The news arriving from Greece alarms ordinary people and reassures the global financial oligopoly in its general rehearsal aimed at verifying what consequences the default of the Mastrich Treaty will have. Greece lends itself well to this “case study” operation.
It is a nation with a very ancient democracy with universal suffrage and a formidable subordination of the economy to non-virtuous politics: after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in those lands, in the first decades of the XNUMXth century, a very extensive peasant democracy was born due to the proliferation of private property among millions of new small owners who took possession of state lands (the Ottoman model reserved land ownership only to the state and forbade private ownership of it) through electoral mediation: so many votes so many hectares.
From that precocious peasant democracy arose already in the last decades of the 1945th century a very extensive patronage structure dominated by a few large families who in fact have transmitted power to each other until today: Papandreu and Karamanlis docet. Mass clientelism became encysted in mass statism and, after the anti-communist civil war of 1949-XNUMX (in the face of the rebellion against Stalin by the Greek communist Titos and consequent bloody Greek-North American repression), with the entry of Greece into the Born with an anti-Soviet function, thanks to the creation of a "rentier capitalism" (capitalism based on land rent) with an exemplary structure.
It was and is based on pure ground rent, i.e. multiplying agricultural rent by a thousand, transforming it into real estate. The economically dominated classes have always lived abroad, flying, like their ships, London or Panamanian flags. In recent decades foreign currencies supported the immense public expenditure thanks to tourism, thus uniting that octroyé wealth with the remittances of emigrants who, after decades of deprivation, are now destroying the Aegean with blows of polluting and purulent discharges.
Over everything dominates a black economy that seems to reach 50% of GDP and one of the most refined organizations of institutionalized corruption, as confirmed by the bi-partisan scam perpetrated for more than ten years by Greece against the EU and therefore of all Europeans. Did anyone notice? Where were the diligent European Commissioners? THE historical drama is consumed with tragedy when one thinks that this social system has prevented Turkey with its veto power for decades from being part of Europe, opposing it in every way, even on the strength of the stolid Ataturkian nationalism (the case of Cyprus for example).
Greece, with its entry into the euro, has never changed its structural characteristics of "rentier capitalism" to very strong corruption and evasion: yet it entered the euro with much less vehement protests from the German side than those made manifest against of Italy. Greece is too small a nation to worry: its GDP is a drop in the European ocean and its wealth is all over the world (the most beautiful magazine on Greece is published in New York and is called “Ellenic Diaspora”).
The default - if it comes - will reduce the pavement and make the vast majority of Greeks suffer, all of whom live as state employees or baby pensioners, with - all - one or more illegal jobs... And therefore, perhaps, the suffering will be less than that that we think. And the global financial oligopoly will draw some very dangerous lessons for Spain and Italy… and Portugal.
I hear Greece being compared to Argentina. Never was a comparison more absurd. It is true that the art of comparison occurs when dissimilar and non-similar things and phenomena are compared, but if comparison is to teach the future, the Argentine one, after the default, is all different from what could be that of a Greek default. In the first place, Argentina was enormously more tied to the world market than Greece was and still is: direct foreign investments in Argentina were the basic element of Argentine privatizations without liberalizations (Prodi & Company model) and therefore the links of Argentina with the global financial oligopoly was very dense and not asphyxiated as the Greek one (a few French and German banks and a few pennies of foreign investments).
And again: the Argentine people have a history of heroic resilience to crises that has lasted for about two centuries and which recently gave life to an extraordinary cooperative, mutual, non-profit social activity of which there has never been a trace in Greece. Moreover, Argentina came out of default with growth thanks to its immense natural resources and the always high price that agro-industrial commodities have had for some years.
The only similarity is the political weakness of both countries: Argentina has fallen into the hands of a neo-Peronism of incredible strength and destructive power. After all, so it is also with the formidable patronage machines of the Greek parties: socialist and national-democratic parties already in the fifties of the twentieth century attracted the attention of the father of post-Moscow and Pareto political science: Maurice Duverger who described their traits with immeasurable power heuristics: institutionally weak parties but very strong clientelists…as in Italy…alas! Will it say something?
