cyprusgrump wrote:GreekIslandGirl wrote:Alexis Tsipras interviewed by The Guardian (today's).
Very interesting and I recommend it to everyone to read:HS: Is your enemy Germany?
AT: No, no, not at all. The war that we are experiencing is not between nations and peoples. On the one side, there are workers and a majority of people, and on the other are global capitalists, bankers, profiteers on stock exchanges, the big funds. It's a war between peoples and capitalism, and Greece is on the frontline of that war. And, as in each war, what happens on the frontline defines the battle. It will be decisive for the war elsewhere. Greece has become a model for the rest of Europe because it was chosen as the experiment for the application of neoliberal shock [policies], and Greek people were the guinea pigs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ma ... iew-syriza
So, the Greek government has spent money like it was going out of style for decades and now that the well has run dry, it’s the well’s fault? You can’t wax lyrical about “the cradle of democracy” then turn round and blame someone else when the moussaka hits the fan.
Who voted for successive profligate governments, year after year? Who told the Greek government to borrow more money than it could afford to pay back in order that they might have paid public holidays, Olympic Games, and Christ knows what all else? They could have voted for small-government, fiscally-responsible, liberals who would have tried to change that (reducing the tax evasion problem into the bargain, as per Laffer).
They, in general, didn’t.
Paraphrased from here.
No doubt a lot of money ended up in the wrong places but that's the same story the world over. Looking at Greece over the last decade or so - I have seen massive changes; not only due to size-able spending on the Olympics (as every dig entailed more money on retrieving antiquities) and new metro, but also the new roads (especially in the Peloponnese) and tunnel building, beautiful bridges, not to mention the money going to finance defence against Turkey. It's easy for some to overlook these positives.
Tax evasion is probably worse in the UK as so many resort to overseas interests and offshore accounts and in over 20 years, not a single plumber, electrician, builder etc ever gave me a receipt if I was paying by cash otherwise they upped the price if I asked for one. Don't even start with the comparisons because the big economies are the worst offenders and the best at playing innocent. Meanwhile, Greece is being used as a guinea-pigs because everyone knows how resilient they are and if they can break the Greeks - they can then break anyone.
Besides the UK has been printing money whereas the Greeks had good growth. And let's not forget the fiasco with the ERM in 1992
wikiIn politics and economics, Black Wednesday refers to the events of 16 September 1992 when the British Conservative government was forced to withdraw the pound sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) after they were unable to keep it above its agreed lower limit. George Soros, the most high profile of the currency market investors, made over US$1 billion profit by short selling sterling.
In 1997 the UK Treasury estimated the cost of Black Wednesday at £3.4 billion, with the actual cost being £3.3 billion which was revealed in 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI).[1]
The trading losses in August and September were estimated at £800 million, but the main loss to taxpayers arose because the devaluation could have made them a profit. The papers show that if the government had maintained $24 billion foreign currency reserves and the pound had fallen by the same amount, the UK would have made a £2.4 billion profit on sterling's devaluation.[2] Newspapers also revealed that the Treasury spent £27 billion of reserves in propping up the pound.
