A shadow government, working in secret
Nearly six months after the September slaughter, we learn that in the hours after the terrorist attacks, President George Bush «dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time longstanding plans to ensure survival of federal rule after catastrophic attack on the nation’s capital.» At the time, US intelligence services did not know whether Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network had somehow obtained a portable nuclear weapon, so a precaution dating from the Cold War threat of intercontinental missiles came into effect, reported The Washington Post, which broke the story. According to the paper, «the high-ranking officials representing their departments have begun rotating in and out of the assignment at one of two fortified locations along the East Coast.» And so, the classified «Continuity of Operations Plan» was leaked to the press to illustrate that the US government was prepared for the worst possible scenario, that the United States of America would continue to function even if it were hit by nuclear weapons that devastated the capital. That must be very comforting for the Americans. They must feel the security that the average Greek feels. We too know that if our government were knocked out with one terrible blow we would not feel the difference. In our case, though, it would be for two different reasons: First, the government does not seem to do very much that we would miss if it were to stop doing it; second, there has been a shadow government working away in secret anyhow. For years. This secret government – or, to be more precise, this parallel society – is made up of two very different groups of people. On the one hand are the few who put their shoulders to the wheel and work like slaves, out of some inner aberration that makes them indifferent to the indifference of those next to them, obsessed over the fact that someone has to get the job done. It is these few people who might keep a bloated monster like the civil service functioning, in a fashion. It is as if these people are deaf, and busy themselves keeping the boat upright while most of the crew vegetate, listening to the song of sirens reciting the privileges that are their right for just being born. In short, they are the Greek equivalent of the few hundred Americans running the country when everyone else is caught up in a nuclear holocaust. The other group in our midst are those who do all they can to live off the efforts of others. They do not obey the laws that mere mortals obey, they take short cuts, they cut queues. They do not pay taxes. A report commissioned by the International Monetary Fund and made public on Thursday found that 28.7 percent of all economic activity in Greece was unregistered and untaxed. This means that Greece has the biggest black economy among the 15 EU members. Among the 21 countries investigated, Switzerland had the smallest black market, with 8.6 percent of the economy under the table, followed closely by the United States with 8.7 percent. Greece’s black economy was, for the many years of stiff state regulation, both bad and good. The good part, as a former governor of the central bank once said in private, was that it was the healthiest sector of the Greek economy, able to react swiftly to developments. Now, in a climate of greater competition with Greece in the eurozone, with the tax authorities waging us wage slaves for more than we’re worth, it is these barons of the black economy who keep real estate and other values artificially high, who deprive state coffers of the money needed to build and maintain public facilities, who have the money and thereby the power to destroy the country and get their way on every occasion. These tax thieves are stealing the future and they are getting away with it, as they always have in Greece. Like the proverbial cockroach, they will survive even nuclear holocaust – in which case they will not be the parallel economy, they will be the only economy. They are already underground; we need have no fear that we will be left without an economy, without black marketeers. In all seriousness, though, we might have a parallel bureaucracy and a parallel economy, but, at the start of the 21st century, at least Greece is no longer plagued by the parakratos, the parallel state in which security forces with their own agenda could terrorize the population and even carry out extrajudicial killings. All that’s left now is their twin and polar opposite, the November 17 terrorist gang, which has anointed itself judge, jury and executioner in the same way the right-wing lunatics of the past did. A shadow, brutal judiciary. But in many ways we all act as if there is a parallel State in Greece – a parallel population in fact. This is the phantom nation that the Greeks blame most of their ills on (when they are not blaming the Americans, the English or the Turks). It is those others who steal the prime parking spot outside our apartments, who get in our way on the street and highway, who can’t find the right change at the checkout counter and keep us waiting, who keep us from being rich and famous as the fates had ordained when we were born. On a political level, the underground force is made up of those «dark interests» that cause mayhem in our political and economic life, which we mention whenever we are too scared or too lazy to put a real name on the problem, whenever we want to blame something or someone without looking too hard at ourselves. And that is how our government has been functioning lately. Inexplicably, while judicial investigations are being conducted into alleged corruption in business and public life, Prime Minister Costas Simitis has, over the last week, warned that the country’s political life was a «murky landscape» reminiscent of the time before a military coup. In Parliament, he accused the conservative New Democracy party of creating a «fascist» atmosphere in the country. When pressed to say who was threatening the political system, Simitis then declared that democracy had nothing to fear. It is as if aliens have taken over Simitis’s body since a year ago, when the cool, rational professor suddenly lost his nerve in the face of public protests at his government’s proposals for pension reform. The government was paralyzed from March until October, when an early congress of the ruling PASOK party was supposed to put an end to uncertainty. But September 11 and the global recession which had already started brought a new world crashing upon our heads, in which very little of what we took for granted is valid anymore – from security to business to pensions. It is a time of questioning, in which we seek security and new ideologies. Despite all this, we do not lose our nerve when our government looks shaky. It is as if we know that at difficult times there is a power that we cannot see that kicks in like an emergency generator and keeps things running. Slowly, we will move ahead. It is as if the end of the world has come. And gone.
