Greece and the End of Sovereignty

In the classical era, Greeks were famous for their refusal to bow to anyone and for the various city-states and their inhabitants refusal to believe that anyone could boss them around. Today we learn that Greek are no longer sovereign:

In an unusually direct ultimatum to Greece, the European Union commissioner for economic affairs, Olli Rehn, said Sunday that finance ministers from the 17 countries in the union that use the euro were expecting the announcement of a unity government before their meeting in Brussels on Monday. Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek finance minister and a key figure in the Socialist government, is scheduled to attend the meeting.

And so the victory of the failed economic policies of the deranged neoliberals is now interfering in the political organization of a western democracy. It would be one thing if the technocrats solutions to the problems capitalism creates worked, but they didn't, don't, and won't. In Absolute Destruction Isabelle Hull argues that the "training" the various European armies received during their colonial wars, in which Europeans slaughtered badly armed natives because, well, you know, the expansion of civilization, led to the kind of violence that typified WWI. Now, it seems, having honed their destructive powers by imposing the Washington Consensus on emerging market nations, what a horrid way to think about fellow men and women, the time has come to impose it on the rest of us.

Some might argue that this is for the "greater good," because, after all, austerity in the name of paying back the crooks who broke the economy is just common sense; however, the rest of us, which is about 99%,  think that the citizens have a right to decide their own fate.

Hope you enjoyed your weekend, while you still had one.