by Richard Cottrell
Contributing writer

June 18, 2012

from EndTheLie Website

 

 

 

Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative).

His new book Gladio - NATO’s Dagger At The Heart Of Europe is now available from Progressive Press.

 

 

 


 

Harried and bullied by the globalist media, the Wall Street barons and combined firepower of the EU and the IMF, Greeks have just handed the poisoned chalice back to the same crowd of scallywags and cronies who caused the country so much misery in 40 years of misrule since the fall of the military junta in 1974.

Unbelievable as it may seem from the perspective of anyone who closely studies events in that deeply troubled land, it seems likely that a combination of New Democracy (notional right) and Pasok (even more notionally left) will take up the reins of power once again.

The result will be yet another round of plunder by an institutionalized kleptocracy which has grown fat and waxy while Greeks themselves have rarely known stability or a decent standard of living that wasn’t bought with crazy economics and funny money.

Okay, those are the headlines as the smug Antonis Samaras, leader of ‘New’ Democracy, heads back to the trough with a horrible self-satisfied look on his pink snout.

 

But is it really quite that simple? I think not, because the election as conducted was patently far from above board.

I have strong suspicions that the result was gerrymandered with the aid of every trick in the book to fix the ‘correct’ result that will satisfy the international money mafia.

Unfortunately, the Greek electoral system positively encourages dirty tricks at the ballot box. In order to permanently institutionalize turn and turn-about rule by the two major parties, they jointly cooked the constitution so that whichever of them topped the poll would always earn a bonus reward of fifty seats.

Yes that’s a nice top-up of obedient faceless cronies who get to run the country having never, effectively, won the endorsement of anybody or anything except the bigwigs of the heavily entrenched system.

Such an arrangement excludes the prospects of new non-establishment forces breaking into what is effectively a private one-ring circus. You can hear the sighs of relief from Wall Street to Washington and all stations in between, but most prominently Frankfurt and Brussels, now that the fix has triumphed on an impressive scale once again.

Now to the math behind this globalist victory. The result as declared places a wafer thin 2.77% margin between the Samaras gang and the Syriza left coalition headed by the icon-breaker Alexis Tsipras, which I have previously written about.

In terms of opinion polls this is inside the usual 3% margin of error. In terms of direct voting, it’s presented as a near-run thing, whereas the correct way to interpret the narrow victory of the grim reaper Samaras and his friends is to appreciate how constructively and finely fudged that result actually is.

In brief, the percentage of votes that get mislaid, or overall are lost on the way to the counting tables needs to be quite small to throw the result. Greece uses a system of proportional representation (inexplicable to Americans, but commonplace everywhere in Europe) which allows voters to mark their preferences with a cross (up to five per ballot paper, depending on the size of the constituency) selected from a list of candidates.

This, laughingly, is called the ‘reinforced’ proportional representation system because it is ‘reinforced’ by the 50-seat bonanza the party with the most votes receives.

This is a great playground for corruption, especially when you consider that the counting and final calculations are performed inside the Interior Ministry.

I wonder how many of those civil servants on the government payroll were happy to go along with a victory by the arch left wing camp. Not many, I dare hazard, even if some independent electoral commission is supposed to be the overall umpire.

The cross-allocation of preferences so that the chaff (the unelectable) are sorted from the wheat (the electable candidates) is a very complicated affair anywhere this type of system (and there are many variants by the way) is employed. Quite small manipulations of the preference votes produce significant changes in candidates finally elected.

In the earlier May election, the difference between New Democracy and Syriza was no more than a whisker close to 131,000 votes. The margin between the two brand leaders, so to speak, was 3.7%. From the provisional figures that we have seen so far, the margin has shrunk to 2.77%, and yet strangely the winning margin miraculously expanded by a mere 40,000 votes in the space of six weeks.

I dug out the final opinion poll forecasts published before the official shutdown, two weeks before the elections. Here’s another odd thing: broadly speaking, support for New Democracy and Syriza appeared to be declining in equal proportions, from 27% down to a new floor of 20%.

Yet curiously neither of these predictions seemed to bear out the actual trends in play. Both major parties piled on 10%. Clearly there was some smart tweaking here.

Roughly speaking, New Democracy and Syriza speak for about 3.4 million voters in Greece. Yet thanks to the grand bonus pile up, New Democracy bags 129 seats in the Vouli (the state parliament) while Syriza, which scored statistically close to the same tally of votes won a measly tally of 72.

Using an image borrowed from Potterland, we recall the exciting wizard broomstick game of Quidditch. Whoever grabs the ‘golden snitch’ wins the game for his team. The golden snitch in Greece is the 50-seat bonus, therefore the sole aim of the establishment system has been to wall that massive margin off from Alexis Tsipras and his merry band at all costs.

Instead of flopping, the two main challengers gained almost exactly 10% each. So, were the pollsters fawning to the system by playing with expectations? Difficult to say, as always, but large gyrations on this scale are definitely remarkable, very peculiar and miles outside the accepted usual margin of error range.

I am dredging my memory to come up with a comparable shift in any contemporary election elsewhere and so far I can discover nothing else quite as epic on the Richter scale.

So much for the softball, now the hardball.

Already reports are coming out of Athens that speak of ballot boxes from left-leaning districts of the city the contents of which either disappeared, or in the case of one specific report, were burned. This happened in the neighborhood of Exarchia, a famous nest of radical sympathizers near the city center.

In the very familiar story of urban mercenaries responsible for the former reign of terror in Greece, lasting for three decades, masked motorcyclists suddenly descended on the local polling station, attacked two police guards and torched a box of votes before speeding off. Such attacks turned out in the Greek years of lead to mask terrorist acts by agents of the state.

Never mind the theatrics. I suspect the real fun went on with off-screen massaging the preference votes in pursuit of that fabulous glittering snitch.

As it is, 55% of Greeks voted against the globalist rape of their country, yet they are now landed with a kowtowing government which intends to roll over on its back and purr.

How Orwellian is that? Greeks are back, in a marvelous phrase of George Orwell’s, to the ‘ordinary dirtiness of politics,’ to which I might add the sheer fakery of the debased electoral system. Vote for this and get something else altogether.

When the EU smash-and-grab troika gathers later this month, expect the rollout of Bailout Bazooka Mark III. The masters of the universe will stretch the repayment elastic 3 to 5 years but demand deeper cuts in public spending over the same period. Samaras the Golden Snitcher will return to the sullen masses of Greece and present the New Deal as a miracle from the gods, a full vindication of his campaign promises.

In fact Greece will be sold further down the river of debt and grinding social impoverishment. To offer but one example, Greek hospitals have run out of all main necessities including basic surgical equipment, bandages, and syringes. Doctors and nurses are struggling to keep their patients succored and alive on a war zone basis. There is no money to pay for imported medicines.

One reason is that Samaras and his pals in the out-going coalition looted state hospital budgets to ward off the squawking vultures of Wall Street. They dished out the same treatment to the universities and every state-owned company.

What is so utterly sickening is to hear organs like,

  • the BBC

  • the Financial Times

  • the Wall Street Journal

  • Der Spiegel,

...and all the hordes of media wolves, howling at the Greeks throughout the recent election campaigns, to grin and bear it, and swallow the medicine.

Unfortunately, as the grim plight of the hospitals demonstrates, there is practically none of the genuine article to go around.

The global corporate media presented the Greek electorate - as if they had any rights to do so - with an epic Manichean struggle between the forces of light and dark, good and evil, a preposterous and absurdly distorted cartoon of the realities.

I stand with Paul Krugman on this. Greece is being sacrificed on the altar of an artificial currency that doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving.

As the Nobel prized winning economist observes, far from lazy southern work skimpers, Greeks work longer hours for much lower wages than Angela Merkel’s pampered work-shy Germans.

It will all end badly. As soon as Greeks realize they have been cheated once again, there will be serious trouble on the streets. I suspect that many, even a majority, understand this but desperately hope that somehow their pitiless persecutors will relent before the nightmare scenario actually happens.

They will not. It may be quite fantastic, but Merkel does not seem to give a plump worstel that Greece is now openly described as German colony.

Her grip on economics is famously feeble, a characteristic of her government. She has only one objective in mind, which is to prevent the Fatherland from dumping the euro in the great sewage ditch known as the Rhine.

That is indeed destined to be euro’s watery fate, though probably not before we once again hear the crump of army boots and the squeaking grind of tank tracks down the thoroughfares of Athens.
 

 


UPDATE

Since filing this report I was directed to an extremely interesting site which deals with vote rigging.

 

Rather than make a summary I suggest that readers check it out here. There they will find an expert analysis of voter manipulation which call into doubt for example, the recent recall election in Wisconsin, among other examples.

The author starts with these sentiments:

“If vote-rigging prospers, none may call it vote-rigging. It simply becomes the new norm.”

The writer’s point is basically the same as mine: where there are wild variations outside arithmetical expectations, then, as Sherlock Holmes would say, “something is afoot.”

The author of the piece, Bob Fitrakis, is basically suggesting that all elections in the US are fraudulent, so we have no reason to believe that others in foreign countries should be any exception. Quite...