Greece Reveals Our Near Future

25 Feb, 2010 by Dave Blount

Print this article Font size -16+

We don’t need to wait until Hopey Change plays out to learn what happens when you put left-wing radicals and the union thugs who finance them in charge of a country. Greece is on the same road, but a few years further along. The Ministry of Truth reports on the street clashes accompanying the second general strike in two weeks.

The action was the biggest since Greece’s socialist government introduced cuts to bring the country’s debt and deficit under control. …

The country currently has a spiralling public deficit of 12.7%, more than four times higher than eurozone rules allow. …

The BBC’s Malcolm Brabant in Athens says that for the second time this month, Greece is isolated from the rest of the world for 24 hours as all flights into and out of the country have been cancelled.

Commuters have been left without most forms of public transport, while public schools, ministries, and municipal offices have been closed. Many hospitals are operating only with emergency staffing.

Don’t worry, the bureaucrats have a plan:

The government has pledged to cut [the public deficit] to 8.7% this year, and also reduce the 300bn-euro ($419bn; £259bn) national debt, by freezing public sector salaries, raising the average retirement age to 63 by 2015, and increasing taxes on petrol, alcohol and tobacco.

It also wants to crack down on tax avoidance. Greece’s black economy is estimated at 30% of official gross domestic product.

Jacking up taxes even further is bound to lessen dependence on the black economy. If that doesn’t work,

Analysts say Greece may be forced to implement even tougher austerity measures to meet EU demands in the coming months. This could include a rise in value-added tax (VAT), which stands at 19%.

For an idea of what raising taxes during economic trouble will do, compare the disastrous FDR, who prolonged the Great Depression by tripling federal taxation, with the great Ronald Reagan, who turned a severe recession into a boom by cutting taxes.

But in Greece, the choice isn’t between socialism and economic freedom. It’s between socialism and communism.

Groups of youths then threw stones and smashed shop windows, police said. Three people were arrested.

The brief clashes were a distraction from the union’s main message that Greece’s rich should pay for the crisis, not the working and middle classes, our correspondent says. …

The country’s two largest trade union groups, the private sector GSEE and the public sector ADEDY, had predicted a substantial turnout among their two million members.

“Today, from all locations in the country, a strong message of unity, struggle and protest is being sent,” the head of the GSEE, Yiannis Panagopoulos said in a statement .

When unions turn against a socialist government because the “rich” haven’t been bled completely out of existence yet, the hammer and sickle are not far from view.

Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos revealed a parallel between declining Europe’s situation and our own:

Mr Pangalos also made a strident attack on the calibre of the EU’s current political leaders, saying those of the 1980s … would never have permitted the current economic crisis.

“This is another level of leadership which we don’t have today. The quality of leadership today in the union is very, very poor indeed,” he said.

I know what he means.

At least Greece won’t be able to dig itself much deeper into debt, even if the government veers even further to the left.

On Tuesday, the credit ratings of Greece’s four largest banks were downgraded by ratings agency Fitch, a move that may worsen the country’s financial woes.

The move will make it more expensive for the banks to borrow funds, and the government to get loans.

In short, deficit spending of the sort Obama et al. have been indulging in is causing Greece to become a failed state. Spain is next. If the Democrats manage to ram through healthcare nationalization, the stratospheric cost will guarantee that America follows soon afterward.

Now who would want the American system to come crashing down? Two names well known in the radical circles that produced Barack Obama come to mind once again: Richard Cloward and his wife Frances Piven, leftists who advocated overloading the economy with deliberately excessive government spending.

Not even Nancy Pelosi could be clueless enough to think we can afford the healthcare bill they are about to impose despite massive public resistance. The idea is to create a failed state, which will quickly give way to a collectivist totalitarian state. For the last year, every time you’ve turned on the news, you’ve been witnessing a communist coup.

On a tip from Forest. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.