Rise of the Technocrats

[Axl Van Sixx]

Anybody the least disturbed by the total subversion of democracy in Greece and Italy? Without any say by the people, international finance has levered its favoured servants into power.

The dictatorship of the bankers

Europe’s economic crisis is being transformed by the day into a deep political crisis. Italy and Greece both have new governments – governments of “national unity”, pledged to solve the economic and financial crisis that has rocked Europe to its foundations. What are these so-called technocratic governments and what do they represent? The Independent (Sunday 20 November) writes:

“Political power in Europe has passed to a tiny elite of technocrats. Two days after the economist Lucas Papademos was sworn in as Prime Minister of Greece, another technocrat, Mario Monti, was asked to lead a new unity government in Italy.”
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Isn’t this perfectly clear? In Italy and Greece, political power does not reside in the governments, and still less with the electorate. It is in the hands of a tiny elite of unelected technocrats. It is not democratically elected governments but the faceless technocrats in the German finance ministry, European Central Bank, the IMF and the European Commission, who will decide the future living conditions of the people of Greece, Italy and the whole of Europe. But whose interests do these “technocrats” act? The same article explains:

“Technocrat here is a euphemism for someone who has worked at or with the investment bank Goldman Sachs, nicknamed in financial circles ‘the vampire squid’. Mr Monti was a member of Goldman's board of international advisers. Mario Draghi, the new president of the European Central Bank which controls eurozone monetary policy, is a Goldman man. So is Antonio Borges who, until Wednesday, was running the International Monetary Fund's European division. Mr Papademos is a former vice-president of that same European Central Bank; he is also the man who was running the Central Bank of Greece at the time when that country, like Italy, used complex derivatives to slim down the apparent size of its government debts in order to qualify to join the euro. The rules of the euro mandated that such debts shouldn't be above 60 per cent of the size of the economy. Who was behind that clever idea? The financial wizards of Goldman Sachs.”
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In the Europe of the banks and big monopolies, democracy is a convenient fiction. In the EU neither the Council of Ministers nor the Commission are directly elected, while the European Parliament is a mere talking shop with no real say in the big decisions. The markets rule, which is to say, the boards of directors of a handful of big banks and monopolies decide everything. They decide what happens to the savings, investments, insurance policies and pensions of millions of people. They have their fingers in every pie. They buy civil servants as easily as one would buy a pound of potatoes in the market – only the price is somewhat higher.

 

[hippie_hunter]

A very unfortunate side effect of what is going on. The EU is on the verge of losing democratic legitimacy due to the crisis.

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

Huh. I guess nobody cares. Looks like it's just you and me, hip.

[In fairness, I probably should have posted this in the European Union thread in the first place]

 

[Destructus86]

It's not that I don't care...I just give up. Let it burn.

 

[Crazy Quilt]

Can we really be surprised?

Banking and monetary policy has been the tool they have used to spread the rule and influence of neoliberalist "free market" economic ideology all over the world over the past decades. It has been inherently undemocratic because it's circumvented the sovereignty of nation-states. These are global, international interests that aren't beholden to a passport. The only entities that could possibly "challenge" them on behalf of ordinary people are national governments which have been mostly powerless(or simply unwilling to thanks to influence peddling) to do so due to the international nature(naturally) of economic globalism. And now we see how, in Europe, perhaps one of the only entities in the world capable of regulating this international sceme(as the EU is an international political entity that has some real authority, unlike say, the UN) has now been thoroughly subverted...through banking, naturally.

These same private banking interests exert enormous control over the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. In my opinion, that has been the single biggest contributing factor behind the spread of neoliberalist economics. The U.S. Dollar is the international currency reserve; so controlling the Dollar through the Fed allows enormous control over the world's financial system. Other nations had to adopt their economic philosophy to be able to survive on an "even" playing field.

"It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Henry Ford