Greece

[Section_31]

Sticking it to the man. Looks like they're gonna win. Fuck you Bilderbergs, pass the haloumi.

[JagSquared]

I feel for the Greeks they seem to have been shafted royally by the bigger nations.

 

One of the things that made me laugh, I heard someone say that they were lazy as they do less hours work in Greece. Fuck that noise who wants to work 50hr weeks to be able to afford to go on holiday to places they live?

 

I'd love to have a Mediterranean style life, work to live not live to work. We're the stupid ones.

[Section_31]

I feel for the Greeks they seem to have been shafted royally by the bigger nations.

 

One of the things that made me laugh, I heard someone say that they were lazy as they do less hours work in Greece. Fuck that noise who wants to work 50hr weeks to be able to afford to go on holiday to places they live?

 

I'd love to have a Mediterranean style life, work to live not live to work. We're the stupid ones.

 

Without doubt. The southern nations have suffered en mass character assassination. Daily Mail stories about how people in Greece get paid 50 grand a year to grow olives for 45 minutes a week etc. 

 

Neo liberal shock doctrine is all this has all been about, lets rampage around the planet turning everywhere into New Orleans under the guise of a benevolent money lending exercise. 

[Rico1304]

Like this one?

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/24/greece-collecting-revenue-tax-evasion

[Bjornebye]

The big chippy in Prescot, when it was run by greeks..... Wow. Best chippy around back then. Only one that came close was the cronton fish bar.

[Rico1304]

Or this one http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/09/tax-evasion-greece

[Section_31]

Good Pilger piece from 2010. 

 

http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-heresy-of-the-greeks-offers-hope

 

 

 

 

What makes Greece different is that within its living memory is invasion, foreign occupation, betrayal by the West, military dictatorship and popular resistance. Ordinary people are not cowed by the corrupt corporatism that dominates the European Union. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the present Pasok (Labour) government of George Papandreou, was described by sociologist Jean Ziegler as “a machine for systematic pillaging the country’s resources”.

The machine had infamous friends. The US Federal reserve Board is investigating the role of Goldman Sachs and other American hedge fund operators which gambled on the bankruptcy of Greece as public assets were sold off and its tax-evading rich deposited 360 billion euros in Swiss banks. The largest Greek ship-owners transferred their companies abroad. This haemorrhage of capital continues with the approval of the European central banks and governments.

At 11 per cent, Greece’s deficit is no higher than America’s. However, when the Papandreou government tried to borrow on the international capital market, it was effectively blocked by the American corporate ratings agencies, which “downgraded” Greece to “junk”. These same agencies gave triple-A ratings to billions of dollars in so-called sub-prime mortgage securities and so precipitated the economic collapse in 2008.

What has happened in Greece is theft on an epic, though not unfamiliar scale. In Britain, the “rescue” of banks like Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland has cost billions of pounds. Thanks to the former prime minister, Gordon Brown, and his passion for the avaricious instincts of the City of London, these gifts of public money were unconditional, and the bankers have continued to pay each other the booty they call bonuses. Under Britain’s political monoculture, they can do as they wish. In the United States, the situation is even more remarkable, reports investigative journalist David DeGraw, “[as the principal Wall Street banks] that destroyed the economy pay zero in taxes and get $33 billion in refunds”.

In Greece, as in America and Britain, the ordinary people have been told they must repay the debts of the rich and powerful who incurred the debts. Jobs, pensions and public services are to be slashed and burned, with privateers in charge. For the European Union and the IMF, the opportunity presents to “change the culture” and dismantle the social welfare of Greece, just as the IMF and the World Bank have “structurally adjusted” (impoverished and controlled) countries across the developing world.

Greece is hated for the same reason Yugoslavia had to be physically destroyed behind a pretence of protecting the people of Kosovo. Most Greeks are employed by the state, and the young and the unions comprise a popular alliance that has not been pacified; the colonels’ tanks on the campus of Athens University remain a political spectre. Such resistance is anathema to Europe’s central bankers and regarded as an obstruction to German capital’s need to capture markets in the aftermath of Germany’s troubled reunification.

In Britain, such has been the 30-year propaganda of an extreme economic theory known first as monetarism then as neo-liberalism, that the new prime minister can, like his predecessor, describe his demands that ordinary people pay the debts of crooks as “fiscally responsible”. The unmentionables are poverty and class. Almost a third of British children remain below the breadline. In working class Kentish Town in London, male life expectancy is 70. Two miles away, in Hampstead, it is 80. When Russia was subjected to similar “shock therapy” in the 1990s, life expectancy nosedived. A record 40 million impoverished Americans are currently receiving food stamps: that is, they cannot afford to feed themselves.

In the developing world, a system of triage imposed by the World Bank and the IMF has long determined whether people live or die. Whenever tariffs and food and fuel subsidies are eliminated by IMF diktat, small farmers know they have been declared expendable. The World Resources Institute estimates that the toll reaches 13-18 million child deaths every year. “This,” wrote the economist Lester C. Thurow, “is neither metaphor nor simile of war, but war itself.”

The same imperial forces have used horrific military weapons against stricken countries whose majorities are children, and approved torture as an instrument of foreign policy. It is a phenomenon of denial that none of these assaults on humanity, in which Britain is actively engaged, was allowed to intrude on the British election.

The people on the streets of Athens do not suffer this malaise. They are clear who the enemy is and they regard themselves as once again under foreign occupation. And once again, they are rising up, with courage. When David Cameron begins to cleave £6 billion from public services in Britain, he will be bargaining that Greece will not happen in Britain. We should prove him wrong.

[Section_31]

Nice Daily Mail piece entitled 'the big fat Greek gravy train'.

 

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2007949/The-Big-Fat-Greek-Gravy-Train-A-special-investigation-EU-funded-culture-greed-tax-evasion-scandalous-waste.html

 

 

 

Ridiculously, Greek pastry chefs, radio announcers, hairdressers and masseurs in steam baths are among more than 600 professions allowed to retire at 50 (with a state pension of 95 per cent of their last working year’s earnings) — on account of the ‘arduous and perilous’ nature of their work.

 

 

Hevens no!! 

[evv]

it best be ok.

im getting married in zante in july!!

[Nightcat]

it best be ok.

im getting married in zante in july!!

 

Have you booked a band?

[evv]

yeah - "limited edition" or something!!

the wife's idea!

[Nightcat]

yeah - "limited edition" or something!!

the wife's idea!

Excellent. Make sure you have enough supply of hornyness that day.

[Section_31]

it best be ok.

im getting married in zante in july!!

 

Full of ISIS now according to the Daily Mail, sleeping on benches and stuff while the women's institute are trying to play crown green bowls. 

[Trumo]

yeah - "limited edition" or something!!

the wife's idea!

 

So the party will involve chucking crockery.

[Trumo]

Have you booked a band?

 

yeah - "limited edition" or something!!

the wife's idea!

 

Smash Iliad.

[evv]

haha cheers fellas.

luckily zante is on the far side of Greece so isn't full of ISIS or immigrants. Yet! there is a bar in Zante called ISIS tho. Maybe that's the start!

as limited edition was the wifes idea, i'll just watch her and the singer!

[Section_31]

In some of the bars in Zante they put meth in the fishbowls, I can heartily recommend it. 

[bouncebrigade]

Syriza have been an unmitigated disaster for the Greek people.

 

Elected on a populist platform they have done nothing they promised.

 

That twat, Yanis Varoufakis, wrote a column in the Irish Times at the weekend pretty much slagging Ireland off for having come through the worst of the recession.

 

Nobody likes to see people suffer, particularly not those from a great country and one of the oldest civilisations on earth.  But Greece needs to take a long hard look at itself.  Widescale tax evasion and bribery and corruption as the norm, it can't all be Europe's fault.  Add to this the fact that they conceivably cooked the books when applying for EU membership and sympathy runs even drier.  I have no great love for the unelected bureaucrats running the show but I understand why they are taking a hard line with the Greeks.

 

Since Syriza came to power there have been billions of deposits withdrawn from banks and Greece has gone back into full scale recession, having briefly emerged last year.

 

Frankly, they would be no loss to the eurozone/EU.

[Jairzinho]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftTzzmDpqNc

[Jairzinho]

The Reality Of Austerity In Ireland Today

 

ALAN BRADY

 

Bob Geldof, the often outspoken rock star from the Boomtown Rats, on a recent trip to his native Dublin related the story of a conversation he had with a taxi driver on the deplorable state of the domestic economy. The pair apparently chatted for a time before the taxi driver summed up the situation with a sigh of resignation grumbling that “we Irish were never meant to be rich”. Geldof was somewhat amused, but also clearly irked by this remark. To him it seemed that nothing had really changed from the Ireland he had bitterly left in the late 1970’s where chronic unemployment, corruption and cronyism were rife and the entire nation was hung out to dry by the political establishment.

 

Indeed, if anything, the situation facing most of the Irish population today is far worse than it was in the 1970’ and 80’s, at least financially. Since the Irish economic and banking collapse in Ireland in 2007, severe financial distress has become something of a national epidemic. An austerity programme imposed on the Irish, in large part dictated by the German led European Central Bank, continues to have a devastating impact on the lives of much of the population. Yet the consensus among the many people I speak to on a daily basis is that the current Irish government are completely out of touch with the average man and woman. They appear to blithely dismiss the increasing plight of ordinary families and seem to be more concerned with portraying Ireland as a country coming through the worst. But on the ground, the reality and effects of ongoing austerity are far different. 

 

Like many others of my generation, my wife and I are what are referred to in Ireland these days as the ‘squeezed middle’; that is to say the category of debt-burdened, middle-income, working households who have had to bare the brunt of seven successive years of austerity measures.

 

My wife is a public servant who on the face of it has an above average salary. But in recent years she has endured close to a 20 percent net pay reduction. On top of this, we have, like others, had to absorb increasing food and fuel prices and a whole range of new taxes and local government charges that have been introduced in recent years.

 

As a family, our weekly household budget is becoming severely constrained. What little savings we had have long since disappeared. Increasing taxation and other charges, coupled with a reduced household income, mean that we often have little or no cash to spare at the end of any given month. Tellingly, a recent survey conducted by the Irish League of Credit Unions found that a quarter of the population (1.1 million people) have less than 50 euro ($68) a month of disposable income left after paying essential bills.

 

We buy little or no luxuries for ourselves. We seldom purchase clothes either – the children get first priority when it comes to clothing and footwear, and only then when a purchase is absolutely necessary. We don’t dine out, and only see our friends mainly at occasional social gatherings such as weddings or christenings which thankfully, because of the costs of such events, are becoming less frequent.

In fact, all occasions have been greatly reduced. We scrimp for months to ensure we can afford presents for our children at Christmas. And birthday parties have likewise been greatly scaled back. We have noticed over recent years that the presents received by our children from their friends on these occasions have got increasingly smaller while some kids, undoubtedly from households under even more pressure than ours, don’t bring presents at all.

 

Overall the cumulative effect of seven years of fiscal austerity, with the promise of more to come, has severely depressed demand among Irish consumers. Those who are fortunate enough to have money more often than not hold onto it with dear life due to fears for job security or as a hedge against future taxation. As a result, shop and pub closures are a regular occurrence.

 

And we are not alone. For thousands of others the situation is far, far worse. Behind many closed doors in Ireland, families are silently suffering tremendous despair brought about by financial stress. An acquaintance of mine told me that her husband, a mortgage arrears collection agent working for a bank, witnessed deeply harrowing scenes of families with young children surviving on breakfast cereals and huddling in cold candle lit rooms because their electricity supply had been disconnected.

 

As it stands, the average Irish household is hugely indebted to the banks, mainly due to the high incidence of homeownership. When this personal debt is added to the overall government debt, we are the most indebted nation on earth. Today, 18.4% of all mortgages are in arrears or have had to be restructured. This is well above the average for a typical industrialised country such as Germany, France, Britain or the US. In response to this crisis, the government has introduced personal insolvency legislation and has drawn up codes of conduct for banks to follow when dealing with mortgage arrears. But many critics say that the rate of house repossessions will accelerate, and the widespread fear that they will ultimately have their homes taken from them still exists among many struggling families.

 

Meanwhile, across the country doctors report that more and more people are coming to them suffering from crippling anxiety, depression, and insomnia directly attributable to their financial circumstances and pressure from lending institutions. A woman with a young family speaking on national radio said that Saturdays and Sundays were the only two days of the week when she wasn’t overwhelmed with stress. The weekend was the only time when there were no upsetting phone calls from the banks or disconnection notifications from utility providers arriving in the mail.

 

Unsurprisingly, incidences of suicide have markedly increased because of the economic downturn and the sense of despair brought about by joblessness. Ireland has one of the highest rates of suicide in Europe yet some working in this area have commented that the true suicide rate may be significantly under recorded. This is because many suicides may be wrongly classified as ‘open verdicts’ and thus not included in the overall statistics. Recently, the Wexford County coroner commented that the suicide rate in his region among young people had become a “major epidemic.”

 

For many, things are so bad that seeking help from charities has become an essential lifeline. Soup kitchens, something that Ireland thought she had seen the last of after the ending of the Great Depression, have opened up in large population centres such as Dublin, Athlone, and Cork to offer food aid to sizable numbers of cash strapped families and individuals struggling to buy even the basics. At the same time, teachers across the country report that many children attend school hungry because there is no food at home. St Vincent de Paul, a nationwide Catholic run charity, distributes food, clothing and other assistance to tens of thousands of desperate people who often have nowhere else to turn. Many of these people seeking charitable assistance, it must be remembered, are very often people who were perhaps once gainfully employed or even self-employed during the boom times.

 

Since the introduction of austerity, the phrase ‘fuel poverty’ has entered the national lexicon. Most reasonable Irish people accept that the spiralling price of crude on world markets in recent times has raised prices on gas and other fossil fuels. But what is less palatable among people who already struggle to fill their gas tanks and heat their homes, are carbon taxes imposed by the Irish government that further increased fuel prices substantially.  In addition to these tax increases, social welfare fuel allowances have been reduced and many elderly people, who are more prone to the effects of cold winters than younger people, are often compelled go to bed early or wear overcoats in their homes in order to avoid the very real risk of hypothermia.

 

In fact, the increasing cost of fuel is becoming a major burden for ordinary Irish families. For instance, there are reports that some police officers, who like my wife have suffered sizable pay reductions, are so financially stressed that they are forced to sleep in their police stations as they cannot afford the gas to commute to and from their jobs.

 

Utility companies too report that tens of thousands are falling into arrears with their heating and electric bills with several hundred being disconnected every month. Meanwhile the cost of fuel has made the theft of home-heating oil a tempting lure for thieves. In fact, every day, unscrupulous gangs roam the country siphoning oil from unprotected outdoor storage tanks.

 

Invariably, the unrelenting stress brought about by punitive austerity and unsustainable debt creates a huge strain on many relationships and family life.  In my neighborhood, many people I know personally have in recent times separated. In fact, throughout all of Ireland, marriage breakups and incidences of domestic violence have increased. However, many separated couples cannot afford to live in separate dwellings due to the onerous cost of living and the widespread problem of negative equity.

 

It is little wonder then that the unemployment rate still remains stubbornly high at over 11.9 percent. Many of the jobless are people who were previously employed in the construction industry during the Irish housing bubble. Also, most economic analysts agree that the unemployment figure would be much higher if emigration from Ireland wasn’t so high. (One thousand emigrate abroad every week). Recently, the IMF stated that when involuntary part-time workers, that is to say people who have had their working hours reduced are taken into account, the unemployment or “underemployment figure” would stand at a “staggering 23 percent” a figure that would parallel Spain’s horrendous unemployment statistics.

 

For young people, the unemployment situation is especially bleak. Over thirty percent of those between the ages of 15 and 24 are out of work. The result is that many graduates and school leavers are faced with the stark choice between years on welfare or having to look abroad for job opportunities.

 

And yet infuriatingly for many people, despite all the apparent suffering and misery created by their policies, the Irish government remains intent on pressing ahead with its avowed aim of paying “our debts” (the tens of billions which were originally the banks’ debts) and sticking rigidly to the breakneck austerity programme imposed on us by the EU, the ECB and the IMF, regardless of the wider societal impact. Enda Kenny, the Prime Minister of Ireland (who incidentally is paid more than Barack Obama) and Michael Noonan, the Finance Minister, say that they have no choice, as the country has just emerged from a bailout programme. But many economic commentators and those who work for the many charities across the country dealing on a daily basis with the ‘new poor’ often counter that the government do have choices. They say that the government all too blithely cut payments and allowances to the disabled, the blind, and other vulnerable groups instead of taxing the more affluent in society. Indeed, since the crisis began, the gap between those at the top and those at the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder has dramatically increased.

 

Public servants and many in the private sector have had severe pay reductions or reduced working hours imposed on them while those in charge of bailed-out banks (currently funded by state handouts) still enjoy obscene pay scales.

 

But it is the general sense of unfairness that most rankles with my friends and acquaintances. Day after day, they read with growing anger newspaper reports of the still lavish lifestyles and pensions enjoyed by the people who destroyed their country. Senior politicians (some of whom left office in disgrace) and bankers, who presided over a massive property and banking bubble, have all long since retired with pension pots worth many millions of Euros. They read about bankrupt property developers, who have had their colossal debts taken off them by the Irish state, still living in their palatial homes, dining in the finest restaurants and seemingly spending their days working on their handicaps on the best golf courses across the globe.

 

At the end of the day, most of the Irish population can fully empathise with Bob Geldof’s anger at what’s happening in Ireland. In the eyes of many, our politicians seem more distracted by sorting out the banks and spinning positive sound bites about the macro economy than standing up for those they represent. So as many people of my generation become increasingly crushed under the twin boulders of austerity and debt, many are coming to the same depressing conclusion as Bob Geldof’s taxi driver; that we really “were never meant to be rich.”

[KMD7]

I have every sympathy for Greece and applaud them for fighting back. That article Jairz posted is spot on.

 

[Section_31]

It's just a land grab by the private sector over the public sector, all over Europe. 

[Sugar Ape]

Well if we're all posting articles...
 
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/22/greece-eurozone-germans-single-currency

Greece is a sideshow. The eurozone has failed, and Germans are its victims too
 


Nearly every discussion of the Greek fiasco is based on a morality play. Call it Naughty Greece versus Noble Europe. Those troublesome Greeks never belonged in the euro, runs this story. Once inside, they got themselves into a big fat mess – and now it’s up to Europe to sort it all out.

Those are the basics all Wise Folk agree on. Then those on the right go on to say feckless Greece must either accept Europe’s deal or get out of the single currency. Or if more liberal, they hem and haw, cough and splutter, before calling for Europe to show a little more charity to its southern basketcase. Whatever their solution, the Wise Folk agree on the problem: it’s not Brussels that’s at fault, it’s Athens. Oh, those turbulent Greeks! That’s the attitude you smell when the IMF’s Christine Lagarde decries the Syriza government for not being “adult” enough. That’s what licenses the German press to portray Greece’s finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, as needing “psychiatric help”.

There’s just one problem with this story: like most morality tales, it shatters upon contact with hard reality. Athens is merely the worst outbreak of a much bigger disease within the euro project. Because the single currency isn’t working for ordinary Europeans, from the Ruhr valley to Rome.

On saying this, I don’t close my eyes to the endemic corruption and tax-dodging in Greece (nor indeed, does the outsiders’ movement Syriza, which came to power campaigning against just these vices). Nor am I about to don Farage-ist chalkstripes. My charge is much simpler: the euro project is not only failing to deliver on the promises of its originators, it’s doing the exact opposite – by eroding the living standards of ordinary Europeans. And as we’ll see, that’s true even for those living in the continent’s number one economy, Germany.

First, let’s remind ourselves of the noble pledges made for the euro project. Let’s play the grainy footage of Germany’s Helmut Schmidt and France’s Giscard d’Estaing, as they lay the foundations for Europe’s grand unifier. Most of all, let’s remind ourselves of what the true believers felt. Take this from Oskar Lafontaine, Germany’s minister of finance, on the very eve of the launch of the euro. He talked of “the vision of a united Europe, to be reached through the gradual convergence of living standards, the deepening of democracy, and the flowering of a truly European culture”.

We could quote a thousand other such stanzas of euro-poetry, but that single line from Lafontaine shows how far the single-currency project has fallen. Instead of raising living standards across Europe, monetary union is pushing them downwards. Rather than deepening democracy, it is undermining it. As for “a truly European culture”, when German journalists accuse Greek ministers of “psychosis”, that mythic agora of nations is a long way off.

Of all these three charges, the first is most important – because it explains how the entire union is being undermined. To see what’s happened to the living standards of ordinary Europeans, turn to some extraordinary research published this year by Heiner Flassbeck, former chief economist at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and Costas Lapavitsas, an economics professor at Soas University of London turned Syriza MP.

In Against the Troika, the German and the Greek publish one chart that explodes the idea that the euro has raised living standards. What they look at is unit labour costs – how much you need to pay staff to make one unit of output: a widget, say, or a bit of software. And they map labour costs across the eurozone from 1999 to 2013. What they find is that German workers have barely seen wages rise for the 14-year stretch. In the short life of the euro, working Germans have fared worse than the French, Austrians, Italians and many across southern Europe.

Yes, we’re talking about the same Germany: the mightiest economy on the continent, the one even David Cameron regards with envy. Yet the people working there and making the country more prosperous have seen barely any reward for their efforts. And this is the model for a continent.

Perhaps you have an image of Deutschland as being a nation of highly skilled, highly rewarded workers in gleaming factories. That workforce and its unions still exist – but it’s shrinking fast. What’s replacing it, according to Germany’s leading expert on inequality, Gerhard Bosch, are crap jobs. The low-wage workforce has shot up and is now almost at US levels, he reckons.

Don’t blame this on the euro, but on the slow decline of German unions, and the trend of business towards outsourcing to cheaper eastern Europe. What the single currency has done is make Germany’s low-wage problems the ruin of an entire continent.

Workers in France, Italy, Spain and the rest of the eurozone are now being undercut by the epic wage freeze going on in the giant country in the middle. Flassbeck and Lapavitsas describe this as Germany’s “beggar thy neighbour” policy – “but only after beggaring its own people”.

In the last century, the other countries in the eurozone could have become more competitive by devaluing their national currencies – just as the UK has done since the banking meltdown. But now they’re all part of the same club, the only post-crash solution has been to pay workers less.

That is expressly what the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF are telling Greece: make workers redundant, pay those still in a job much less, and slash pensions for the elderly. But it’s not just in Greece. Nearly every meeting of the Wise Folk in Brussels and Strasbourg comes up with the same communique for “reform” of the labour market and social-security entitlements across the continent: a not-so-coded call for attacking ordinary people’s living standards.

This is what the noble European project is turning into: a grim march to the bottom. This isn’t about creating a deeper democracy, but deeper markets – and the two are increasingly incompatible. Germany’s Angela Merkel has shown no compunction about meddling in the democratic affairs of other European countries – tacitly warning Greeks against voting for Syriza for instance, or forcing the Spanish socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to rip up the spending commitments that had won him an election.

The diplomatic beatings administered to Syriza since it came to power this year can only be seen as Europe trying to set an example to any Spanish voters who might be tempted to support its sister movement Podemos. Go too far left, runs the message, and you’ll get the same treatment.

Whatever the founding ideals of the eurozone, they don’t match up to the grim reality in 2015. This is Thatcher’s revolution, or Reagan’s – but now on a continental scale. And as then, it is accompanied by the idea that There Is No Alternative either to running an economy, or even to which kind of government voters get to choose.

The fact that this entire show is being brought in by agreeable-looking Wise Folk often claiming to be social democratic doesn’t render the project any nicer or gentler. It just lends the entire thing a nasty tang of hypocrisy.

[Sugar Ape]

The big chippy in Prescot, when it was run by greeks..... Wow. Best chippy around back then. Only one that came close was the cronton fish bar.

 

The people who own Cronton fish bar took over the chippy by ours a couple of years ago. Superb.

[Total Longo]

The big chippy in Prescot, when it was run by greeks..... Wow. Best chippy around back then. Only one that came close was the cronton fish bar.

 

Chris's "award winning" Chippy on Rose Lane, Mossley Hill, was boss. Literally round the corner form where i grew up.

 

Think it won Echo Chippy of the year for two years running or something. Could be woeful now, but the fella who owned it (Chris) sounded like Stavros off Harry Enfield. Hilariously Greek.