Yet another General Strike in Greece

[puisseguin]

Yet another General Strike has been called in Greece and the few who stll have jobs will once again be expected to stop work and loose pay.

The strike is in protest against the bailout terms that require spending cuts to pay the countries massive debts.

 

It is pretty clear that the country will never honour the agreements made with the countries funding the bailout. Is it time for the EU to cut is losses and cast Greece to its own devices.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19724284

 

Greece is currently trying to qualify for the next instalment of its 130bn-euro bailout, which is backed by the IMF and the other 16 euro nations.

 

Greece was given a 110bn-euro package in May 2010 and a further 130bn euros in October 2011. That money is paid in instalments, but correspondents say the lenders are reluctant to stump up the latest slice, as they feel Greece has not made enough effort to meet its deficit-reduction targets.

 

Greece needs the next tranche of its bailout to make repayments on its debt burden. A default could result in the country leaving the euro.

[Dicky_Bird]

As the general working greek loses his/her home and cannot put food on the table, the people at the top continue to wallow in their own lavish lifestyles.

 

Its the people at the top who caused this, but its the working greek who is paying the price

[WeX]

Spain is going mental too but its not getting reported much. Google "Spain Riot".

[melthebell]

Spain is going mental too but its not getting reported much. Google "Spain Riot".

 

was just gonna mention that

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4557544/Spaniards-in-riot-at-cuts.html

 

should we follow suit?

[chem1st]

http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1057677

 

Spain...

[green]

Im hoping that the Greeks kick this bunch of techno/corpocrats into oblivion and the European elite get their commupence. After all it was Greece who first gave us Democracy....maybe they can win it back for us again.

[iansheff]

As the general working greek loses his/her home and cannot put food on the table, the people at the top continue to wallow in their own lavish lifestyles.

 

Its the people at the top who caused this, but its the working greek who is paying the price

 

As always happens the rich don't lose out, it said on the news yesterday one third of Greeks are living below the poverty line.

[Anna Glypta]

As always happens the rich don't lose out, it said on the news yesterday one third of Greeks are living below the poverty line.

 

Well if Greece defaults it won't be the rich that lose out. Their borrowing is from foreign banks, firms and pension funds, some of it guaranteed by governments.

 

Greece is in this mess simply because they spent more money than the country could afford. The reason for this is irrelevant to the outcome. But over the lastdecade they have bought flash cars, boats and houses on borrowed money. The government has spent billions on infrastructure that was really nice but unaffordable. All on borrowed money.

Now is bill payment time and it seems there are 2 options. Either the Greeks can pay for the lifestyle they've enjoyed or the rest of us can give it to them as a gift. The money that Greece owes then can come out of our taxes and our pension funds. We will not pay as much for this benevolance as the Eurozone, but it will still impact heavily on our own personal lives.

 

Then we can start thinkingabout whether we want to be similarly benevolent to Spain and Portugal.

[Vague_Boy]

Its the people at the top who caused this, but its the working greek who is paying the price

Tax avoidance is endemic throughout all levels of Greek society.

 

According to a remarkable presentation that a member of Greece’s central bank gave last fall, the gap between what Greek taxpayers owed last year and what they paid was about a third of total tax revenue, roughly the size of the country’s budget deficit. The “shadow economy”—business that’s legal but off the books—is larger in Greece than in almost any other European country, accounting for an estimated 27.5 per cent of its G.D.P.

 

Greece, it seems, has struggled with the first rule of a healthy tax system: enforce the law. People are more likely to be honest if they feel there’s a reasonable chance that dishonesty will be detected and punished. But Greek tax officials were notoriously easy to bribe with a fakelaki (small envelope) of cash. There was little political pressure for tougher enforcement. On the contrary: a recent study showed that enforcement of the tax laws loosened in the months leading up to elections, because incumbents didn’t want to annoy voters and contributors. Even when the system did track down evaders, it was next to impossible to get them to pay up, because the tax courts typically took seven to ten years to resolve a case. As of last February, they had a backlog of three hundred thousand cases.

 

The result has been a vicious circle: because tax evasion is so common, people trust the system less, which makes them less willing to pay taxes. And, because so many don’t chip in, the government has had to raise taxes on those who do. That only increases the incentive to cheat, since there tends to be a correlation between higher tax rates and higher rates of tax evasion.

LINK (The New Yorker, 11/07/11)

 

 

 

Of course investment bank Goldman Sachs has to take some of the blame

 

How Goldman Sachs helped mask Greece’s debt

 

Yesterday European finance ministers agreed a second bailout for the Greek Government, worth more than 130 bn Euros. In light of the country’s staggering debt, and the risk it poses to the health of the entire Eurozone, it now appears that Greece should not have been permitted to join the Euro in the first place. So, why was it?

 

Nick Dunbar’s film on last night’s BBC Newsnight set out to provide at least part of the explanation.

 

The film shed new light on a slight of hand orchestrated by the investment bank Goldman Sachs, that allowed a large chunk of Greek public debt to seemingly disappear, and for the country’s finances to appear in better shape than they were in reality.

 

Back in 2001, the Greek government was pondering how it could meet the conditions of Euro membership. A key requirement of the Maastricht criteria, five criteria that determine whether an EU country is ready to adopt the euro, was that member states show ‘directionality’ in their public debt.

 

This meant that the country’s debt ratio needed to be going down year on year: ‘The national debt should not exceed 60% of GDP, but a country with a higher level of debt can still adopt the euro provided its debt levels are falling steadily’.

 

The solution they came up with was not to cut spending or raise taxes, as Dunbar incredulously points out, but to attempt to hide their debt. Enter Goldman Sachs, global investment banking and asset management company.

 

Newsnight revealed that one of the Goldman Sachs bankers hatched an ingenious plan to strike a financial deal called a ‘swap’ with the Greek Government, using it to hide 2.8bn Euros of national debt. The deal was legal but completely secret.

LINK

[Saffy]

Bring back the drachma ....