Approximately twenty-four hours after Barack Obama was reelected to the presidency and 5,500 miles away from his campaign headquarters in Chicago, the Greek parliament narrowly (153 to 128) approved a new set of “austerity” measures, including raising the retirement age from sixty-five to sixty-seven, in order to qualify for yet another European—which is to say, German—bailout, this one worth about $40 billion. According to The New York Times, the Prime Minister of the moment, the Amherst- and Harvard-educated Antonis Samaras, promised that these would be “the last” of the budget cuts, and that future “adjustments” would come from rooting out what his American counterparts used to call “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Pull the other one, Antonis! The Times reporters Rachel Donadio and Liz Alderman dryly noted that he is “the third prime minister to promise the ‘last cuts’ since Greece asked for a foreign bailout in 2010.” No one outside the shaky Greek coalition government—or inside it either, I’ll bet—believes that these are the last cuts or that this will be the last bailout, but future ones are bound to be similarly advertised as part of the necessary fiction that they can fix what can’t be fixed.

Something else that “few believe,” at least according to the Misses Donadio and Alderman, is “that the measures will help improve the country’s economic health.” Over on the Times’s editorial page, they couldn’t agree more with their reporters’ instant analysis. “The fact is, just about everything in this austerity