In the USA, it only took 8 years of cronyism and corruption to completely tank our economy and send people fleeing to protect themselves.
One wonders how Greece operated this long at all given the noxious mix of government and business.
With high corruption comes a level of cynicism that eventually corrodes the nation's well-being.
Though, for Greek conditions, perhaps the better US parallel is the post-Civil-War period: that was thorough and lasted for decades. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
The cynicism and the corryption has come back to bite its originators. The new underclass, in all its shapes and forms, isn't smiling. Really I can't emphasize strongly enough how different the composition of the violent crowd is from the usual anarchist mobs.
I also add that there is accumulating evidence that some of the protesters are on the police payroll. Stelios Kouloglou, a respected journalist and head of the independent online tvxs report that they saw young men with helmets, hoods and wrenches, chatting and mingling with the police outside a down-town district. There's a blurry cell-phone photo as evidence along with the eye-witness testimony here:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake
