Greece is under a global microscope focused on it by the same forces that have put it in the laboratory: the regime of international financial dominators, which has been conducting policies of neo-liberal austerity for the past generation in every country under its control.
Whatever label is chosen for this latest brand in the capitalist dominated market, a nation of just over 11 million people has become a test case in returning to an older, pre social democratic fundamentalist form and removing social restraints on the alleged magic of the market which, as wiser money mongers understand, creates misery and possible revolution if left uncontrolled.
Under corporate mind management, the prevailing story fed populations has been the typical one of welfare chiselers at the bottom freeloading on working people whose taxes support their profligate life styles of unemployment, imprisonment, hunger, homelessness and other aspects of such mind managed idiocy. Greece is said to be sponging on thriving economic citadels like Germany and France, home to hard working populations while the indolent Greeks sit around cafes and enjoy lives of leisure. In America, this tale is told in the same way to workers and retirees under major stress from an expanding billionaire creditor class as they themselves dwindle in number and fall into greater debt all the while being taught to blame those even worse off than they are for being the cause of their problems.
Looking down on those with less is the political program of the neoliberal austerity perversion faith, its preachers, ministers, rabbis, priests and other immaterialists. Looking above to a class of incredible wealth is not on the agenda, especially when that wealth owns and operates the political system which encompasses the government supposedly running things democratically, and the media supposedly reporting on matters in an unbiased and objective way. Of course.
But something is happening in Greece, has long been happening in South America and should soon be happening here in the USA and it is shaking up the program of more wealth for some, greater debt for all and poverty for more than ever before. The nation that according to history, legend, myth and conveniently excluded slavery, supposedly birthed the concept-conceit of democracy has begun to actually practice it. This has caused panic in power circles and led to even more cruel stupidity in their reaction.
An old lesson learned in working class ghettos where loan sharks were the moneylenders had it that they were to be feared only up to a certain point. If you owed the loan shark a thousand dollars, that represented a real problem for you. But if you owed the loan shark twenty thousand dollars that represented a real problem for him. The IMF and others of the financial euro-mob currently threatening Greece with further and more savage punishment if it does not pay its debts have either not learned, forgotten, or are just too stupid to understand that in forcing people into debt in order to profit from the interest they collect on those loans, they also run risks if the loans are not paid, cannot be paid, or the debtor refuses to pay. Of course, muscle by the loan shark can follow if the debt is small enough, and total war, by nations. But when the debt is not only international but beyond billions for Greece and into the trillions globally and shakes the foundation of a desired capitalist union of nations in Europe, muscle is severely limited. Unless the loan shark is a maniacal idiot with too many weapons and too little brainpower to understand that his power over the neighborhood is gone, no matter how much homicidal damage he may inflict.
The creditor-predator class is reacting to signs of rebellion in ways to cause more rebellion, but also instill more fear that they will unleash violence, even if accidental or just plain stupid, of a nature beyond anything of the past and even if it wont be enough to save their system it could be enough to destroy that of humanity.
The voice of democracy remains to be acknowledged though it spoke loudly in Greece when a decisive majority told the international banking community, in effect, to get screwed. The people have suffered enough. Though the vindictive polices inflicted on the Greek people have been vicious, it’s important to remember that they are nothing new, have been going on for a long time – some would say for five hundred years though in more current language vagueness-pollution only “decades” – and have caused human misery in third world and developing countries long before attracting attention in the current phase of a dying order trying to sustain itself by dumping more misery and deprivation on its own.
The staggering debts forced upon formerly colonial nations in order to prop up their capitalist-owned economies were borne by most of the people in the neo-colonial world. They caused pain, starvation and wars barely noticed and even less understood by western populations. But that same policy of cutting government programs that saw to at least a minimum of social services, in order to pay the banks in the USA and its cronies in Europe has been practiced in the western world itself during the more recent phase of a collapsing financial order of private anti-democratic capital, an order which threatens to collapse on humanity’s head if global populations don’t take faster steps to impede the process of destruction and transform it into one of progress.
Finance capital, though global in essence is still individually anarchic in practice and fundamentally incapable of thinking in anyway but for personal private profit at loss to the alien “other” – humanity. This is the problem faced not only by Greece and Europe but by the entire population of the planet.
A corrupt mob of thugs can run a neighborhood, a city and even a country, but it becomes more difficult when nation states still exist to try and fake a global government. The near farce of a U.N. is a case in point, though attempts to democratize that organization of dominating minorities are among hopeful signs for the future. But the market, no matter how monopolistic and massive various corporate entities become, still operates on the religious belief of competition and the material reality of private profit as motivation for anything and everything that gets into that market. Cooperation is a sin and the work of satanic forces according to the capitalist deity, and through its control of mass consciousness it teaches and breeds such warped belief, possible through the material reality of progress always available to some while others suffer.
Slavery, feudalism and other dead systems also had thriving populations and great numbers who lived quite well, thank you. But when the number of thrivers began to decline and the profiteer’s bankbooks got fatter even as their numbers dwindled, those systems were near their ends. Such is the situation today as riches expand to an ever smaller population while the working class – graduated to the middle during social democracy – reverts to sinking into debt and is still losing ground while poverty increases. This is true in the USA, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, North and South America. Globalization, also according to the economic rules of capital in place at least since the industrial age, means the faster destruction of the natural environment by continuing to treat it as no more or less than a commodity to be used for profit making.
The evidence grows more clear everyday, but that billionaire class and its lucratively paid servants still control not only governments and media but military forces capable of inflicting even more horror than they are guilty of historically and at the present moment in slaughters in the middle east and elsewhere. And their banks and other glorified loan sharks far surpass the fictional shylock who demanded a pound of flesh from his debtor. They have been devoutly gorging themselves on the bone marrow of the third world for more than a generation and are at present and despite alleged racist superiority, draining the blood from their own people while they suck the planet dry of its marrow and other fluids in pursuit of profit at earth’s loss.
Humanity has been evolving for more than two hundred thousand years, experienced the alleged “new” world of 500 years ago, the emerging third world of yesterday, and is now dealing with the Euro zone and Greece today. What will tomorrow bring? If we truly want many more tomorrows we need to get much closer to the beginning of global democracy and the end of a system that threatens to destroy much more than one nation’s political economy if it isn’t stopped.
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Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate
http://legalienate.blogspot.
