Rahm Emanuel's most famous quote is, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
Those words have been taken very seriously in Europe, and not just by the neo-Nazis in Greece (who now garner 22% in opinion polls).
The ones taking the greatest advantage of the seemingly, never-ending crisis are the banking elites.
"There must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing...There must be a strict supervision of all banking and credit and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people's money."
Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
The disconnect between the people of Europe and its leaders is nearly complete.
In 2011 voters all over Europe kicked out their governments when they had a chance because they were unresponsive to their desires. In their place came unelected technocrats.
Since then things have only gotten worse.
For instance, in Greece police are pepper-spraying other protesting police, while judges and doctors strike due to unpaid salaries.
In the last four years, Greece's economy has contracted by 25%, a number almost matched by their unemployment rate (a rate that America peaked at during our Great Depression). 1 in 3 businesses in Athens have closed.
The Greek government responded to the loss in revenue by raising regressive taxes on middle-class usage of cars and fuel. This has caused Greeks to abandon their cars.
According to the government’s statistics office, the number of cars on Greek roads declined by more than 40 percent in each of the last two years. Meanwhile, more than 200,000 bikes were sold in 2011, up about a quarter from the previous year.
As for the health care system, the problems extend far beyond doctors not being paid.
Life-savings drugs are now becoming very hard to find. The famous European health care system is being
systematically dismantled by the technocrats.
Unpaid bills go much further than just the doctors and judges.
Greece’s power regulator RAE told Reuters on Friday it was calling an emergency meeting next week to avert a collapse of the debt-stricken country’s electricity and natural gas system.
RAE took the decision after receiving a letter from Greece’s natural gas company DEPA, which threatened to cut supplies to electricity producers if they failed to settle their arrears with the company.
What we are looking at is a country on the brink of complete collapse. People are seeing their lives wiped out. Naturally this is causing depression with tragic consequences, such as a
dramatic rise in suicides and
abandoned children.
Greece is far from alone in this misery.
Spain's unemployment rate of 25% is even higher than Greece's. This has caused reactions that harken back to the 1930's, such as bank runs and food riots.
Unemployed fieldworkers and other members of the union went to two supermarkets, one in Ecija (Sevilla) and one in Arcos de la Frontera (Cadiz) and loaded up trolleys with basic necessities. They said that the people were being expropriated and they planned to “expropriate the expropriators”.
The foodstuffs, including milk, sugar, chickpeas, pasta and rice, have been given to charities to distribute, who say they are unable to cope with all the requests for help they receive. Unemployment in the Sierra de Cadiz is now 40%.
Hunger is on the rise in Spain. The desperation of the Spanish people who now claim that
“Democracy has been kidnapped" has become extreme, to say the least.
The Catalan parliament will be voting on the
question of independence as soon as Thursday. They are pushing ahead with this despite
stern warnings from the Spanish military.
According to AME, current events in Catalonia are the result of "a frightening economic crisis and other manifestly disastrous political management by the formations that incur a high treason to voluntarily maintain a system of electoral representation that encourages the emergence and establishment of separatist nationalism to give in to his blackmail votes to stay in power."
With all this suffering and strife, with the people demanding their governments be more responsive to their needs, the European governments are actually moving in the
opposite direction.
Economically, there can be little doubt that some sort of enhanced co-ordination is desirable for Europeans to prosper in a multipolar world. But politically, the likely outcome is a further shift in power from elected representatives to unelected technocrats and a further weakening of democracy; and greater powers for bankers at the European Central Bank and lawyers at the European court of justice – along with the civil servants in Brussels who interpret their judgments.
This reaction to the crisis of distrust of democracy and embrace of elites, mainly economists and other technocrats, to deal with the political situation is a repeat of the
same mistakes of the 1930's.
The alarm bell of warning has been wrung by no other than
Václav Klaus.
The new push for a European Union federation, complete with its own head of state and army, is the "final phase" of the destruction of democracy and the nation state, the president of the Czech Republic has warned.
Now before you pity Europe, consider what is
happening to democracy here in the States.
The financial industry is on track to break its 2008 campaign spending record of $170 million, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics cited by CNNMoney. So far, Wall Street has spent $164 million donating to candidates and political groups. And CRP estimates the total tab to be huge with donors $2.5 billion on the election overall.