By Georgios Malouchos
Editors note: this article was first published by to Vima.gr here (in Greek) and is republished with permission. Translation by TPPI.
It is being carved up and sold: in short we are returning to the age of the British ‘Power’, sixty years after Karamanlis, after first spending eight years confronting the colonialist control of electricity production, connected the power plants and grids and created the state body which provided the foundation for reconstruction in Greece following the civil war.
Subsequently, of course, PASOK came. And that which Greeks remember about PPC is not all of the above, but the unionists who believed that through the electricity switch, they could control the rise and fall of governments. The national contribution of PPC was forgotten, replaced by the dictatorship of the unions and the gang which had turned it into its own feudal estate.
But all of this does not mean that its productive role in socioeconomic development can be written off. That was forgotten but cannot not be erased, particularly today when, unfortunately, we have fallen so very far. So far that businesses are closing, small and large, because it is impossible for them to cover the cost of energy!
The government is exploiting memories of the dictatorship of the unions, which are represented by PPC more than by any other state enterprise, and is proceeding once more in doing that which has been imposed upon it, even if it does not make any sense – in fact the opposite.
The government’s promises and ‘renegotiations’ have long since evaporated, and Samaras is effectively negating Karamanlis’s national accomplishment which today, in the situation in which the country finds itself, is unfortunately tragically relevant.
Indeed all of this is being ideologized. However without seriousness: of course the state needs to be shrunk. But not everywhere and not uncritically.
Not there where those who diminished it in the past, are now building it up again.
Not by saying that prices will fall, something that won’t happen – it has never happened anywhere – indeed quite the opposite.
Not with the false argument regarding the reduction of the debt which the ‘rescue’ programme has now rendered so onerous that the price of PPC is a drop in an ocean.
And of course not giving it there where all expect it to eventually end up: to the state-fed Greek ‘entrepreneurialism’, which is doing just fine, despite the phony talk of a model change which in no way has any basis in reality.
There is no logic to this privatization in particular – others, yes and indeed not a few. But not this one. It won’t help anything, but to the contrary, will harm the national interest in the medium term.
The only logic it has is that the small PPC accurately reflects the new reality in – now small – Greece.