The Greek pantomime is now truly unbelievable

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about referendums. When you vote in a referendum, you don’t get a change of government. What that means is this:
if you vote contrary to the government’s wishes, It will be absolutely stumped by what to do next.

Its vision of how things should be rests on things being a particular way: voting yes to a treaty, voting no to an independent Scotland, or whatever. Vote the wrong way, and you either get another vote to correct your ways, or changes are brought in by back doors, and the populace goes away with its nose well and truly put out of joint.
Greek referendums are even more of a pantomime. In Greece, the government encourages you to take the daring, two-fingers to establishment course of action. The people obey.

What they don’t realise, whether through sheer defiance or dismally hopeless ignorance, is that the government is failing or refusing to deal with the consequences.

Everyone except Prime Minister Tsipras’s government could see it: Greece would have to leave the Euro if it rejected the bailout. There was no going back.

After the vote, I said that there were now 2 possibilities: Greece will leave, or European leaders will unwisely give in to the Greeks.

Although I think I’ve called this largely right so far, not even I thought the Greek government would be so staggeringly arrogant that, to avoid Grexit, it would put forward new proposals that effectively imposed even more austerity than before. The Greeks are going to get exactly what they rejected by popular vote, and more, from the buffoons that told them to vote this way and have now been totally caught out for the fakers they are. This government knew all along that, outside of the Euro, Greece’s prospects were bleak.

If you look at very successful devaluations over the years, you see strong opportunities for export to exploit. Argentina, for example, could count on exporting to neighbouring countries as a transition towards democratisation and market economics was taking place throughout Latin America.

Greece, with a bloated state, 26% unemployment and an economy that has shrank 25% in 5 years, simply didn’t have this good fortune to fall back on as it pulled itself up by its bootstraps.

So, with no intention of facing the consequences of the exit, it is clear Greece’s creditors held all the cards all along. Everyone bar the Germans are now saying nice things about Greece’s proposal. How can they be so charitable?

It is now clear that the government went along with this sham vote, simply hoping that the creditors would think they had more clout, and were less of an economic basket case than is actually the case, and they would soften towards Greece. This didn’t happen. Now the Greek government has finally realised that it can’t pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. Its generous creditors weren’t the mugs it thought they might be.
We all know it needs this bailout. It didn’t need this vote, predicated on the notion that there was a choice – a notion that was a complete lie. In the end, it is parliamentary procedure, not popular vote, that will make the judgement call that sticks.

It is from the ancient Greek language that we derive the word ‘hubris.’ It is from the modern Greek government, that we have seen the most extraordinarily misplaced, spectacular demonstration of it.