GREXIT How much is the Greeks' vote worth

Who benefits from the Greeks' vote on Sunday and how? Who gains what? Perhaps it wouldn't be meaningless to even ask ourselves who wins or who loses. In this game with a lot of money at stake (hundreds of billions) and cheap politics, the separation between the two areas, economics and politics, seems to have been abolished. In reality, nobody and nothing can erase it, and those who play, fraudulently crossing over from one realm to the next, in hopes that they will manage to disappear, are just selling illusions.

Let's enter the realm of economics first. Sunday's vote of the Greeks isn't going to bring in even one Euro in the treasury of the country, whose debts are so big, compared to the revenues it can muster, that not even the visible part of the debt iceberg can be managed using "its own resources". A fact that even the Greek government has acknowledged a long time ago, and caused it to feverishly look for solutions that agree with their creditors. The ideas being thrown around, just for the sake of speculation, such as the "minting" of a new currency by Greece, only show the lack of judgment, in a press for which moderation, any kind of moderation, has long been abolished. Write something, boys, just write, anything, but make sure it's a "shocker"! So, what? If the authorities in Athens were to print different paper money tomorrow, what value does anyone think they would have? Or, to put it differently, who do you think would decide their value? Does anyone think that Greece's debt would be lower, or easier to repay, if it were denominated in "neo-drachma", instead of Euros and dollars?

Does anyone want to go into the scenario where a piece of bread will cost 100 million in the morning, and by evening it will get to 3 billion of ... whatever you want to call the new Greek currency? True, other countries have gone through that as well, but the end result is the same: all the cuts from the population's revenues, on the back of which the "necessary adjustments" have been done simply through the quick, or ultra-accelerated devaluation of the currency in circulation! Did Sunday's vote get the country closer to an arrangement that would simultaneously allow it to repay its foreign debt while also maintaining the population's income standards like they used to be prior to the beginning of the crisis? The fact that the IMF says that it is ready to help, if it is asked to (nota bene!!), and the EU smiles photogenically saying "we await new proposals from Greece" means nothing in terms of cashflow. That is artificially frozen by the refusal or the inability to repay the due installment of the Greek debt, to the IMF, which is why the Greek banks have not been and will not be opened. Otherwise, the default would be signed by the very depositors scrambling to take out their meager savings from their bank accounts; in other words, pretty much everything the banks still have, aside from what comes in through the international lending mechanisms, meaning zero, for now!!! Meanwhile, the fragile as is economy of the country shakes like jelly and is coming apart at its seams. Tourism is collapsing and with it, the only source of income for a good chunk of the active population. The other part consists of employees in the public sector, one that doesn't really have money to pay salaries, pensions, and current living expenses, such as medical ones, or the ones that support the vital systems of urban life. The "payment balance" of Sunday's vote thus only has hopes on the positive side, and on the negative side, millions of Euros being lost everyday.

In the political realm, the Greek government members have struggled hard to promote the idea that Sunday's vote is one that strengthens democracy, and even more than that, it has dealt a blow to the "autocracies" represented by "creditors" and by the "EU machinery". A blow meant to remind them all the purpose and the power of democracy and at the same time, to save "Greece's honor", showing to anyone who wants to look that you can't push upon a nation just anything, simply because it owes you money!!! the second idea being arduously promoted by the organizers of Sunday's referendum is that the outcome of the people's vote, the rejection of the latest financing package proposed to Greece to continue its financing, strengthens the negotiating position of the government in Athens, in its confrontation with its creditors. The attempt of the Tsipras government to build the propagandistic image of a "neo-Armageddon", in which Greece, like at Thermopylae, is defending with the chests of the 300 soldiers of the new Leonidas the values of democracy against the assault of the barbaric hordes of the Xerxesian empire of the European non-democracies is a ridiculous fraud. A cheap charade! How much this charade was worth to other people can be inferred from former finance minister Varoufakis' resignation, who became a persona non-grata for his European partners, as well as with his own citizens, whom he has deceived as much as he could with "miracle solutions" and "victorious assaults on the dark forces of the creditors".

Just like in the case of the economic game, in the political one, the balance sheet for Greece is negative, after the referendum. The costs are a lot higher than the winnings. If anybody wants to write it off as a victory, it is a Pyrrhic one. All that Greece can expect from the situation created after the referendum is for the bitter and toxic pills of the long treatment it will be subjected to, in order to pay off its debts, to be wrapped in shinier foil and maybe for the active ingredients to be buffered with some measures that will save the "face" of the members of the Athens government, regardless of whom they may be, now or a few months from now.

In short, Sunday's referendum isn't worth a dime for Greeks, even though it has managed to sell cheap illusions to some!