Greek Democracy or EU Elitism - Who Will Prevail

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker speaking to the press this morning, said : "I will never let the Greek people down." Juncker's long monologue was somewhat like watching the Wicked Stepmother in Snow White ask over and over : "Mirror, Mirror on the walk, who is the fairest of us all?" As children, we knew she would be outraged by the answer. Today, Juncker said he was "betrayed" by Greece's behavior after all he and the EC had done to help it. Strange words form the man who heads the EC, the creditor of 60% of Greece's €323 billion debt.-- with the IMF (holding 10% of the Greek debt) and the ECB (6%) -- because their intransignce has caused a fall of 25% in Greek GDP during the last five years, unequaled in Europe since World War II, while its unemployment rate stands at 25% overall, with youth joblessness at 50%. There are food and medicine shortages, and pensioners must somehow survive on 50% of their pensions.~~~~~ After calling for a referendum, on Sunday evening, following emergency meetings with monetary authorities, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras annouced that Greek banks and the Athens stock market would be closed Monday to prevent a run on deposits and a massive share selloff. The creditors instantly went from optimism to pessimism, facing a likely Greek default and exit from the Eurozone. But to tell the truth, after the interim jolts, Greece will be better off out of the Eurozone. The UK's Telegraph quoted its financial columnist, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who calls the EC/IMF/ECB reaction to the Greek crisis : “deliberately provoking a bank run and endangering Europe's system in their zeal to force Greece to its knees....to duck their own responsibilities leading to this impasse.” According to Evans-Pritchard : "it has never been plainer that the Greek crisis is all of Europe’s....Tsipras and Varoufakis...had made more politically perilous compromises, notably on budget surplus targets and in its proposed tax reforms, and notably not on already slashed public-sector pensions. The EU advanced modified terms that amounted to tinkering at the margin....On the table at this point was a five-month extension of the bailout. Sign the deal and roughly $8 billion of the rescue funds agreed in 2012 will flow. Don’t, and Athens wouldn’t be able to cover a $1.8 billion payment due at the IMF this Tuesday." ~~~~~ So, last Friday, Tsipras announced his call for a public referendum on July 5 to determine the majority view of Greek voters. The EU was quick to react, suddenly withdrawing the bailout extension, leaving nothing for Greeks to vote on. It also refused Greece’s request for an extension of talks to accommodate the July 5 vote. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister and leader of the Eurogroup finance ministers, immediately accused Tsipras of breaking off the talks. The referendum idea, Dijsselbloem said, “has closed the door on further talks while the door was still open, in my mind.” Yet, Varoufakis was still on the telephones, tweeting, and trying to keep contacts open throughout the weekend. Dijsselbloem’s account of the Greek minister’s stance was disingenuous. Then, Dijsselbloem excluded Varoufakis from a Eurogroup meeting Saturday afternoon : “Our Greek colleague will not attend,” he said. But, despite or because of this, the Greek parliament backed Tsipras, voting for the referendum. This wasn't a great surprise because the left wing of the Syriza party was uneasy with Tsipras’s compromising in Brussels and had hinted last week that it wanted a referendum. On Sunday morning, the ECB stepped up to the plate, announcing that it wouldn’t provide further increases in emergency funds to keep Greek banks liquid. That put the Bank of Greece on notice that when the current provision runs out, it’ll be on its own to deal with the probability of a full run on Greek banks. But late on Sunday, the ECB board, perhaps having internal attacks of nerves, reversed itself, voting to provide Greece $2 billion in liquidity on Monday, the same amount it provided Friday. “It is obvious that ECB President Mario Draghi doesn’t want to be tagged as the one responsible for pushing Greece out of the Eurozone,” according to a Telegraph European source, and “I suspect he’ll do the same Tuesday, so Greek banks can keep their heads just above water.” ~~~~~ Concerning the catastrophic austerity program forced on Greece by the EU, Greek voters have an absolute right to judge a deal wherein Tsipras and Varoufakis have gone much further than they promised when elected in January.Europe has by action and words argued all along that the democratic process - to say nothing of the basic well-being of Greeks - counts less than technocratic calculations and targets that have repeatedly proven wrong in Greece and elsewhere. “Democracy deserves a boost in Euro-related matters,” Varoufakis tweeted Friday in support of the referendum. “We have just delivered it. Let the people decide. (Funny how radical this concept sounds)." Today, a Grexit begins to look inevitable. Grexit will be hard on Greeks during the transition back to the Drachma. but to put democratic values above market values is an easy decision. ~~~~~ Dear readers, when the European project began after WWII, Churchill, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet explicitly advanced it as the mechanism needed to strengthen European democracies. If Europe’s progress now depends on turning democracy into a centralized elite bureaucracy which smirks at the power of the governed and refuses to accept democratic votes in referenda -- the cynical joke among EU residents is that the EU makes them vote until they give the "right" answer -- then why support an EU at all? The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (French Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen), passed by France's National Constituent Assembly in August 1789, is a fundamental document of the French Revolution and in the history of human and civil rights. The Declaration was directly influenced by Thomas Jefferson, working with General Lafayette, who introduced it. Influenced also by the doctrine of "natural right," the rights of man are held to be universal : valid at all times and in every place, pertaining to human nature itself. It became the basis for the French nation of free individuals protected equally by law. It is included in the preamble of the constitutions of both the Fourth French Republic (1946) and Fifth Republic (1958) and is still cherished by French citizens. The Declaration was a core statement of the values of the French revolution and had a major impact on the development of liberty and democracy in Europe and worldwide. The Declaration, together with the American Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, inspired the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The French Declaration says : "Society has the right to call for an account of its administration by every public agent. Any society in which the guarantee of the right is not secured, or the separation of powers not determined, has no constitution at all." Juncker, Merkel and Lagarde, who is French, would do well to memorize this excerpt. The French, Spanish and Italian people, and some of their growing political parties, look at Britain doing better than Eurozone countries because they do not have the Euro and so control their own finances and fiscal policies -- their own destiny. Weaker Eurozone countries feel a loss of sovereignty and an entrapment in a gigantic, unelected Brussels bureaucracy of elitists and politicians appointed by each country so as to "kick them upstairs" to the EU to represent the views of a particular political party at home. Unless the EU comes to terms with this, not only the Euro but the EU itself could collapse. It will be a pyrrhic victory for Merkel, Juncker and Co. to beat up on Greece and force it to its knees, if in doing so, they sow the seeds of a generalized insurrection within the European Union.