An American View of Greece Revisited

[robertpaulsen]

An American View of Greece Revisited

Almost five years ago, I interviewed my father and wrote a blog post regarding his experience of his most recent visit to Greece. At the time, Greece was undergoing a strike where buses and trains had curtailed their services. Economic growth had sputtered, debt had ballooned and unemployment had skyrocketed to double digits. When I asked my Dad what he thought of James Howard Kunstler's insight that Greece might resort to communism, he responded, "As far as I'm concerned, they're really close to it, they're crazy over there."

Fast forward to today. My father is no longer with us, passing away almost four years ago, but almost all the problems that plagued Greece then have magnified and multiplied. Unemployment is now at 25%, as bad as it was in America during the height of the Great Depression. Instead of communism, the extremist threat on the rise is from the far-right in the form of the fascist Golden Dawn, which took third place in parliamentary elections earlier this year. But the biggest immediate problem is the debt. To address the debt crisis, there had been a debt restructuring program set up by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Eurozone countries and the European Central Bank (ECB) which was initiated around the time I wrote my original post. When the first restructuring obviously wasn't working, a second restructuring which carried over the bailout of the first one was ratified by all parties in February 2012. But with the January election which brought the left wing Syriza Party to power, a new coalition government declared the old bailout agreements cancelled. They were given until May 31 to negotiate with creditors.

How will this all play out? The current outlook isn't very positive:



Greece is probably already defaulting on its debt. Here’s why

more at link...

http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2015/04/an-american-view-of-greece-revisited.html

[Warpy]

1. Commies! Run for your lives!

Greece is the canary in the coal mine. The wealthy there have used the honor system to pay their taxes because tax laws have no teeth in them. We all know how much honor most wealthy people possess.

They will all shriek communism if the new government passes actual penalties for under reporting assets and dodging taxes. They'll shriek even louder should those taxes rise.

However, this is what Greece needs to do because squeezing the poor to death hasn't worked.

[robertpaulsen]

2. Yeah, I get a little chagrined when even Reuters refers to Syriza as "extreme left-wing".

There's nothing "extreme" about Syriza. What's extreme is the situation they're trying to deal with where the vast majority has either lost or had the security of their livelihoods threatened.