By John Ward
Dimitris Christoulas’ suicide note is a death-sentence for the Troikanauts
Lucas Papademos said during an official visit to Cyprus that current projections suggest Greece’s economic output — or gross domestic product — will rebound in the second half of 2013. If it does so, it will be bucking five years without growth. In each one of the those years, the potential for production, innovation and demand in the Greek economy were, by common consent, far better than they are now.
Papademos said this miracle turnaround will happen “if the Greek authorities stick to reforms and take additional measures to speed up economic recovery such as introducing job creation schemes”. As none of these are likely to come from the existing Greek elite of corrupt boobies, we can see that the Greek Goldman implant’s prediction is worth about as much as his former employer’s confideniality agreements.
But in a final attempt at hocus-pocus, Papademos said a sizeable portion of the Troika rescue loans “have been earmarked to boost the liquidity of Greek banks which took huge losses after agreeing to voluntarily join a swap deal and accept a deep cut in the value of their Greek government bond holdings”. What Papa Doc didn’t get round to mentioning here is that, by its very existence, the Troika agreement’s 159 pages ensure that, each and every month, Greece is $1.5 billion deeper in debt. Which, if you’re trying to win a race from the back, is a helluva a weight handicap for the judges to hand you.
So in brief then, Lucas Papademos was remaining strictly loyal to his firmly-established track record of talking complete bollocks.
In a measured response to the Greek leader’s judicious mixture of dissembling and cant, Athenian pensioner Dimitris Christoulas yesterday stood a few hundred yards away from the Greek legislature, and blew his brains out with a handgun.
Greek Pensions have been slashed by up to a quarter as part of the austerity measures demanded by the Troika. In a suicide note left at the scene (extract above) Christoulas wrote that the Government had “nullified any chance of my survival which was based on a decent salary that for 35 years I alone, without state support, paid for”.
So far in Greece, the self-destruction score stands a two incidents in a week. Last Tuesday, a 78-year-old Italian woman living in Sicily threw herself from a third-floor apartment after her monthly pension was cut by 25%.
A week earlier, a 58-year-old Bologna businessman tried to commit suicide by setting himself alight while sitting in his car outside a tax office in northern Italy.
The Troika, Brussels and Berlin should take heed: once inhumanity can be quantified by pointless death, it is the end for any regime in terms of affection and respect from its followers. Twenty five years on, a crass Sun headline emerging from the disordered head of Newscorp butterball Kelvin Mackenzie about ‘scouse blame’ for the Hillsborough tragedy still damns The Sun readership in Liverpool to a level 30% lower than anywhere else in the country. Once the Murdoch gargoyles were caught hacking infant corpses and their distraught parents, the end for the News of the World was in sight. In this way does evil – infuriatingly slowly, but inevitably – die. A year ago, I tended to see Angela Merkel as a leader on the side of taxpayers against banks. Now she seems more like a heartless Stalinist, and her hitman Schauble a small man made bitter by his disablement.
Putting loony conspiracies and simplistic analyses aside, to suggest that the anti-growth discipline being applied to the ClubMeds is PURELY to ‘put their house in order’ (the sanctimonious drivel Berlin would have us believe) is a blatant untruth: the main objective is to save banks in general, Wall St in particular, and the gravy train in Rompuy-Pompuy land.
It’s such a shame that the innocent, the meek, and the defenceless have to die before we can get rid if the European Bunion. How much better it would’ve been if politicians from London to Liege had simply grown some balls thirty years ago – and told the Federals to go read some social anthropology before letting the heat of their rape-engorged egos burn the science books.
