Europes 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.
Isnt 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.
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.
