Democracy? EU-IMF Sets Tax-and-Spend Policies in Greece as Citizens Burn it to the Ground

February 13, 2012

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Eric Blair
Activist Post

Can a country like Greece have a genuine democracy when an unelected international agency forces tax-and-spend policies down their throat? If a sovereign nation cannot determine how much to tax it's own citizens and what services to offer, what power does the people's government actually have to govern?

Even the Greek parliament that just approved the very unpopular austerity package in Greece is lacking legitimacy, but the policy was demanded by the EU/IMF to secure a second bailout and avoid national bankruptcy. See an explanation of their woeful approval ratings and democratic failings below:

The austerity package was also demanded by the "appointed" Prime Minister Lucas Papademos who, not surprisingly, is the former vice president of the European Central Bank.

Papademos threatened lawmakers before the vote that they "would be gravely mistaken if they rejected the package."

"It would be a huge historical injustice if the country from which European culture sprang ... reached bankruptcy and was led, due to one more mistake, to national isolation and national despair," he said.

If massive austerity cuts, surrendered sovereignty, and runaway riots burning down the streets is not "national despair", I'm not sure what is.

Greece is the classic "Economic Hitman" scenario where international banks make phony debts so large they can never be repaid; pretending as if the loans were going to help the people, when really they just went to political insiders and the banksters who created them. They follow by forcing bankruptcy to demand even more debt to solve the problem of debt, and when that has been exhausted the bankers come for their "pound of flesh", as they're doing now.

This pound of flesh is taking the form of higher taxes, deep cuts to public jobs, pensions, and services, and even the fire-sale privatization of entire islands. Oh, and national sovereignty, but that seems to have already disappeared well before this current round of blood sucking.

And as the police (who surely are included in the majority opposed to this measure), battle the angry citizens on the streets, we must begin to question the very foundation of representative democracy once international banks set a nation's policy.

Does the above video resemble the birthplace of democracy? How far must this continue to erode before international banksters are exposed as the fascist dictators they truly are?

Read other articles by Eric Blair here.