Just The Numbers, Mam

By: Les Dunaway

As regular readers know, I’ve been less than optimistic about the prospects for recovery in the EU. I don’t believe that Greece, Portugal, Italy or, for that matter, France, will wean themselves from the socialist trough.

Sunday night, the most clueless of the clueless “mainstream media”, 60 Minutes, led with  An Imperfect Union: Europe’s debt crisis [story] . Steve Kroft deserves credit for, finally, reporting the situation in Europe to the millions of Americans who don’t read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times every morning.

With that said, it’s also necessary to point out the deliberate misleading of those Americans who, against all reason, accept information from 60 Minutes.

A few examples, with quotes [italics] from the report and my analysis:

• European finance ministers have spent most of the past year trying to find a way to save Greece and keep the Eurozone intact.
  Actually, they’ve spent the past year finding a way to borrow money and kick the can down the road. They’ve avoided even discussing the social and cultural issues which led to this situation and which will be corrected only by a true Great Depression for, at least, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy. Those of you who have or remember family members who lived through the 1929-1939 era, know that they understand that you can’t spend money that you haven’t earned and that new clothes, restaurant meals, … are not necessary to life. It’s likely that the US, Germany, Japan and China will end-up financing a Berlin Airlift-like humanitarian rescue of one or more Southern European countries
• Christine Lagarde: You know, it’s like when the tide goes away, you see those that do not have their swimming costume on. And that was the case in Europe.
  I couldn’t have said it better. However, I suggest reading the paragraphs just after this statement to see the degree to which no one is willing to talk about the elephant in the room – the fact that which was best summarized by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.
• With its huge industrial economy, its vast trade surpluses and balanced budgets, Germany is by far the most powerful country in Europe. And it reluctantly agreed to bailout what it considered to be its deadbeat relatives, but only up to a point, and only under certain conditions.In return for going along with the bailout, Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted that all euro members roll back their debt, and that severe austerity measures be imposed on Greece — requiring it to slash government spending, roll back pensions, lay off 150,000 public workers, reduce salaries by 20 percent, and raise taxes. All of this imposed on a country that had been in recession for the past five years.  
  This illustrates the death-spiral of socialism. Socialism doesn’t work! It can’t! And when it doesn’t it’s perpetrators resort to totalitarian measures to force the people to make it work, rather than admitting that the failure is structural – because that would require them to denounce their religion.
• Yanis Varoufakis: Greece is in its Great Depression. Greece is in a coma and it is getting deeper into that coma as one company, one firm, one shop shuts after the next.Yanis Varoufakis is an economist at the University of Athens who has advised the Greek government. He says the belt-tightening is stifling economies all over Europe and made the situation in Greece much worse. The Greek unemployment rate now stands at 21 percent, and the economy is shrinking at the rate of eight percent. There are bread lines in Athens, and in the central markets, more people are looking, than actually buying.
  The Grapes of Wrath, with a Greek accent.

As I began, Steve Kroft deserves credit for writing this story. I hope that he, or someone, will do the follow-up which could be titled The Rise and Fall of the European Union. It could be preceded by America – Dragged Down by the Crumbling EU.