"With the move towards appointed "technocrat" governments pushed...

"With the move towards appointed "technocrat" governments pushed onto Italy and Greece, I get the feeling that they're being set up for a social revolt. At least the PM's of two weeks ago were elected by the people and had some sort of legitimacy..."

Right on, CT. "Acting-Man" who lives in Germany and has been predicting the Italian crisis for a couple of yrs had this to say about it:

What we have just seen are two bloodless coups. They may have taken place within the bounds of legality, alas, both Papandreou's and Berlusconi's case are an attempt to circumvent messy democratic solutions for the simple reason that the eurocracy knows it would be in fairly big danger of seeing its power curtailed if such solutions (such as e.g. Papandreou's proposed referendum) were actually pursued.
Regarding the aim of rescuing the euro project, or at least the aim of delaying its demise, we would certainly agree that this course is the one most likely to succeed. Democracy is in many ways deficient, especially when it comes to the need to implement what are quite unpopular measures.
Alas, as we have often said, we are strongly opposed to the 'centralizers', 'tax harmonizers' and 'redistributionists' that today comprise this so-called 'technocracy' at the center of the EU. As we noted in a debate with friends yesterday:

"One keeps hearing demands for more centralization – tax 'harmonization', which is new-speak for 'let's impose the highest possible taxes everywhere', more 'redistribution', and above all, 'more regulation', especially of the evil financial markets where all sorts of bad things are happening to sovereign bonds nowadays.
Naturally, fractional reserve banking and the inflationary boom-bust sequences it has brought forth doesn't even rate a mention - since it has also enabled the growth of this huge statist moloch the EU and many of its member nations have become.
What is really needed is some introspection and remembering what the EU was originally about. Its founders wanted to restore 19th century liberalism to Europe – free trade and freedom of movement for people and capital within Europe. They emphatically did not want to erect some sort of socialist super-state. They wanted to bring back to Europe what the mad socialist and fascist ideologues of the 20th century had destroyed. Now we have a bureaucratic monster in Brussels that has produced nearly 300,000 new regulations over the past decade, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of pages of 'administrative law' and other regulations the member states themselves produce every year. It is a miracle we still have a functioning civilization. If we want the problems to be solved, the most important question should be: what is needed to enable the production of new wealth? What kind of environment will be most conducive to reviving the entrepreneurial spirit? It should be simple enough, but it would of course threaten a great many vested interests."

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=11560#more-11560