When
I read this, and especially when watching the video I feel the most
incredible rage that a proud country should be reduced to this
because an detestible financial elite have sought to enrich
themselves at the expense of people who are guilty of no more than
trying to get by.
It
is also alarming because it is a glimpse into our own future.
This
Is What A Country On The Brink Of Collapse Looks Like
Wolf
Richter,
Testosterone Pit
5
May, 2012
Tourism,
Greece’s second largest industry after the shipping industry, and
already in a downdraft, is taking another hit as tour bus drivers
will go on strike for four days next week; wage negotiations have
deadlocked.
Owners
demand that drivers take a 50% cut in pay and benefits on top of the
20% cut they’ve already suffered.
The
National Organization for Healthcare Provision (EOPYY), Greece’s
state-owned health insurer, hasn’t
paid pharmacists for months and owes them €540 million.
In
turn, pharmacists are refusing to sell medications to insured
patients, including cancer patients, unless they’re paid in
cash—and even hospitals are reporting shortages.
Greece’s
ship repair and shipbuilding industry, a highly competitive activity
in a global market, has collapsed.
Over
90% of its union workers are jobless—though Greek shipping
companies own 16% of the global merchant fleet, more than any other
nation. They’re just not having their ships built and repaired in
Greece anymore—whatever the reason, high cost of labor, lack of
investment, changing shipping routes, strikes. A sign that there are
fundamental problems related to competitiveness that a bailout, no
matter how generous, won’t be able to solve.
And
yet, President Barak Obama—whose reelection hinges on the US
economy, which is wobbling, and on the jobs picture, which remains
dismal—blamed European leaders, specifically German leaders, for
refusing to bail out Greece and the rest of the tottering Eurozone at
taxpayers’ expense, just so he could sail to four more years.
Everything in the book, from the loss in US manufacturing jobs to
cancelled IPOs, was “attributable to Europe and the cloud that’s
coming over from the Atlantic,” he said at a fundraiser in Chicago.
German
Chancellor Angela Merkel shrugged off the bullying and just said no
to Eurobonds, again. Despised in Germany, they’re seen as an
insidious transfer from bleeding German taxpayers to other countries.
Instead, her government wants struggling Eurozone countries to
overhaul their economies with utmost speed—and Germans are willing
to dole out hundreds of billions of euros to make that possible—but
it’s proving to be impossible, at least in Greece, and very painful
everywhere, to unwind years of an economic gravy train fueled by
cheap euro debt. Read.... Germany
Walks Away From Greece.
Unpaid
bills are threatening
Greece’s electricity supply
And
unpaid bills are now threatening Greece’s electricity supply.
State-owned Electricity Market Operator (LAGIE), a clearing house for
power transactions, hasn’t paid independent power producers for
electricity it bought from them. They, in turn, haven’t paid their
natural gas supplier, Public Gas Corporation (Depa), which now
doesn’t have the money to pay its supplier.
Payment
is due on June 22. Alas, its supplier is Gazprom in Russia, and they
insist on getting paid. If not, they will shut the valve, and Depa
won’t get the gas to supply the independent producers, which will
have to take their power plants off line, removing about a third of
the country’s electricity production.
But
Germany isn’t even worried about Greece’s return to the drachma
anymore—a fait accompli. It’s worried about Spain and Italy.
Greece simply is the model. The costs appear to be steep, but most of
the actual costs have already been incurred. They’re hidden in
Greece’s debt, now held largely by European institutions, such as
the ECB, and in the infamous Target2 balances within the European
System of Central Banks. Hundreds of billions of euros. They were
spent on everything: social benefits, German frigates, inflated
wages, now weedy and abandoned Olympic facilities, profits, bribes,
votes. What remains aren’t productive assets to service this debt,
but simmering unrest and the debt itself.
International
companies have long been preparing for Greece’s return to the
drachma, quietly and in secret, but occasionally word seeped out.
According to the latest revelation, Heineken
NV has moved excess cash out of Greece, doing what the Greeks
themselves have been doing. And currency traders were surprised
on Friday to see the new identifier for the drachma (XGD) on their
Bloomberg terminals; a test, the company said, so that it would be
ready for trading drachmas.
When
Alexis Tsipras, leader of the Radical Left Coalition (Syriza)—in
first place with 31.5% in the latest poll—laid out his program,
he left no doubt: his first action if he won the June 17 elections
would be to annul the bailout memorandum signed by the previous
government. The memorandum spelled out the structural reforms Greece
would have to implement in order to receive further bailout payments.
He’d stop the privatization of state-owned companies, undo wage and
pension cuts, lower the Value Added Tax, offer debt relief to
households, raise the minimum wage back to the original €751, raise
unemployment benefits.... His program had vote-buying promises for
practically everyone. And yet, he wanted to keep the euro and
expected taxpayers of other countries to fund his promises.
Program of “dignity and hope” he called it.
Program of “dignity and hope” he called it.
Antonis
Samaras, leader of the conservative New Democracy—in second place
with 25.5%—also laid out his program.
He’d renegotiate the bailout memorandum, though he stressed that
Greece should stay in the euro—whose flood of cheap debt had made
the Greek elite rich, and certainly he wouldn’t want to stop the
gravy train. He promised to raise pensions, private-sector wages,
child benefits ... undoing much of the economic restructuring already
agreed to. And he threw in some new goodies: unemployment benefits
for the self-employed and compensation to Greek institutions for the
haircut they’d suffered on their Greek government bonds. Every item
on the long list was at the expense of restive taxpayers in other
countries.
Greek
politicians, even the new generation, are sticking to their time-worn
strategy: vote-buying with ruinous promises that can only be
fulfilled with an endless flow of borrowed money. Thus, they define
themselves as leaders who need a central bank that can print however
much is needed to fund these promises, with periodic devaluations or
defaults to get a fresh start.
And
here is a powerful video of “the Days of Decline”
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