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"The operation was a huge success. Too bad the patient died." If it wasn't so serious, it would be a good giggle akin to that old joke. We are referring to the OGB movement. You've all heard of OWS, the Occupy Wall Street movement. Well, even though Germany backed off from the truly insane idea of having a budget overseer resident in Athens, about the same effective function is being demanded by the lenders controlling the funds for the Greek Debt Dilemma bailout.
We refer to this as the Occupy Greek Budget movement, or OGB. If there was any real institutional cultural memory (of which we often lament the lack), this is the last thing the Germans should have found acceptable. How quickly they forget. Well, maybe not so quickly. However, they obviously are failing to consider how they felt when French troops occupied Germany’s Ruhr valley after World War I (a good example of why forced repayment doesn’t work) to co-opt the profits from German industrial output because… they could not keep up with their payments.
In that instance it was of course war reparations, whereas current circumstances are more so a case of Greek malfeasance. That said, draconian cures do not often create sustainable solutions to the worst sort of problems. It calls for more creativity than that. And for all the Greek political class is significantly responsible for the problems now foisted on the general population, perhaps the bitterness of the Greek people will indeed end up driving a solution to the problem. There is one radical alternative nobody in Greece seems to have worked out just yet…
