The Drach Card and Greece's Permanent Austerity

Nothing is as permanent as a temporary tax so Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, attempting to justify punishing workers, the elderly and the poor again while giving privileged professionals, the rich elite and tax evaders a free pass and Stay-Out-of-Jail card, had the temerity to say that once the country’s austerity crisis subsides (that would be never) that he would restore unfair cuts.
News Flash #1 – Samaras isn’t going to be around long enough to break his promise because he will remember the coming Wrath of September when Greeks take to the streets to begin his downfall, just as they did his similarly failed political weakling predecessor and one-time roommate at Amherst College, then-PASOK leader George Papandreou, who is still President of the Anti-Socialist International.
Samaras, the New Democracy Uber-Capitalist leader, will not make it through his four-year term, although he doesn’t want to be pushed into the dustbin of history with the likes of Papandreou so won’t resign, but have to be carried out kicking and screaming: “I had no choice! I had to cut workers’ pay 100 percent!” with drool running down.
Whenever there is any chance Greeks will resist again and decry the pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions he admitted were unfair, Samaras plays the Drach Card, saying unless they submit to orders of international lenders and get on their knees to them as fast as he did, that Greece will be forced out of the Eurozone, back to the drachma, and complete collapse.
If Samaras, who swore that these new austerity measures would be the last, discovers they are not enough to “save” Greece in the same way that American GI’s burned Vietnamese villages to save them, he will come back for more, but say that this is really, really the last time and that if your pay isn’t cut 100 percent then Greece will be forced out of the Eurozone and it will your fault, so there!
News Flash #2 – Greece is already in collapse, except for people who live like him and drink wine from the skulls of workers, the elderly and the poor and really don’t care what happens to them. It was put there by alternating New Democracy and PASOK administrations packing public payrolls with hundreds of thousands of deadwood sit-on-their-ass non-workers in return for votes. Greece may, per capita, have the world’s biggest number of LIFERS in its civil servant system: Lazy-Inefficient-F**koffs-Expecting Retirement.
They should have been fired long ago and put into training programs to learn skills that would get them real jobs with real companies lured by cutting red tape and with tax incentives to hire people who would then pay taxes instead of siphoning them. Samaras said the temporary-but really-permanent cuts would restore “credibility.”
News Flash #3 – Greece lost all credibility around the time that Papandreou’s father, Andreas, co-founded the PASOK party in 1974 and  after being elected Prime Minister, hired every person in the country who wasn’t already working for a private company. Greece might be more believable if Samaras implemented real reforms instead of only austerity, and started not just arresting tax evaders for show as previous governments have, but prosecuting them, putting them in jail, and impounding all the assets they stole and selling them to the highest bidder to bring in revenues. Now THAT’s privatization.
You have to remember too that Samaras hasn’t any credibility, starting with reneging on his campaign promises to try to re-negotiate terms of a pending second bailout of $173 billion from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) that ordered him to make $14.6 billion in new cuts and he surrendered faster than the French Army in World War II.
Forgotten as well is his promise to make whole Greeks and those in the Diaspora who put their savings into buying Greek bonds to help their homeland only to see them devalued 74 percent by previous Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos, now PASOK’s leader, who is one of Samaras’ partners in an uneasy coalition, along with Un-Democratic Former Left leader “Uncle” Fotis Kouvelis, who’s been asleep longer than Rip Van Winkle.
Still, Samaras would have you believe he’s credible enough that his promise (what’s that worth?) to one day restore pay cuts and pension benefits, at least to those who are still alive and haven’t died or killed themselves, will come true, although it’s just another fairytale, although Pinocchio seems to be his favorite.
NEWS FLASH # 4: Pay cuts are never restored, and neither are increased taxes reduced, because private companies want slaves and after they’ve cut your pay 30-50 percent and pocketed the money, they ain’t gonna give it back. Governments benefit from having indentured civil servants, and since many of them aren’t doing any work anyway, why pay them is what they figure. The Venizelos Taxes, doubled income and property taxes which were supposed to be for one year, are in their second and already are permanent. and so will the coming Samaras Taxes.
Through all this chicanery, Samaras’ threats about Greece returning to the drachma are reminiscent of what he said during the campaign – that it would be his rival, Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) leader Alexis Tsipras, who is opposed to the austerity that Samaras has embraced to save Greece – who would push the country out of the Eurozone. Tsipras, who lives in a fantasy land surrounded by Che Guevara-adorers, doesn’t have a clue about running a government or a country, only how to try to overthrow one, so he’s not the solution.
But neither is Samaras, who is about to get a lesson in political science – the street version, not the kind they teach at Harvard, where Papandreou has fled to be a lecturer in revisionist history – but down in the gutter where they’ve put people, and then the New Democracy leader will discover that there’s nothing as permanent as a temporary leader, after he’s gone.