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Welcome, 77 artists, 40 different points of Attica welcomes you by singing Erotokritos an epic romance written at 1713 by Vitsentzos Kornaros

Monday, April 28, 2014

Any talk of economic recovery is pure fiction

We're just importing more people from crisis-hit southern Europe into low-paying jobs or precarious underpaid self-employment

Down is up. Sick is healthy. The RMS Titanic is seaworthy. Topsy-turvy logic is a speciality of the austerity brigade, and here they come dishing up a third helping. First, in 2010-11, they pledged that making historic cuts amid a global slump would definitely, absolutely secure a strong recovery. Then things went predictably belly-up, forcing Cameron and Osborne to dump their deficit-reduction plans and the eurocrats to make more bailouts. Yet these reversals were, naturally, "sticking to the course". Now things don't look quite as awful as they did a couple of years ago and this somehow gets chalked up as a miraculous rebound.

Only a prude would expect their politicians not to exaggerate. But getting to such upside-down conclusions requires more than that: it requires fictionalising and even lying. Let's have a look at two examples from the past few days, one in Britain the other in Greece.

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READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com