Lessons for Greece

Evidence of this crisis in Greece is the International Monetary Fund managing Greek finances. The IMF routinely impoverishes national economies for the benefit of its corporate masters.

The Greek kleptocrats have the same masters as IMF. They receive their education in America and do internships at IMF and the World Bank, a sister institution of the IMF. The Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, was born and educated in the US. The former Prime Minister, Kostas Karamanlis, studied at Tufts University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Tufts and American universities are caught in the frenzy of money as well. They ignore their mission of educating good men and women. Instead, they model their training after Wall Street. The “best and the brightest” from American universities fail to study the Greek classics, history, science, and engineering. They go straight to law or business schools and the bonuses of Wall Street.

The result of this collusion of state, academe and Wall Street is a cannibalistic monster of capitalism devouring democracy and civilisation for a short-lived extravagance of riches for the very few and abuse and violence for the many.

Wall Street nearly annihilated the US in 2008. Millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes. Wall Street executives responsible for that financial and social calamity are not in prison but continue making enormous profits. The administration of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama bailed out the banks that brought the economic meltdown on America.

This catastrophe has been the business product of decades of corruption. Corporate lobbyists bribe politicians who then “deregulate” the government’s oversight of corporations. In fact, deregulation also brings corporate power within the government, essentially the government becoming a colony of polluters and oligarchs.

The spring 2010 poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico by BP was a direct effect of deregulation of the oil industry.

In Greece, corruption of the political system has created a curious phenomenon, thoroughly oligarchic: the country being an almost private fiefdom of a handful of families producing prime ministers. The American-educated politicians have stripped the country of industry and self-reliance. Greece even follows America’s terrible agribusiness practices. From millions of peasants working the land and growing the country’s food, now Greece imports food while hundreds of villages are ghosts of their former self. Rural people have flocked to Athens and a few other large cities, abandoning the countryside to the toxic grasp of agribusiness and the church.

The Greek government borrows continuously but fails to tax the rich and the church, the country’s richest institution and largest landowner.

The Greek government also does the bidding of America in foreign policy: opening the country to the machinations and aggression of Moslem Turkey. For example, on October 29, 2010, Turks desecrated dozens of graves in a Greek Orthodox cemetery in the tiny island of Imbros, which is under Turkish occupation.

Greeks don’t trust their government. Instead, they periodically take to the street in protest but fail to terminate family rule. In desperation, many of them try to join the civil service that guarantees them a modicum of security.

Small shopkeepers and cottage industries offer an alternative but limited future. They get little support from the government hell-bent on globalisation and multiculturalism, two faces of the same corporate monster: wrecking local industry with imports and abandoning the guarding of its borders. Such policies are undermining a Greece that can barely support its own people much less hundreds of thousands of illegal foreigners (largely from Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran) crossing into the country from Turkey. In fact, the hoards of illegal migrants have made the situation so bad that European Union soldiers are joining Greek soldiers in guarding the Greco-Turkish border.