hello guys, i am stathis from greece,its my first post in here and i would like to give you an idea of what is happening in greece as i feel them and some corrupted media. sorry for my english i ll try for my best. first of all the problem in greece is political. let me explain why. here in greece we have 2 big political parties which are in government since ever. something like democrats and republicans . so if a citizen has proves that a politician is a thief he has to go to an attorney and give him the clues or the proves. here its the first boom....the government designate the attorneys.so most of the times the attorneys dont paying attention of what you are telling to them. but sometimes if the attorney do his job and say yes we have corruption here he has to give all the case to the parliament which has to decide again if there is corruption. but the parliament is the big two parties.so every single time they are thinking about the case some months and then they decide that they dont have enough clues or proves. so no one till now has ever gone in prison.they are just judging their selves. they have also created lots of laws which are saying that if someone manage to prove that a politician was corrupted,doesnt go to jail if there have passed 4 years from the event or if there were any elections before. that means that they have to put their self in to the jail as we have every four years elections so it has to change the political party and if we have elections before we still cant put them in the jail as it doesnt count as we had elections. the last years the courts in germany gave us some names from the siemens scandal.there they told us that a man called hristoforakos took 1 million euros from the siemens.he told to the court that he gave these money to the one of the big political parties. do you know what happened? this guy in know the chief in the department of anticorruption. he didnt pay anything,he didnt went to jail and we found him and a job. and list goes and goes.its endless. ti close the political part and go to the economical i would like to add that these two political parties the last 40 years made an army by giving jobs to people into the public sector.also here in greece who ever works in public sector earns doubles from the others and also no one can touch them no matter what.no one can dismiss them. lets go to the economic part now. first of all these two big political parties have taken all the money europe was given as the las 20 years.these guys plus some others who were next to them.and now we have to pay for them.i understand that we voted them so we have to pay all but as i explained before isnt the easier thing to get rid of them... lets see the last 2-3 years now... in 2008 before the crisis the prime minister gave to the banks 18 billions. he put these money to the state expenditures . so suddenly our shortfall from 5-6 billions for this year went to 24 billions... then we had elections... the new prime minster is now be hunted from the attorneys as he with the federal statistic department ballooned our shortfall again with lies.that time all the department resigned except of the boss of the department. of course i would like to add here that we had an economical problem but not so big. after that we all know the story.but there is another thing we do not know most if us. germany and ECB bought most of our debt in the 60-70% of its true price and now we are paying back the 100% of them. why germany end EU is doing this?some days ago we gave them 3 billions for debt they had buy for a little more than 2 billions. also why every year we have to buy airplanes and military vehicles and submarines from france and germany?why they dont secure the EU borders? we have to do that also? finally germany was clever enough to secure her economy.germany is producing high tech things and she has to compete japan and usa which also have strong currency. we are producing potatoes and tomatoes and we have to compete turkey,marocco,egypt which have weak currency.holland which is producing meat managed to pass to the europeans laws that some % of meat or cheece must be produced in holland.why no one said something like that about potatoes and grapes or things that we are producing? to end this story,things seem to be very well organized and they know exactly what they are doing... for the rest of us we have to wait which are their planes...
hey man, appreciate getting it from the horses mouth, your English is not that bad, and ours is not that good we are all watching you, because we are not that far behind The more you talk the more it sounds like the USA But you are extreme USA compared to the world is always a very mixed bag our only salvation has been extreme diversification
"we are all watching you, because we are not that far behind" most americans are still clueless about the dire financial circumstances of the US. the republican party leadership talks as if abortion is the #1 issue in the country.
most Americans think it is ther God Given Right (literally) to live the life they have lived. After I had my mental breakdown I went back to school and just took some biology courses, just to get my head back together Over there they don't talk about American exceptionalism, they talk about the survival of the human race and it doesn't look good (if you are a human.) Not bad if you are a groundhog
Greece needs to get out of the EU as soon as possible, depreciate their own currency and bring back tourism and sell potatoes, etc. The game will always be rigged towards Germany and France. The smaller countries have no chance in this game.
France. u are joking. it is a bankrupt country. all the latin countries + greece are broke. they should form their own currency bloc. and call it the southern euro. france can be its northern outpost. "sell potatoes" are you mixing up greece and ireland? fyi depreciating the currency does not lead to prosperity but economic disaster. argentina is the prime current example. a weak currency doesn't built factories. otherwise africa would be an industrial powerhouse.
Maybe you didn't read the original post to get the potato reference. As for France, I agree they are as broke as a joke, but they are always going to be close to the top of the food chain in the EU, and will ensure they benefit from the PIIGS nations involvement. My point is that every single one of these countries will have their own interests first and foremost, and will always be looking to take advantage of the little players in the economic game. The only country that doesn't do this globally is the US, where you get self-hating Americans like Obama and half of the Democratic party that are more than happy to give away the competitiveness of the US in an effort to weaken it, all in the name of global fairness.
"As for France, I agree they are as broke as a joke, but they are always going to be close to the top of the food chain in the EU, and will ensure they benefit from the PIIGS nations involvement." show some proof to this statement. other than exports to the piigs germany had to pay billions in agricultural subsidies to greece etc.. where is the net benefit to germany?