficit was the “most important job” facing the government, prompting Michael Burke, a respected economist, to attack the CBI’s support for further austerity, saying that big business benefits from the harsh cutback in public spending causes “misery for millions”.
Those EU dummies need to turn their eyes towards the English Channel, I guess...
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Nice and nicer still
Journalists have been and will continue to be called many names, but the latest description of them by the Pentagon has left many of us bewildered.
In its release of a book of instructions on the “law of war”, detailing acceptable ways of killing the enemy, the Pentagon states that journalists can be labelled “unprivileged belligerents”, an obscure term that replaced “unlawful enemy combatant.”
The 1,176-page “Department of Defence Law of War Manual” explains that shooting, exploding, bombing, stabbing, or cutting the enemy are acceptable ways of getting the job done, but the use of poison or asphyxiating gases is not allowed. Surprise attacks and killing retreating troops have also been given the green light. Nice.
The Pentagon manual does not only talk about protocol for those on the frontline. It also has an extensive section on journalists – including the fact that they can be labelled terrorists. It declares: “In general, journalists are civilians. However, journalists may be members of the armed forces, persons authorized to accompany the armed forces, or unprivileged belligerents.”
When asked what this meant, Professor of Journalism at Georgetown University Chris Chambers said it meant that journalists who are officially sanctioned by the military and attached to a unit, will be favoured to an even greater degree than before. “It gives them licence to attack or even murder journalists they don’t particularly like but aren’t on the other side.”
Nicer still.