The two-thirds society is a European reality

Besides the irrational and degrading (for both givers and takers) "collective guilt - collective punishment" treatment the EU has reserved for Greeks, one must also try to see the broader picture. The so called Economic and Monetary Union has so far failed not only the periphery (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland...) but also many people in most other countries. The percentage of citizens living at or bellow the poverty level has more than doubled even in “economic miracle” Germany, since the introduction of the euro. Real unemployment in Europe is double the official one, unless one is ready to except as “success” the fact that millions of people are working even full time for wages that keep them well under the poverty level.

Greece has just had the bad luck to be the weakest ring in the chain. It was the first to break under the stress of the Lehman fiasco and Greek governments were the willing collaborators to the -mainly German and French dominated- banking system, in its race to extract what little liquidity was left in the Greek economy.

Decades of incompetent or/and corrupt governments have made sure that there was no resilience in the Greek economy. No production, no competition, no trust in the state and no willingness to share the pain in dire times. Whoever had some serious money (often undeclared and non-taxed income or even bribes from the “good old days”) has long ago stashed it in Swiss, German, French, British, Dutch or other banks or in offshore centres.

The EMU and globalization works fine for banks and large companies which can afford to hire "tax advisers" to guide them in avoiding to pay taxes. And then the states have to both raise taxes for ordinary people and borrow from those who stopped contributing with taxation, in order to balance their budgets. As a consequence no country can properly deliver the basic political goods any more (defense and security, law and justice, health, education, infrastructure). This system makes citizens have less and less trust in the political institutions and degrades democracy to a useless parody. It prepares the ground for ever more oligarchic and authoritarian governments, voted by the first third of the people -those who still enjoy relative prosperity- and tolerated by the middle third under the threat of losing even subsistence level income. Before not long the last one third of Europeans will officially be the pariahs of the continent.