Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Greek Triumph

I am happy for the people of Greece and the EU this week after voters elected Alexis Tsirpas as its president.  The Greeks were able to achieve what so far the Scots and Spaniards have not--a blow to the Eurocratic Empire.  It's interesting that a desire on the part of the Greek people to self-govern is somehow considered "radical" in the west.  The radical part seems to be a desire to escape a fiscal austerity program that has been imposed by the EU.  It's only the beginning, but the Greeks are euphoric for the moment and having a grand party of it all.
Now the dilemma for Tsirpas is how to do this while remaining on the Euro currency and that has Eurocrats nervous about Greek payments.  The New York Times reports, "Some of the creditors still seem to feel that a debt is a debt to be repaid in full, and that the Greeks 'deserve' punishment for their history of profligate spending and habitual tax evasion."  Again a very one-sided view from the west.  Nothing is said of the shenanigans of Goldman Sachs to crash the Greek economy so that vulture capitalists could buy up Greek bonds on the cheap.  As investigative reporter Greg Palast revealed in his excellent book, Vultures' Picnic, Greece is a crime scene, and the people are being looted.  Now the Greeks have had enough and they've begun to fight back.
This is a small victory for the people of the world against multinational corporations and international bankers, not just for Greece.  The best government is local government.  The frictions that borders cause for international trade are not just costs to be removed from a value chain, but cellular walls that protect nations and the people of the world.  They create jobs, protect cultures, preserve local environments, and ensure that the will of the people is not abrogated by central planning or a bureaucratic elite.  One of the great oxymorons of globalization is that the destruction of nation states and their sovereign cultures in favor of large, homogenous regulatory unions is somehow a way of embracing "diversity."  The Eurocrats have shown their predisposition toward Orwellian state-craft and there is no uglier example of that than what has happened in Greece.