Not content with wrecking their economies, the EU/ECB/IMF troika has now taken to open gerrymandering of the parliamentary systems in Italy and Greece.
Lukas Papademos, the Greek Quisling forced on his countrymen in order to empty their pockets, has called snap elections for May 6th.
The auguries are not optimistic that Greeks will cram the polling stations to endorse the scorched earth policy emanating from Washington, Brussels and Frankfurt. As I wrote in previous columns, Greek politicians are little more than venal kleptocrats helping themselves at the public trough for years. On the purely nominal left, Pasok; on the even more nominal center-right, ‘New Democracy.’ The latest poll reporting had neither garnering a sufficient number of votes to form a government with a clear majority. Forecast: heavy weather ahead for the despised austerity program. The response of the New Democracy leader, Antonis Samaras, was to level a gun to the electorates’ collective head, ordering them to vote for New Democracy, with the ultimatum that he would call a second election, and presumably a third and fourth, until they got the message.
Now something very interesting has happened: a controlled demolition job of Pasok and another smaller but significant right-leaning party, the Democratic Alliance.
Akis Tsochadzopoulos, a prominent Pasok paymaster, an ex-minister and one time challenger for the premiership, was suddenly arrested out of the blue this week in a convoluted money-laundering wrangle. Three associates have also been charged.
It beggars belief that the authorities have just now tumbled to some massive scam – three weeks before the scheduled elections.
As Henry Thoreau once said, some coincidences speak for themselves, ‘as when you find a trout in the milk.’
Whether the Akis Affair has solid foundations hardly matters. Pasok has effectively been struck hard amidships by a powerful political torpedo jointly primed by Samaras and the Regent Lukas Papademos. There is no other logical or credible explanation.
A second salvo scored a direct hit on the Democratic Alliance, a fringe liberal-right party captained by Dora Bakoyannis, a charismatic figure in Greek politics, and ex-foreign minister, who is accused of falsifying her tax returns.
Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. Again it hardly matters considering the overall situation taking shape.
The fiscal affairs of virtually all Greek politicians are, shall we say, inscrutable. Similarly, there is scarcely a public contract or business deal of any size in Greece that does not attract hordes of sticky fingers.
There is a rather poignant side to the vilification of the fragrant Dora, which unless I am much surprised, actually figures in the present calculations in a deliberately malignant fashion.
Her first husband, Pavlos, a virulent campaigner against the NATO-imposed military junta that ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974, was assassinated in his office in September 1989.
Blame was affixed on the Marxist guerrilla group N17, which actually made no sense whatsoever given his credentials as a fervent anti-fascist.
The more likely explanation was his leading role in a highly sensitive parliamentary inquiry investigating the Bank of Crete loan stuffing affair, in which the sitting premier, the serially corrupt Pasok premier Andreas Papandreou, was deeply implicated.
With the death of Bakoyannis, the inquiry lost much of its driving force. Papandreou escaped the rap.
In my forthcoming book (see note below) I argue that the murder was a contract job outsourced to N17, along with much other violence during the Greek ‘years of lead’ which lasted almost 30 years.
Between them, Pasok and the Democratic Alliance are supposed to take on sufficient damage to discourage support and drive voters towards the arms of the only safe mainstream alternative. Enter stage right to the sound of trumpets, New Democracy!
The Greeks have an excellent word for this kind of theater: skevoria, meaning an elaborate pretence (I have brought this up in previous articles see here and here).
There is an alternative label. This is the ‘Strategy of Tension’ devised during the Cold War under the auspices of the US, Western intelligence and NATO to scare voters away from communists and other left wing bogies to the open, welcoming arms of the right.
The events in Greece right now are nothing less than the identical tactics refreshed to meet current aims and necessities. The chief of these is to secure a pliant parliament that will behave like nodding mules as the rape and pillage of Greece proceeds apace.
Samaras himself gave a hint of the intended demolition of his main opponent. He suddenly switched tack from a possible grand coalition, after some weeks of talks aimed at constructing a common platform.
This is because the troika hold little faith or trust in some wobbly coalition that would invariably collapse under the strains of sticking to the austerity package while anger rages in the streets.
So, what is now happening in Greece is a slow-motion soft coup designed to install a malleable token government that will obediently follow the orders and instructions of the globalists without question.
Next comes Italy. Elections are not firmly scheduled there yet, but the incumbent premier Mario Monte, the economist technocrat imposed by the same EU/ECB/IMF troika, has dropped strong hints that they may be held this autumn.
Economically, Italy is in a tail spin. Unemployment is close to the Spanish level of 21%-plus. Among the giovanni – the 18-30 age group – it is heading towards 40%.
Monte’s solution is to make it even easier to fire those lucky enough to have a job. This is a classic instance of the economic illiteracy associated with rubrics of the infamous Austrian School of auto-destructionists.
It is an open secret in the feverish marketplace of Italian politics that autumn is scheduled for the launch of a new ‘center right’ party.
Actually, there will be nothing new or original about the re-incarnation of Democrazia Italiana, which dominated Italy in the post war years until it was destroyed by the tangentopoli parliamentary corruption scandals of the 1980s.
The photogenic aristocratic businessman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo – Maserati Man, from one of his former corporate appointments, who I have previously written about – is widely tipped to lead the new force.
The fly in the ointment is – or rather was – the threat to the electoral numbers game posed by the Lega Norda, the Northern League, a largely populist force organized around the personality cult projected by its leader, the ex-communist fraternizer Umberto Bossi.
The League’s bastions are Veneto (the province of Venice), Lombardy (which contains Milan, Italy’s financial capital, home base of gauleiter Mario Monte) and the Friuli mountain region. To Legalites this is the Valhalla they call ‘Padania.’
For the best part of two decades and more Bossi and his cohorts formed the backstop for Silvio Berlusconi’s on-going political circus.
Bossi ostensibly campaigned for the secession of the Northern provinces from the rest of Italy, which attracted a certain following elsewhere in a country which has yet to come to terms with the Risorgimento (the unification of separate states) dating back 150 years.
Padania made no serious political headway, but Bossi’s real strength rested on his ability to act as political magnet opposed to the establishment consensus, a fact that that Berlusconi was compelled to recognize by including him in his various administrations.
That the Lega has no fixed center of political gravity beyond a vague allusion to social conservatism and misty devolution is part of its appeal.
More specifically, Bossi’s heated rhetoric aimed at Muslim immigration supposedly polluting the Northern homelands struck home well with pious, conservative Northerners, who are inclined to regard anywhere South of Bologna as bandit country
With a support base fluctuating between eight and ten percent, they have numbers sufficient enough to undermine the prospects for a rejuvenated, centrally-organized form of Christian Democracy able to form a majority government.
Rumors have been swirling around for some time of rampant corruption within the Lega’s charmed inner circle.
The story conveniently broke on April 3 that Francesco Belsito, the party’s treasurer, a close friend and ally of Bossi, had indulged in money laundering and embezzlement of party funds on an apparently heroic scale.
The truly damaging aspect was the revelation that some money from the Lega’s war chest was paid personally to Bossi, who paternally passed on a portion to his sons.
He was left with no option but resign. A predictable civil war is now raging between the various quarreling factions as to who might succeed him.
As Silvio Berlusconi ruefully observed, first he was offered up for sacrifice and now it is his old chum and collaborator Umberto Bossi. The old order changeth. The moment was carefully chosen.
As in Greece, there are important elections approaching. In Italy the voting for local councils which always attracts a significant turn-out is swiftly approaching.
The political execution of Bossi was clearly designed to provoke the maximum blowback on Lega Norda.
Greece and Italy are two South Med countries, fairly recent newcomers in historical terms to the European landscape.
Both are prone to chronic political instability, insurrections and upheavals. In 1967, fascism returned to Greece in the shape of the brutal military junta that ruled for the next eight years.
Italy experienced running coup fever in the 1960s and 1970s, fomented in the bowels of lo stato secreto.
The saintly Aldo Moro, an ex-premier, was murdered in May 1978 for the sin of advocating a ‘historic compromise’ between the powerful communists and the Christian Democrats. This did not appeal to the United States and her NATO allies.
In both countries the inhabitants are consistently frustrated in choosing representatives that do not meet the approval of greater powers. As we see from these latest developments, nothing has changed.
I very much fear that the spotlight will shortly shift to Spain. The Spanish budget is a horror comic, as I have previously written.
It is so many numbers adrift that the chances of getting to the balanced budget demanded by the bailiffs are literally out of this world.
The new government elected in November last year is pledging spending cuts that belong in never-never land.
Spain is hopelessly, entirely bankrupt but you may count on it that she will be squeezed to the last pip of the very last Seville orange.
Unemployment is on the way to 30%, and up to half of all employable young people. All discretionary spending has stopped. A customer with money to spend in a department store is almost as rare as a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster in a bikini.
The country is awash with underwater mortgages and construction loans (sound like America, anyone?).
The hapless triumvirate puppet premier Mariano Rajoy is on the bridge of a fiscal Titanic, furiously babbling orders to a crew that are either paralyzed with fear or taken already to the lifeboats.
It is time to change the captain and I think that is exactly what will happen, following the clear precedents already established in Greece and Italy.
Soon.
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