Greece: today's the day...

...that Greece's prime minister announces the first batch of austerity measures.

It took five months of television-based test-marketing to get here (and an incremental cost of close to Euro 1 billion). Numerous ideas have been bandied around Greek television, ostensibly to gauge and measure public discontent with each proposed idea... in the meantime, Euro 8 bill. have flown out of the country as people prefer to expatriate their savings despite (belated) government assurance that savings will not be touched.

And still, in midst of all this, attempts at deflecting public attention away from Greece's dire financial straits are still rampant: committee to examine the Siemens scandal, committees to analyse creative accounting... all of course for the present socialist party's political expediency.

Discrediting the previous government, however, will not bring along Santa bearing presents of a few billion Euro in cash. Nor will creative communication 101 as in, Ministry of Commerce and Competitiveness, Ministry of Citizens Protection...
For the record, it is the present prime minister's father, one Andreas Papandreou, whose innovative borrowing and gleeful spending put Greece on the road to over-debt.

The country, Greece, is plagued by bullshit and a television nomenclature created by Greece's socialist party denizens in the 80s and 90s that seems to support this bullshit. These people are loth to see the good times gone.

These are the "good fellas".

Unlike the movie, however, this is not Hollywood and a happy ending where good is vindicated for its efforts and all is better after, is not on the agenda.

Austerity and a weak negotiating position is.

And this position is all the more compromised by internal squabbling: after all, all of the provacative complaints made by Greece's euro-partners originated in Greece itself!


While Greeks point at one another shouting, his fault!, the country's credibility is sinking and so is the inhabitants'. Whose fault is that?