It is a bit off the radar screens of the mainstream media right now but life in Greece grows ever more miserable. Nothing works. The poor are getting poorer and hope has just gone. But of course PM Alex Tspiras, a man reminiscent of Tony Blair in all the worst ways, will accept none of the blame.
I linked to a report earlier on how folks now cannot even afford bread and how Greeks are responding. This is not just in Athens but across the land. Thanks to "reforms" implemented by Tspiras at the behest of the EU and IMF, pensioners must now live on 9 Euro a day. Despite the EU bodge agreed with Turkey which saw our isolamofascist neighbours pick up a 6 billion Euro bribe, economic refugees still arrive on Greek shores daily and Greece must foot the bill.
Is there any sign of the supply side reforms we were promised which might create real jobs in Greece? Precious little. The Mrs and I learned today of yet another bureaucratic delay stopping us from starting to rebuild the Greek Hovel. It is a pointless delay caused by one of the daft bureacrats on the state payroll trying to justify his job and it may last for months and months. We are now 18 months into seeking planning permission and there is no end in sight.
Give us that permission and 240,000 Euros will be injected into the Greek economy at once creating jobs for several men who currently stand idle. Once the hovel complex is rebuilt there will be more visitors going to Greece, more cash into the economy. But one of the 2.5 million jobsworths paid by the Greek State is again delaying matters. We do not know who it will just stay that way and Tspiras has done nothing to deal with these sort of issues.
And so the cleverer and more ambitious young folk continue to leave. The population gets older and poorer and hungrier.
Last year the Hellenic Republic voted Oxi!, No!, to all of this. We voted no to the EU imposed austerity. It was Tsipras who lead the Oxi! campaign but then went and agreed to more austerity from the EU. It was Tsipras who betrayed Greece not the EU. The EU just screwed the Greek people but it was upfront about saying that it would do just that. It did not lie. It betrayed no-one.
Alex said the other day: "I would say that what is creating conditions of delay in regaining trust of markets and investors ... is the constant clash and disagreement between the IMF and European institutions."
No Alex, what is needed is quite simple. Greece should leave the Euro and go back to the drachma. that would effectively get rid of the debt in that Greece could repay in worthless new drachmas from the printing presses. Tough luck banksters but that will be your problem not ours.
As the drachma collapses in value, as it surely will, there will be a tourism boom and real inward investment and that will allow Tsipras the leg room to fire hundreds of thousands of the jobsworths on the state payroll and to let the private sector flourish.
Tsipras could have done that, with a mandate from the Greek people, last year. But the odious little man rather enjoys hob nobbing with other PMs and Presidents as an equal within the EU. Tsipras betrayed Greece and put himself first. He will go down in history as a Traitor for that but there is still time for him to change the way he is viewed, one last push for Grexit and he could be a hero.
But, sadly for Greece, the odious Blair clone is unlikely to go down that path. Instead it is easier to blame others as het gets on a jet plane for another summit and more high jinks on the World stage.