THE ROVING
EYE Austerity not a Greek
goal By Pepe Escobar
Talk about a dream rematch. This Friday,
Monty Python's epic Germany
vs Greece philosophy football spectacular will
be replayed, live, at Euro 2012. There won't be
"Plato in goal" and "Aristoteles as sweeper", or
"Nietzsche accusing [referee] Confucius of having
no free will" - but one can savor the global
impact in case a bunch of footballing Spartans
forces the sleek "Onshela" Merkel's team to exit
the euro.
And especially after "Onshela" -
as part of a highly choreographed fear campaign -
could not help hectoring the Greeks ahead of last
Sunday's elections, prodding them to vote the
right way, as in submitting to the German
sado-austerity diktat.
All across the
Atlanticist West, the corporate media "narrative"
depicted the slim victory of the right as a Greek collective decision not to exit the
euro, at least for now. The Brussels eurocracy was
ecstatic. Then, after a few minutes of financial
tiki taka - as in Spain nonchalantly passing the
ball in midfield - the God of the Market was back
in business.
The notion that the Greek
vote is a good step for Europe is as far-fetched
as the notion of a military coup in Egypt right
before a presidential election won by the Muslim
Brotherhood opening a gradual transition towards
democracy.
As much as the centurions of
austerity were spinning a victory, what actually
happened in the Greek elections was even more of a
shift toward anti-bailout parties. The bailout is
known in Greece as "the memorandum". Austerity -
led by the conservative New Democracy party -
"won" with roughly 40% of the votes, while 52% of
Greek voters actually supported "anti-memorandum"
parties.
Anyway, this soon proved
irrelevant. On Monday, neoliberal Zeus - aka the
God of the Market - was already focused on
destroying tiki taka Spain to the tune of a 7.28%
interest rate. Zeus is by definition insatiable;
in his present-day form he always wants to devour
more pensioners, more unemployed, more young
unemployed, more public assets, anyway, anyhow,
anywhere, no matter the nationality.
Even
if the conservatives form a coalition government
in Greece, and manage to extract a few,
minimalistic, nominal concessions from the
German-led sado-austerity front, the only game in
(Greek) town will remain a social and economic
wasteland; social security in collapse; hospital
shortages; one in four workers unemployed; 7 out
of 10 young unemployed aged between 18 and 24
dying to emigrate; migrants attacked by neo-Nazis;
businesses closing down by the thousands.
And eventually the ones to truly benefit
will be the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn, already
capturing 7% of the vote.
Bankers in
bondage It all goes back to the supreme
categorical imperative; how can the eurozone
possibly survive as we know it when its raison
d'etre - economic and financial integration - is
collapsing?
The real financial powers that
are behind "Onshela" Merkel don't want eurobonds
or any kind of collective support to the banking
system. They are sado-austerity fetishists. The
only thing that matters for them is what they
perceive as German national interest - not
"Europe".
The French, for their part, are
busy working on an 11-page "Growth Pact for
Europe" - their contribution for a key summit on
June 28-29 when the eurocratic maze (European
Commission, European Council, Eurogroup, European
Central Bank) will more or less (not) decide the
next steps.
Essentially, Germany wants a
political union - a federalization - before
discussing anything else, while France wants a
progressive road map to be followed over the next
10 years; for the French, a political union is not
a necessary condition for financial solidarity.
US President Barack Obama is the top
cheerleader of what the French are saying; first
we need to be back on the business of economic
growth, otherwise we're all crashing against the
wall. This means immediate financial solidarity -
as in a banking union. Yet the German
sado-austerity club interprets all this as the
other Europeans piggybacking on their financial
clout and thus not doing the hard work to get
their economies back on track.
In thesis,
the Atlanticist West is furiously discussing all
this at the Group of 20 gathering in Los Cabos,
Mexico. Here the shallow Atlanticist corporate
media spin is that "Western decisions today will -
and indeed must - influence whether Brazil, India,
Indonesia, and Turkey support the global order of
tomorrow." [1]
This is nonsense. BRICS
members Brazil and India and future BRICS like
Indonesia and Turkey are in fact astonished at the
degree of Western indecision, or prostration, at
the feet of the neo-liberal Zeus. They want a
radically different "global order of tomorrow" -
starting with finding their own escape routes from
the contamination caused by the eurozone debacle.
If only the Monty Python match could be
reenacted. Kant would insist on a critique of pure
reason while Plato would insist we all live in a
cave and can only identify shadows. It would be,
essentially, a draw, and everybody would remain in
the euro.
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