Greece's "post-democracy" government, to use Jürgen Habermas' serviceable term, is off to a rocky start just like that in Greece. Despite the three-party coalition that it formally represents (social democrats, conservatives, more-conservatives), the bankers' debt-collection government in Greece is plagued by partisan squabbling! Even among its own coalition partners!
Golly, who would have thought that democracy was so hard to get rid of?
What's next, Post-Democracy 2.0?
There are still protests, strikes. It appears that the 99% in Greece still have given up this quaint idea that the people should have a meaningful say in how their government works. For some reason hard for the minds of Very Serious People to fathom, they also don't seem enchanted with an indefinite future of impoverishing themselves and their country. Don't they know what a privelege it is for a silly, insignificant little country and an unimportant people like themselves to be a satellite state of Angela Merkel's Germany?
George Gilson explain how post-democratic Greece's bankers' government, Post-Democracy 1.0, works in Press Watch, Dec. 2 Athens News 12/02/2011:
Absolute fiscal discipline and on-site Brussels-Berlin proxies to oversee every budgetary move is, by all accounts, the new eurozone plan, which probably will be unveiled by Angela Merkel in the German legislature today. That means, in short, you can wave bye-bye to the national power of the purse, the cornerstone of parliamentary democracy.After he eventually gets kicked out of Greece, Mr. Dimas can have a promising future as a FOX News commentator.
That is the new eurozone: you trade your sovereignty for security, with a leonine contract (where one party gets the lion’s share and the other the short end of the stick). But certainly it is not the security of the middle and working classes that is secured in fiscally strapped countries. They get brutal austerity, the total demolition of social welfare, and the elimination of labour rights earned with the hard struggles over a century.
Berlin is basically giving indebted countries an offer they cannot refuse. A comment by German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle (shown on Greek TV), at a November 29 conference attended by his Greek counterpart Stavros Dimas, made that plainly clear.
“If one country does not want to come with the other countries they will not have the possibility to block the other countries. Mr Dimas, what do you think of the offer?” Westerwelle asked with a strikingly imperious tone. “You cannot really disagree,” responded Dimas, somewhat taken aback.
But it is Greece’s deputy premier, Theodoros Pangalos, who takes the cake. He told a French-speaking TV station a few days ago that the two million Greek indignados who protested austerity were a mix of “communists, fascists and jerks”. He prefaced that wisdom by saying he would speak as simply as Charles de Gaulle! In fact, Pangalos is the namesake of his grandfather, a general who headed a dictatorship.
Tags: italy, post-democracy
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