Whoever had a chance to watch the news two days ago, (on Thursday, 28th January 2010), which included footage from the comments, speeches and pleas George Papandreou made at Davos, must invariably have seen how he dishonored his office given to him through the electoral process (regardless of what kind or quality) demoting it from one of public leader-representative of a People, to a low down wandering peddler calling out to whomever is listening that his are the best watermelons in the market. In other words, he degraded all of us from a people with dignity, presence and substance, to a peddler’s showcase in search of a buyer-owner.
Continuing on the theme of our last article about the rigged game of the economy, and on how, we, the Citizens, are complacent enough so as to allow for our own strangulation in the name of ‘the crisis’ and the ‘state of emergency’, and how the financial affairs and state expenditures and deficits shoot upwards in a mysterious ways, we shall also have occasion to appreciate the very process all these measures are actually enforced by, so as to get a taste of the true fibre of all those we are up against (as opposed to the fibre we were led to believe they had), as well as of all those we come up against in general. In other words, we will investigate the true identity of the so-called ‘new’ faces of the ‘new’ government of ‘renewed’ PASOK.
Every disinterested social analyst who remains politically neutral so as to proceed with a scientifically unbiased analysis, must see that there is a dominant syllogism of a schizoid type worldwide (including Greece), regarding the relation between People-State, as well as in relation to the meaning of the ‘good’ of a State/Country. We shall bring Greece as an example, but this is something that holds true in every State.
Where does the schizoid character of the syllogism lie? Precisely on the apparent logical error that everyone accepts as axiomatic.
In reality, each State in modern society is an entity which was created to defend, promote and guarantee the well-being of the social whole who set it up in the first place, namely, the People on the basis of whom the State exists and is representative of. Even in oligarchies, this is the very principle that furnishes the pretext that legitimizes them (the few ‘aristos’ enjoy the legitimized protection of the many, so that the former few may have the time to concern themselves with the well-being of the general public and nothing else). The logical syllogism therefore that claims that the State does well, assumes that the People do well. There follows the corollary that if the People suffer then de facto the State suffers too.
This entirely sensible and healthy mutual link between People and State is historically substantiated, since every State which caused destitution, famine, occupational impasses, excessive corruption and inequality to the overwhelming majority of the People in favour of a few State-fed functionaries feeding on the State mechanism, collapsed in violent and bloody revolt by means of which the People got rid of it. And this had nothing to do with the extent to which there was parallel development in the arts, in the industry, in the expansion of State proper, the development of philosophy or whatever else is mentioned in the History of Civilization and is described or referred to in awe. It is true that the relationship between the People and the State has always been controlled by the extent of the prosperity of the People.
But in our times, and this is precisely where the schizoid character of it all lies, the prosperity of the State is presented, in the words of the propagandists and of those holding the higher offices of the States, as the direct inverse of the prosperity of the People: the more the People become destitute and degraded, the healthier the State becomes. This is the demented logic of a schizophrenic, and parallels this of trying to boil water using ice instead of fire.
Based on the same schizoid manner, they attempt to lower (as they purport) the deficit created by older loans only to inflate it by getting new loans. Every one who had been through usurious lending (i.e., has received bank loans) knows very well that there is no chance of improving one’s finances in this manner, and on the contrary, it is the only certain way to lose all property and perhaps end up in jail.
The only sensible road to recovery lies in securing and collecting all those funds that are rightfully ours or are owed to us or that we have lend to third parties without collateral, as well as the generation of new income through production.
It is these sets of sensible arguments which are twisted and then used to anchor their senseless logic, claiming that cutting People’s incomes and revenues will guarantee those People recovery and well-being.
But this is wrong, no matter how objectively we see it: On the one hand, such syllogism is wrong because it is not the People who owe the State anything and on the other hand because the State has no right to enforce further taxation without sound reason, and just as a form of revenue on the behest or on the behalf of third parties.
Whatever tax evasion occurs, it occurs basically by persons who feed on the State via their networks and various dubious uses of the Law, in ways that the People never know about or get to know about only after the fact.
The tax exemptions provided by Law to the upper classes, as well as every other tolerant treatment the State extends towards them (treatment the average Citizen never enjoys) constitutes the real and present tax evasion. On top of that, these people also commit actual tax fraud, by refusing to pay even the comparatively insignificant amounts of tax (compared to the amounts that go untaxed) due to them.
It is there that the State will find the capital owed to it. In people like Voulgarakis, in families of the Angelopoulos kind, in funds channelled to charities, which however sell their charitable cause to the highest bidder, like the National Charity Offices of Constantinople ( NCC) which were the forerunners and pilot studies of today’s Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs). It is these NGOs that drain our economy and property by exempting hundreds of millions of state funding per year, only to usurp functions of the Public Sector and steal the jobs of the Civil Servants among other things. For the present we will not examine in this article the rest of the national and cultural undermining engaged at by NGOs but also by the others described as embezzlers of Public funds.
If the holders of high offices in Greece were really after financial recovery, they would demand the return of all these funds (which are the money of the People amassed through the People’s taxation and job security payment dues and of which the People know not where or to whom these funds have ended up) covering in this way the state deficit many times over with capital which they now borrow pawning the Independence and the Freedom – Sovereignty of the Greek People.
If they really applied the principle of proportionality enforced by the Constitution of Greece on taxation, all the shipowners, large capitalists, bankers, industrialists, money brokers and others (who at this time self-appoint themselves as wholesale guarantors and exploiters of the middle class) should have been the ones to be called upon to support the State, offering the capital that the State now needs and which every minister now is after to borrow selling Greece out before the People can react and realize that they will have to topple not only a government and also its buyer.
They tell the Farmers, as they will tell the Civil Servants, the Pensioners, the Doctors, the Freelancers, the Workers, the Salaried but also the other working classes, just as they said to the Stagiers, that they must now live not on zero income but on negative income for as long as it takes ‘due to the crisis and need of the State’.
And they turn one part of the Working class against another accusing one in the eyes of the other that ‘they are no good loafers who feed on state funds, working against those of the other part’ and so that the former part should rejoice that the other part of the same working class will be exterminated.
But this is nothing but an erroneous and libellous propagandistic lollipop designed to distract attention from the real loafers and no good wasters of time and money, who not only feed on but devour the popular/national capital to the expense of all other classes (Workers, Farmers and Professionals and Entrepreneurs) and it is only those loafers that deserve the enmity of the People. They are the only ones who are the needless ballast, that not only adds dead weight to the ship of the State, but because such ballast is also toxic, it opens holes in its hull.
There is nothing that the politicians and the upper classes can do that the other social classes cannot do a thousand times better, even without impressive education. This is said in full cognizance of my expertise as educational specialist on intelligence and competences, and based on my judgement as a recognized social researcher / analyst who has a multitude of proof which I shall have the pleasure to share with you in the forthcoming articles, where we shall examine the kind and quality of these upper classes, something that social science systematically avoids examining for self-explanatory reasons. (class analyses typically stop short of studying middle-middle class, not even upper-middle class).
And as a pre-taste of this , let us now see together who is today’s minister of finances, George Papakonstantinou, who, together with G. Papandreou are on a road trip to borrow huge amounts of money only to give to particular buddies of theirs (either on the pretext of servicing the currently running loans, or on the pretext of offering motives to the large capitalists, or under the pretext of supporting the credit system of banks, or under the pretext of following directives set by EU) and not to the People. After that they will make the People pay these loans off under usurious terms.
Every loan shark means to take off you his pound of meat, just like Shylock in the Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare.
George Papakonstantinou was raised in the hegemonic class exposed to the education and networking of the capitalist class, shipowners, bankers and politicians of the American College of Psychiko. Childhood friends and former classmates or some of their kind, are all those who have always been demanding pay cuts, flexible work loads, eradication of the Welfare State and of Social Security and impunity on the industrialists. He was also raised in the cosmopolitan environments of the European cities where he also lived amongst those classes, and then, after he was well-versed in economics (that is, how to maximize profit to the businesses of his class) in Britain and the US, worked in OECD for 10 years, with the well-known consequences of economic suppression and financially restrictive policies that were enforced in Greece and elsewhere.
Also, the same George Papakonstantinou worked in the same manner in other posts enforcing financial cul de sacs on all People of Member States of the EU, while during 2004 was a member of the Governing Council of ISTAME, one of the NGOs belonging to PASOK, and in particular to the Papandreou family, which during 2004 alone received grants in excess of half a million Euro (in addition to additional funding to support actions of this NGO with others of similar kind).
This man, therefore who has never had anything to do with the Working Class, and whose contact with the people of Kozani, Greece, was similar to this of ‘Candidate Mantas, cousin of a shipowner’ in the widely known Greek movie ‘Tzeni Tzeni’ , and who was trained in the logic of every Almounia, Trisset, Soros and Paulson, is the same person who has the audacity to ask the Greek to live on money a lot less than the cost of one of his ties, and to ‘hold on’ working and starving, when the same George Papakonstantinou has not worked worrying about what the next day will bring even for one minute in his life, even if we accept that learning how to use State funds for the benefit of industrialists and bankers is work and not aberrant behaviour of a sociopath.
And of course George Papakonstantinou comes with a tradition, a heritage which set him up in all posts he has gone through.
He is the cousin of Michael Papakonstantinou, who was an MP (apart from other offices he himself has held) of New Democratic Party (NDP) and an older member of Center Union (CU). It is this uncle of his who had also been the occupant of Ministerial Offices in politically and nationally critical periods, and who in fact had shown us an engagement model in extremely sensitive international issues on the eve of great defeats of friction of Greece with other countries, such as his involvement in the Cyprus Question, which in turn set up conditions that led to the Turkish invasion we are all familiar with.
The same can be said with respect to his behaviour towards the then prime-minister of Skopje, and with respect to the role he played as a forerunner of the foreign policy adopted at this time and age not only by NDP but by PASOK and G. Papanadreou. The same goes for his actions/relations concerning Turkey.
The actions of the uncle of George Papakonstantinou has always been undermining for the People and the People’s goals, since even earlier on in his career he had already proceeded in deeds and actions that precipitated the so-called ‘breakup’ of relations between the Palace and the Democratic government, paving in this way the coming of the junta. How the junta treated this person who theoretically was the junta’s adversary supports the actual truth of the argument.
So what can we see through the qualifications that this ‘untouchable’ minister of finances possesses?
That he is nothing less than a representative species of this insatiable capitalist class from which true Socialism and true Democracy protect.
This representative of the capitalist class has infiltrated the power elite by self-naming himself a democrat or a socialist, so that he will be able to achieve a redistribution of wealth in favour of his social class, rendering his school classmates and friends super-rich and the People (with whom he had never had any link other than this of exploitative relationship) super-indigent, turning this People into a beggar asking for alms just to get something to eat.
And the man who has hired him to play the role of the auctioneer of the property of the People, if of course he will be eventually allowed to do so, is none other than G. Papandreou.
George Papandreou, who was educated in the company of his parents and grandparents, how to be obsequious and grovelling to those on whose behest he is tearing the country of the Greeks apart and is currently attempting to dissolve their Nation as well, exploiting a mass to achieve that goal and treating People like a hegemon who has the lowest regard for the People and treats them as if they were imbeciles. In other words, he tries to convince people that to become financially indigent and lose their holdings via the consecutive mortgaging that the latter are subjected to, and which G. Papandreou went to Davos to expedite like the auctioneer of a house whose owners passed away childless, are to the benefit of and great pride to this People who are themselves been auctioned and ridiculed.
AS LONG AS the media try to make us believe that it will be a great success for G. Papandreou and of his collaborator if somebody (whose identity in fact we do not know) deigns to lend us at usurious terms,
AS LONG AS it is considered a good choice for us to accept lending by another State which will become our overseer and governor, bypassing any issue of transgression of the Constitution and of Democracy,
AS LONG AS the true culprits of this embezzlement, theft and undermining are not subpoenaed to return the stolen funds and goods and stop their thievery by punishing them as exemplars of traitors of the State and of the Nation and criminals against Humanity,
THE MORE will the extermination of the People will continue, and be met with unprecedented adversity imposed on them, while
THE ΜΟΡΕ the wealth of those represented by the ‘new refresher politicians’ of PASOK as well as of the totality of all politicians and party holders will reach infinite proportions.
AND THE ΜΟPE their appetite for more will be whetted.
Translation provided by Michael T.