Granted, I get a lot of my information second-hand but Syriza, the alternative communist party in Greece is getting airtime galore prior to the next election.
When I see the mainstream media giving one party so much publicity I think I can predict what is coming and so can Greeks.
People I speak to say Syriza are the favourites to win the next election and I see nothing to go against that prediction.
So what do the communists/Syriza stand for? What do they say they will do when they get into power?
2 main things.
1. Put government wages back to prior levels and recruit all previously laid off government workers.
2. Increase taxes on businesses.
You have to say they are consistent to their goals, ie anti-capitalist.
This sort of campaigning is nothing new for Greeks. Every election you have a party coming out with things that are clearly too good to be true but they appeal to the emotions of the Greeks and the Greeks can’t help themselves but to vote on their emotions.
Last time it was Papandreou with “there is the money”
And now you have Tsipras and Syriza with “there is the money”
When there clearly isn’t.
If and when Syriza get to power, you can be sure that the Greek economy is going to completely implode and then default.
Unless Germany is prepared to pump billions more into the country there is no other way out.
You can bet their will be major issues even for basic services in Greece and I can tell you now, if that happens, who will be getting the blame?
Capitalists.
It will have been the capitalists that have put the country in such a bad position.
It is Germany that has aggravated an already bad situation by having such tough deficit targets.
And the solution must be more government to quash the corruptive effects of the private sector which have destroyed the Greek economy.
Of course all this is nonsense.
Greece has economic problems because the state spent more than it took in (government deficit) and the country imported more than it exported (trade deficit).
Absolutely none of these issues are to do with the private sector.
Individual Greeks have to balance their books, the government has thought it did not as it could simply get the private sector to pay for it.
Capitalism and freedom are the only things that will give Greece a prosperous future.
Giving power to the government has been tried and it has failed miserably but you can feel what is building here. A socialist/communist takeover.
The extreme left will be given power, they will fail, the blame will be left at the door of capitalists with the goal to make Greece even more dependent of foreign governments and banks than it was before.
Free domain radio have the philosophy that basically, people in Western societies are livestock, cows if you will. We produce the milk for the government farmer in the form of taxation.
While the farmer/government cannot give the cows total freedom, the more freedom it gives the cow/taxpayer, the more productive that cow is and the more tax revenue the government gets.
So in the UK you have a farmer that wants the population to be productive so there are large tax revenues. Businesses are easy to start and regulation is relatively low, although still far too much.
On the other hand you have Greece. The farmer here seems to have no interest in having productive livestock. The farmer appears to not want higher tax revenues.
In fact, if you look at the Greek economic situation from the farmer-livestock perspective, it is not like farming at all.
The Greek government seems to simply want to keep the animals alive. In other words to give Greeks just enough freedom so they can feed themselves so they do not starve to death.
Even since the introduction of the Euro this attitude of the farmer in Greece has clearly showed that the animals have not been given enough freedom. Because while the animals have been feeding themselves, the farmer has got into massive debt.
Since 2008, the reality has been crystal clear. The farmer needs to increase his income or shed some machinery of government.
But instead of this, the farmer has decided to give the animals even less freedom through increased taxation. The exact opposite of what is required.
And now a communist party look set to take power and strip even more freedom from the animals and increase the amount of machinery on the farm.
It is hard to believe anyone can be so stupid, unfortunately the talk in Greece is not about making people more productive or shrinking the size of government.
The talk is all about whether Greece will continue to receive money from the EU. Until the Greek media starts talking about the core issues, Greeks will be as clueless as ever with regards top what the real problem is with their country.
A bit of history… After WWI every single government that came into power from the opposition would summarily fire the entire public sector to hire their “own people”. Governments lasted about a year on average so this happened quite often. There is a square in Athens still called “square of lamentations” named after those dismissed public workers that went there to cry about their misfortune.
This situation was put to an end by the introduction of the “permanent public sector position” concept which stated that a public servant cannot be fired from his position as long as this position existed. This law ended up in the constitution and hence very difficult to change.
Unfortunately, this law backfired. Instead of firing the public sector and hiring their own people, each successive government would keep the “old guard” and hire their own people nevertheless. Parties from the centre, centre-right, right and extreme right wings would eventually get cushy jobs with ever more people coming into the public sector after an election as a “reward” for votes. In 1981 the centre-left and left also came into the game and they had A LOT of their “own people” that were out of the game until then and hungry for some of the honey in the pot.
Of course this created the problem of what to do with all this flock. Remember, you have to have a “position” to hire someone to fill it. And that’s when bureaucracy was re-invented for the Greek public sector. Even today, you can’t just go and pay the state in one queue you have to join three or more, often twice. You need three or four people to sign and stamp a simple document. And worst of all you have to wait for all links in the chain to even bother. In cases where real money is involved or corrupt public servants deem it to be so, your file may stay at the bottom of the pile if you chose not to pay a little “fee” (usually 10% of the worth of the file, but negotiable). In other cases if you wanted something done quickly you would bring a little brown envelope with cash (a “grigorosimo” or “promptness fee” – yes! It has a name!) to pay whomever was responsible to get the job finished quickly. Usually at the expense of others who had to wait.
Why did Greeks put up with this situation? To explain I will need to make a small parenthesis to mention a story from my favourite sociological TV programme, Star Trek. A race existed in Star Trek universe called the Ferengi, whose culture was the epitome of hard-core capitalism: always concerned about profit, never to be trusted in a deal, exploitation of workers etc. A human tries to form a workers’ union with his mainly Ferengi co-workers and start a strike – the concept of a union or strike being equally unknown to them. When the Ferengi boss agrees to the workers’ demands of higher wages, less hours and better conditions, the Ferengi workers are not happy. “Aren’t you happy you are no longer exploited by your boss”, asks the human, to which the lead Ferengi worker replies “you don’t understand human, the Ferengi do not wish to to end exploitation, we rather be bosses to do the exploiting ourselves.” And this is the best explanation I can give for Greeks being seemingly more or less apathetic to their bloated, inefficient, bureaucratic, until recently overpaid public sector. They want to be part of it, themselves or their children. They grumble, complain and curse but ultimately they would do everything to get their children a highly desired permanent, overpaid, cushy public sector job.
Unfortunately for most in the public sector, they will soon find that their job is no longer permanent, overpaid, or cushy. So you can see how most of these people want to go back to what was their reality and end this current nightmare.
Together with them, an army of unemployed, young, overeducated people that don’t want to emigrate for a better future and currently wait for some foreign investment that never comes (who would invest in Greece right now?). Full of creative energy, totally disillusioned, and extremely angry for a predicament they didn’t create. Finally and more importantly, a whole nation, a proud nation at that, branded lazy, stupid, ungovernable, and insulted at every turn as thieves, parasites, unwanted pariahs. The words of an ex-president of the Hellenic Republic ringing in everybody’s ears: “we are a brotherless nation”. In other words, Alone.
Add to that about two million hapless souls, economic migrants, that are effectively “parked” and trapped in Greece with EU using the Dublin II agreement to transform the whole country into a glorified concentration camp for unwanted people. Turkey doesn’t take them back besides having signed the agreements because she is trying to get even more from Europe; namely EU visa provisions for Turkish citizens. Greece can’t give that; the EU doesn’t want to and doesn’t care much.
These people don’t want to be in Greece. They want to move to France, Germany, London and Bradford. Imagine the effect of an influx of two million people within 10 years in a country with a population of 10 million. Imagine the equivalent numbers of 10 million people descending upon the British Isles, more than half of them squatting in London. Then you can begin to fathom the situation in Greece. Of course Britain is nicely protected by the sea and a few EU countries between her and the source. Greece doesn’t have that luxury, only a neighbour that makes money from bringing people from Somalia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and other far away countries, in cheap flights without visa requirement so it can funnel them into the land of honey that is the EU/Greece. If only they knew… And with all those often desperate people, crime has skyrocketed in a country where doors were left open 20 years ago. Now you need reinforced steel doors with the hope that maybe they will leave you alone in your own living room.
Conspiracy theories are also rife. We have trillions of barrels of oil and gas and that’s what “they” want. We have rare earths and China is hoarding those leaving none for the rest. We have tons of gold; tons of uranium; lots of sunshine, the foreigners want to make us desperate to buy all those assets for peanuts. The Germans need foreign workers for their factories and know that Greeks are hard-working and want them to emigrate there (not helped by Merkel more or less suggesting something like that). The whole Greek crisis was an American ploy to stop the building of a Russian gas pipeline that would compete with the Nabucco pipeline. Or maybe just because the previous government was warming to Putin’s Russia.
Then you have the memoranda and the instalments. Oh, the instalments… Every two or three months the Troika would pay Greece a visit and everybody would be worried stiff. Did we meet the (often impossible) targets? Will they sign off for the next instalment or are we going bankrupt on Tuesday? If we missed the targets by a few millions, what new tax would the government devise to find this money by Tuesday? Every two to three months… For two years… I don’t know if you can imagine it, but it was soul-destroying for me, and I don’t even live in the country! And then you have every man and his dog with their own stupid little opinion on what Greece should do or what the EU should do to or with Greece. “Kick them out of Europe” (with a massive earthquake perhaps). “Leaving the euro would be catastrophic for Greece”. “Not leaving the euro would be worse”. “Greece should default now”. “Greece will default in a month”. “Greece default imminent”. “Greece defaulting… now! No… now! Now! Nnnnnnow! Oh never mind saved again.” And of course the latest that shows the true solidarity and democratic nature of what we call the European “Union”: “Greeks should vote for who we want or else” (effectively).
Can you imagine a whole nation of people yanked by the nose like that? For all those reasons, for all the desperate Greeks, extreme left and extreme right ideologies sounds like music to their ears. Never go to the supermarket hungry or the voting booth angry I say, or the result is lots of junk food and snacks and rebellious attitude respectively.
Yes, screw the banks and liberal capitalism. Down with globalization. Kick out the failed politicians. Illegal immigrants go home. Nationalise companies. Jobs for everyone. Growth instead of austerity. No more debt. Screw Germany and their attempt for a fourth Reich. Screw our EU partners who instead of showing solidarity they are punishing a whole population for THEIR failings. They owe us, we don’t owe them. Out of the Eurozone. Out of the EU. In the EU without the Euro. In the Eurozone without the debts. We can borrow from the Chinese. We can hire an island to the Russians for a base in the Med to scare the crap out of EU and NATO. Oh and out of NATO by the way…
I don’t vote angry so I don’t support the above.
At the same time I cannot even come close to criticizing the ones that do.