I had to sit through a painstakingly boring municipality meeting today. Every journalist occasionally does. Watching these "leaders" side-track facts, attack each other, confuse themselves, play drama on stage etc. makes you wonder why the hell the Greeks ever invented democracy. Maybe it was supposed to be a theater show. Here's some of the gold of what I witnessed today, which I'm supposed to write a news article about before midnight.

7 million in debt

Young woman from the Justice-Socialist Party, clearly upset: Lennart, X company now reveals it had 7 million in debts when we bought it. I mentioned this during our last meeting but you consequently told me I was fantasizing and called me all sorts of foul names. Why did you lie to us?

Lennart, a true Social Democratic patriarch, takes the stage: I completely trusted the figures I'd received from the economic department, which didn't address this figure as debt.

Socialist: Don't sneak around the facts Lennart, you know you lied to us. And you called me filthy names and told me I was dreaming. Again, I ask, why did you lie to us when you knew the facts?

Social Democrat: You are standing here and basically claiming the economic department lied. Are you ready to stand by that comment?

Socialist and Social Democrat argue for 5 minutes, then are forced to give it a rest.

Public transport

Man from the Green Party takes the stage: We've received complaints from people saying they don't have the proper credit card or cannot make the SMS payments to work on buses. We need to look at this, otherwise people might choose to take the car instead of public transport.

Social Democrat, again, irritated: We've increased the number of people choosing public transport by 20 % with this system. We will not, I repeat, we will not use cash machines anymore. This has already been decided.

Greenist: But if people have problems with credit cards and SMS payments, this system may hurt the public transport business.

Social Democrat: WE WILL NOT INSTALL CASH MACHINES AGAIN.

Greenist realizes his issue was a non-issue, backs down.

Hidden buffers

Man from Justice-Socialist Party: The municipality has over a 10-year-period put away X sum of money for investments, yet only used about 30 % of that money. This is money that should be used for government programs to combat unemployment, gender inequality and poverty. Can one correctly address this sum as a hidden buffer?

Woman from the Folk Party: This is ridiculous, there is no hidden buffer anywhere, all money is addressed carefully in the annual report. If anything, we should be happy we didn't spend all that money--that way we don't have to borrow.

Socialist: Let me repeat again. Money that is put away for investments, yet are not used, and if this becomes a decade-long pattern, is it not right to call this a hidden buffer?

Social Democrat: Now we know why all Communist economies to date have crashed.

Quiet laughs can be heard throughout the all.

Another Socialist: This is typical of you Lennart, whenever you lack arguments, you attack the person. I hope everyone in this room, including the audience, is taking note of this.

The meeting is supposed to take lunch at 12 but stretches on for almost 30 minutes more thanks to the Socialists not giving the issue a break, and basically everyone from liberals to Social Democrats insisting that it's a phony issue to begin with.

Some people say that democracy works on local but not government level. I think we've cleared out this misconception. Obviously there's at least as much incompetence, drama and false pride going on in the municipality halls as at regional and national level. We're paying these people large sums of money each month to talk gibberish in this fashion.

I wonder how much we'd achieve if we removed all of them and replaced them with one expert within each field under a homogeneous political philosophy. It cannot possibly get worse.