If things develops like this, Twank will be happy.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

The Government is passing a new social security law (pretty much screwing everybody, but especially working mothers) and a new labor law. The latter is really infuriating because it clearly has nothing to do with anything fiscal, and noone is even trying to defend it on rational grounds (other than marketista sloganeering), just that it was a term imposed by the "troika" (ECB, Comission, INF) in the relevant Memorandum. The government threatened yesterday to impose a freeze on private-sector wages for the next three years if no agreement is reached, exactly at the moment employers and unions were discussing the new collective agreement (which will be severely weakened anyway if the new measures are imposed), a signal to employers to not negotiate, obviously. As I said no rational arguments are presented for these moves apart from the "memorandum" and the treat of not receiving the second installment of the "loan".
The whole memorandum is the unilateral imposition of neoliberal shock treatment, dismantling what little there is of social protections and social welfare in colonial fashion. James Galbraith in Le Monde Diplomatique, states that this dismantling was insisted upon explicitly by the IMF this past January.
Interestingly small and medium business owners seem to be on the workers side as far as the pensions are concerned and not very eager to impose wage restrictions, probably because they know that if consumer purchasing power plummets they are done for as well.

Almost everybody expects things to become really difficult for the government and violent come autumn. Me, if I were a betting person I would give decent odds to the parliament building being burned down at least once before Christmas 2011, and substantial odds to the army being called in to quell the unrest. I also don't rule out a sort of "civilian coup" where the government declares a state of emergency especially if polls start showing a possible loss for the governing Socialists (right now they are showing historical abstention / blank vote levels approaching 40%) and calls on assorted neolib business, political and academic "personalities" to form an "emergency cabinet".

The only thing that might stop this unrest is despair. The mood in Athens is one of utter lack of hope and prospects. This can turn either to anger or passivity unless a viable alternative is offered.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

But aren't there any attempts at tax increases, particularly on taxes that would fall more heavily on wealthier individuals?  (Arguably, state salary cuts are such a tax,

State employees in Europe are usually under-remunerated relative to their qualifications (depending a bit on which proxies you use to estimate qualification). The implicit understanding is that they have greater job security and more secure salary progression than in the private sector.

If that understanding is broken on the employer side... well, that won't necessarily be cheap.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

"This is extremely dangerous. This is 1931, we're heading back to the 1930s, with the Great Depression and we ended up with militarist dictatorship," the general secretary of the European Trades Union Congress (ETUC) said in an interview with EUobserver. "I'm not saying we're there yet, but it's potentially very serious, not just economically, but politically as well."

Mr. Monks reported that Mr. Barroso has similar concerns, but based on diametrically opposed reasoning. He said the commission chief believes the austerity packages will save Europe from returning to the darkest days of the last century rather than precipitating the fall.

"I had a discussion with Barroso last Friday about what can be done for Greece, Spain, Portugal and the rest and his message was blunt: 'Look, if they do not carry out these austerity packages, these countries could virtually disappear in the way that we know them as democracies. They've got no choice, this is it'."