Freedom in Europe Is Eroding From the Edges, Financed by the Banks
JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN
30 MAY 2012
“Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy.”
Slavoj Žižek
“Corruption is a tree, whose branches are of an immeasurable length: they spread everywhere; and the dew that drops from thence hath infected some chairs and stools of authority.”
Beaumont and Fletcher, The Honest Man’s Fortune
This is a fascinating perspective on the financial situation in Europe from Slavoj Žižek which appeared in a recent edition of the London Review of Books. It reads like a modern variation of an age old script with dollars and bankers replacing bullets and shock troops, at least for now.
The role of Goldman Sachs and some of the other banks, with their attendant politicians who are in many cases now their direct representatives in the erosion of freedom in Europe, is fascinating to watch, in the manner of a train wreck in slow motion.
The monied interests are putting forward their own agendas and candidates while maintaining the charade of popular government, goose-stepping to the tune of financial expediency and the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ that helped to spawn the cult of the Übermensch at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The counter example is Iceland, and at an earlier period Sweden, which took a different course of action with their banks, direct confrontation and resolution of crony capitalism and the debt trap, rather than accomodation and appeasement.
The US and UK are little better off, having established a temporary equilibrium in which the monied interests are consolidating their gains. How else can one explain the lack of investigations and prosecutions of financial frauds, that become increasingly blatant and brazen, while the national economy continues to stagnate under the burden of crony capitalism and the most powerful political agenda is more tax cuts and sinecures for the super rich? And freedom continues to be assaulted and deconstructed in the name of the endless war on terror.
At some point the people will make a stand, and the Banks will make them an offer which they think that they cannot refuse. This is playing out now in Greece, and is coming to a country near you.
London Review of Books
Save us from the saviours
The Rest…HERE
