Sunday, February 19, 2012

Digging for Greece


No easy task finding scraps of information about the situation. What little is out there is one sided based in propaganda of the financial pages and the far reaches of the back pages. Our world "leaders" would have you believe that this "bail out" is necessary to prevent other Euro zone countries from going under. Nothing could be farther from the truth for what is to stop any of the other P.I.I.G.S. countries from doing just the same? A bail out after all is to bring a business or organization back to solvency and that can not be done with a country when the cutbacks come from taxes. It would be much like a person racking up debt on a credit card and then quitting his job to take on a part time job. It's a recipe for disaster.

We saw this scenario once before in the 1930s. Even the gambling and much of the lack of regulations were the same, look up "bucket shops" if you don't believe me. And how did we get out of the Great Depression? Did we make it out by tightening our national belt and being saddled with a debt we couldn't pay? No FDR stepped up and fought to get this country back on it's feet with one of the biggest building programs in the nations' history. He knew that rather than have people sitting around half starving to death in Hoovervilles it was better to put them to work making something and collecting a pay check and in turn paying taxes back into the system. Did he lower taxes then? He did not. He raised them on the wealthy because hoping for money to trickle down doesn't work.

There is a certain degree of hostility between Greece and Germany. On the face of it I can understand how someone could get suckered into thinking that one side is described as lazy while the other is arrogant. The editors of the papers that wrote that must have chuckled when they came up with that for their corporate masters. But the truth is it's the average people who were hoodwinked into thinking such nonsense. The one article I did find was written by a German woman who married a Greek and moved there several years ago. Having lived both places she knows exactly what's going on. From an LA Times article:

Distrust

Update: Just found out that many Greeks are leaving the country rather than face no future. Will the last person leaving don't forget to turn off the lights.

Fleeing Greeks

3 comments:

BBC said...

Wondering why Greece didn't have a safety net set up.

BBC said...

Maybe because the workers didn't want to contribute to it?

Randal Graves said...

This will be like everything else, raze shit to the ground, then already-fat vultures come in to claim the carrion at a low, low price. Sure, we'll hire you back, 2 drachmas. A day. Hold on, I have to rub my hands together.