‘We condemn Greece to misery and poverty to keep Standard & Poor’s off our backs. But we have miscalculated.’
Photograph: Argyropoulos/Sipa/Rex Features
The behaviour of the EU states towards Greece is inexplicable in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and foremost, a failure of solidarity.
The «austerity package», as the newspapers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. Even now the schools are running out of books. There were 40% cuts in the public health budget in 2010 – I can’t find the present figure. Greece’s EU «partners» are demanding a 32% cut Συνέχεια →
If by now the EU and Greek politicians do not see that the enforcement of more and more taxes is not paying off then who will stop the country’s downslide? This rather proves that no one really is concerned about kick-starting the economy at all, but what matters to everyone is how certain individuals will make money off of interest (cf. Papandreou’s talks with the IMF before anyone spoke of debt problems, his pre-electoral lies that there is a lot of money to go round and his unconditional acceptance of terms and conditions of loans with an interest rate not given to other EU nations in the same predicament).
Years of quotas imposed by the EU on Greek products did wonders for the nation so yes, Greeks need to pay back the EU that helped so generously in aiding the country to become commercially competitive. Greek politicians, who have been hailed as saviors by the foreign press and have squandered trillions, are not to blame either — Greek citizens are, right? The latter therefore need to pay up for the inept governments of the past three decades, and that makes sense — no one in their right mind would hold a CEO or accountants responsible for a company’s bankruptcy. It is the factory workers who went out for drinks every Friday night that disgraced it.
Greek tax officials have walked out at the start of a 48-hour strike to protest over salary cuts and other Συνέχεια →
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