The Aged P

The euro-mafia is already hailing the Greek election as a turning point, hoping that conservative New Democracy and their socialist rivals Pasok will form a coalition which will implement the austerity measures demanded by Germany. Their micawberish expectation that something will eventually “turn up” is not, however, shared by all observers..

Both parties, which have ruled Greece for 38 years, are widely blamed for a crisis that has taken the country to the brink of economic collapse. Between them they won only about 40 per cent of the vote. By contrast, parties that opposed the bail-out increased their share of the vote to over 46 per cent, with Syriza, the radical Leftist coalition that wants to discard the agreement, almost winning outright.

Has the Greek euro maiden been untied from the rails and carried away before the locomotive thunders down the track?

I think not.

Settle down, folks, for the longest running death scene since the days of Victorian melodrama….

There are 9.27m people in the UK of working age who do not work. 2.65m are unemployed 3.71m are in education. This leaves a balance of 2.91 million people who are neither seeking work, nor are they in education. This is a 30% rise or 1 million additional people in the final category in the last five years.

We now have 46% of the working age population supporting 54%.

Then there are 6m public sector workers, many of whom play an important role in our society and whose services are vital for the smooth functioning of a modern state. However their wages are fully funded by taxes levied on the private sector. So, remove the 6 million public sector workers from the income generating workforce and you have 37% of the working age population paying for the other 63%.

In other words taxes taken from the wages of one third of the working age population are needed to provide income for the other two thirds.

And when you realise that about 30% of the whole population are either in school or retired and are therefore not part of the working age population you must be as shocked as I am that cruel and vicious conservatives pretend that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A MONEY TREE.

Fortunately Ed Milliband, Presidents Obama and Hollande, the public sector unions, the BBC and the audience at BBC Question Time know that conservatives are lying. They don’t call it a money tree, of course, they call it “growth”. But at least the latest Greek darling of the left wing media is much more upfront.

Leftist Alexis Tsipras, 37, emerged with the power to block them. Greece, he said, could ditch its spending cuts and renounce its debts to EU partners, yet enlist their help in keeping the euro currency some 80 percent of Greeks cherish.

“Pythagoras didn’t manage to square the circle and god knows these guys don’t know how to either,” said one EU diplomat in Brussels, echoing widespread sentiment in European capitals.

“The Greeks seem to have no understanding of the seriousness of their predicament……

There they go again, pretending that money doesn’t grow on trees, that there is no such thing as a free lunch…

We know our rights.

We want a money tree and we want it NOW!!!!!….

..and the next generation? Who cares…they can take care of themselves…

h/t to a comment at Biased BBC

Nigel Farage mocked the Eurocrats with his usual panache by this tongue in cheek encomium to Europe Day (May 9th). Good knockabout fun, as usual, but, towards the end he makes reference to a spectre of civil war and revolution in the wake of the EU’s self serving attempt to defy gravity by forcing savage austerity policies on counties like Ireland, Italy and Greece in order to shore up the Euruzone and, more importantly, protect German banks from the consequences of their drunken sailor lending policies over the last two decades.

The established Greek political elite unwillingly submitted to the austerity package demanded by EU. But a few days ago the people of Greece were able to voice their opinion via parliamentary elections.

The result? A total collapse of support for the mainstream parties and a large swing to the extremes of left and right – exactly the same thing as happened in the German election of 1932…and we all know what came out of that….

Over the last months there have been regular marches and demonstrations against the massive cuts in state spending being forced by the EU in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. Indeed in Greece these protests have frequently escalated into full scale riots.

The BBC has, of course, reported on these protests but in a strangely disconnected manner. The levels of anger and frustration are made obvious and the fact that the austerity programmes are the result of pressure from the EU (aka Merkel/Sarkozy) is clearly noted.

But that’s where it ends. There is little background or follow up – the journalism is very two dimensional. Now this is odd because there is nothing more that the BBC likes to do than to dig deep into any protest/riot. G20, Tottenham/Croydon August 2011, Occupy and Syria…..the agitation is lovingly filmed and often carefully choreographed for the cameras, just in time for the evening news. Individual protesters (usually young and photogenic) are interviewed with a hushed and reverential air and over the days there springs from out of nowhere a veritable tsunami of in depth analysis which is usually skewed against the powers that be. Within a fortnight or so there appears the Panorama documentary and six to twelve months later the play/film/opera dramatising the whole event with a cast of heroes…and villains.

The villains – they are always central to the whole performance. Bankers, Oil companies, government ministers – all wheeled out and deconstructed in the name of truth and journalistic rigour. Yet the script has been changed for these Mediterranean protests. There are no villains in this epic – no shadowy figures to abuse, excoriate or condemn. No implication of a deep laid conspiracy to suppress freedom.

Nobody to blame.

Of course you and I know only too well who to blame. They are the cartel of bureaucratic bunglers and con artists who cobbled together the gigantic scam that is the Euro a decade or so back. They are the guilty men and women. In any other situation the BBC would be hunting them down with mike and camera, confronting them in their glittering taxpayer funded offices in Brussels, metaphorically tarring and feathering them in the name of justice and revenge.

But the BBC could never perform that function against the EU, not in a million years. For it is essentially the PR arm of the EU. It has shamelessly pimped this raddled harlot across our airwaves for decades. It would be like the pope flourishing a condom. To admit this monumental failure on the part of the EU elite would demand a degree of honesty and conscience that is simply beyond the pale for any BBC chattering class apparatchik.

Sorry, people…move along there, nothing to see here. Why not look over there at Tesco or that travellers site or the anti capital protest – we’ve already got scores of reporters and the whole team of Today and Newsnight presenters covering those much more important stories…
You see all that criticism of the EU is simply not…helpful….it undermines the narrative and we at the BBC always appreciate the big picture….

The BBC shows us how, just before Greece entered the Euro, Goldman Sachs and the Greek political elite cobbled together a dodgy deal to cover up the huge elephant in the room that was Greece’s debt and then how the EU financial “experts” looked around and pretended not to see it.

Their fingerprints and DNA are all over the room but, you see, it was all a misunderstanding and anyway it’s water under the bridge.

That sound? It’s Al Capone, turning in his grave out of sheer envy….

Or, as Adam smith might have said

Investment Bankers, politicians and EU officials seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public