It's all Greek to me.
by Knight Allen, NSC Director of Legislation
Published on  March 08, 2012 - reprinted with permission

     You have probably been following, at least to some degree, the European financial crisis and in particular, the Greek bailout.
The saddest thing to me about the whole sorry mess is the loss of self-governance by the Greek people.
Greece is the birthplace of democracy, for goodness sakes, but now for all intents and purposes it's being run by a bunch of bankers and paper pushing, numbers crunching, bean counting bureaucrats with no accountability and unanswerable to the people of Greece.
Consider just two aspects of the bailout as reported by the Wall Street Journal on 2/22/2012:

  1.  The European Central Bank is protected from taking a loss on its Greek bond holdings while private investors are set to take a 50% to 70% loss.
  2.  Both major political parties were forced to agree to the austerity terms in order to get the money and have agreed to "govern" under those conditions regardless of which party wins the next Greek election.
Of course, a case could be made the Greek people got themselves into this situation with their cradle-to-grave political system that produces less and less while constantly demanding more and more. The problem, as Margaret Thatcher famously observed is that at some point you run out of other peoples' money. Or as seems to be the case" for Greece you keep getting money but the price is so high you lose control of your government. Pretty dismal and I guess we can all be happy it couldn't possibly happen here, right?

Well maybe right but then again, maybe not so right.  Consider:

  1. When the financial crisis hit, what exactly did the Congress do? They did precisely what the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department bureaucrats, the monster banks and the Wall Street operatives told them to do. They simply obeyed all the unelected and unaccountable factions that had gotten us into the mess in the first place giving them obscene amounts of money to keep the game going.
  2. Speaking of money.  What about the massive devaluation of our currency (see article from NSC Foghorn 10/13/11)? That has mostly been the, conscious policy of the Federal Reserve. Unaccountable and unanswerable to the American people.
  3.  What about zero interest rates that are doing so much harm to savers and seniors (see article from NSC Foghorn 9/8/11)? Again a conscious policy by the unaccountable Federal Reserve.

  So how different are we from the Greeks?  Actually, not very different at all. The Congress has become nothing more than a servile lap dog that holds committee meetings on a regular basis to be kept up to date on what the unelected rulers are doing and what those rulers expect from Congress. Pathetic is too kind a word to describe the collective incompetence of these people.

  I have been known, on rare occasion, to drop a letter to the editor. I enjoy being part of the "Letters" community and, agree or disagree, I always find the page to be interesting. Every once in a while something special comes along (besides mine which are always special, right?). That happened on 2/21/12 in the RJ in a letter written by J. Daluga of Henderson; the subject was how some people are always trying to impose their moral codes on everybody and how this is coming from both sides . . . . .  "The right says abortion is immoral, gay marriage is immoral and secularism is immoral. The left says being rich is immoral, fatty foods are immoral and fossil fuels are immoral.
This is the real problem: Someone else wants to tell me what's 'moral' - and they want (to) make laws about it.  Stop."

   Well said J. Daluga.

  Knight can be reached at:  knightallen702@yahoo.com

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