Πηγή: Stuff
By PAUL MCGEOUGH (Reuters)
Feb 18 2012
She wore a black skivvy, blue jeans and silver-buckled black boots. After clambering through a window, Lambrousi Harikleia perched precariously on a ledge two floors above Patission Street, off Omonia Square in downtown Athens.
Driven to attempt suicide by a harsh new round of cost-cutting that threatens the government housing agency where she and her husband work, Harikleia dabbed at her tears, for a moment wrenching attention from an unseemly slug-fest on the economic fate of her country, between the rich northern capitals of Europe and those of the beleaguered south. For a while we were compelled to focus on the insufferable human toll of a country in economic free fall.
In an apparent suicide pact, her husband had joined her - but only briefly - a whole city block was cordoned off and five hours elapsed before Harikleia,in her 40s and the mother of a disabled child, was coaxed back through the window by police negotiators.
Amid deep humiliation and great uncertainty about what it means to be Greek and, more particularly, European, enraged Athenians are lashing out as the weight of five grinding years of recession and the promise of perhaps decades of crippling reform and restructuring crushes the living breath from them.
The desperation of Lambrousi Harikleia is as combustible as the ferocious anger of protesters who on Sunday lobbed Molotov cocktails into more than 40 city buildings when authorities tried to move them away from the parliament.
Inside the assembly, MPs forced through another $400 million worth of painful budget cuts on top of $4 billion already promised, all part of what has prompted Greece's spiritual leader, Archbishop Leronymos II, to warn of a ''social explosion''.
Greeks, Europe and the world await a pronouncement by a European troika - the European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB) - on what was to be a second bailout of $160 billion for Athens, on top of $135 billion less than two years ago.
But such is the mutual distrust and a Greek suspicion, reasonably founded on blunt public comments by German, Dutch, Finish and Luxembourg officials, that the Europeans are manoeuvring to cut Greece adrift from the European monetary union, that there are doubts all the money will be forthcoming - without which Greece would default within weeks on bonds worth $17.8 billion.
European officials are furious that Greek political leaders continue to allude to a need to renegotiate some of the bailout conditions, despite signing undertakings, demanded by the troika, that there would be no walking backwards.
The depth of the naked suspicion was encapsulated in a comment on Wednesday by Wolfram Schrettl, professor of economics at Berlin's Free University, when he told reporters: "Statements and assurances from Greece [that it will abide by loan agreed conditions] are no longer taken at face value. There is a growing belief that Greece is looking for a sucker - and Germany is playing the sucker."
In such an atmosphere it is likely the Europeans will dribble out just as much cash as Athens needs to get it through an April election campaign; then it will try to lock in a new administration to tough new conditions, including that it hold to sweeping pension, salary and job cuts previously agreed.
Apart from anger at Greece's failure to implement earlier agreements there is growing confidence in Berlin and several other capitals that the markets recognise that Greece is beyond redemption and that it could be cast out without a contagion affect in other Euro basket cases - Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy.
The charred, boarded-up facades of the torched shops and banks and the smashed marble cladding that became missiles in Sunday's running battles are quickly absorbed into the grimy streetscapes of the Greek capital. But despite the removal of protest graffiti from the marble front of the Bank of Greece and the buzz of cheerful, well-heeled crowds in the brightly lit boutiques and wine bars of Ermou Street; and even the sight of young lovers kissing beneath laden orange trees on Syntagma Square, a hungry gauntness cloaks the Greek capital.
Walking westward from the square, passing many of the looted stores, lands a visitor into Sofokleous Street where hundreds queue daily at a municipal soup kitchen, part of a church-backed network that distributes 250,000 meals nationally every week.
Despite protesting their shame, some of the clients reveal their circumstances: property and business owners who were squeezed too hard; widows and widowers left with as little as $120 a month from their pensions after they have paid rent. Unlike the ''old'' poverty-stricken Athenians, these are the ''new'' poor - well dressed and, as one soup-kitchen staffer observed to a reporter, people ''who speak languages … and own laptops''.
University of Athens economist Panagiotis Petrakis ticks off the indicators: standard of living down, by as much as 30 per cent; bank deposits that have not been spirited out of the country are dwindling; almost 70,000 businesses folded in 2010 and bankruptcy is stalking more than 53,000 of the remaining 300,000; unemployment, 25 per cent - but youth joblessness is 47 per cent and rising; a quarter of the population living in poverty; homelessness, up 25 per cent, with well-educated youngsters accounting for much of the rise. Petty crime, doubled.
On top of all that Petrakis detects a slow run on the Greek banks. "It means a slow death for the economy," he forecasts.
"People are depressed," the economist says, acknowledging that an acquaintance of 40 years was among those who had contributed to a doubling of the suicide rate since the onset of the crisis. "As a people, Greeks had a feeling that something bad would happen - and now they don't believe this recession will end."
There is no shortage of finger-pointing and name-calling. Greeks mostly blame their politicians for the mess they are in. Their politicians excoriate their European paymasters, especially the Germans, as much for fuelling the Greek addiction to debt as for the ruthless detox regime to rein it in.
The borrowing fed a pact with the devil. The politicians used the money to pay a bloated public sector - one in seven Greeks is on the government teat. The deal was that families and whole communities would support politicians as long as the cheques kept coming. Reporters testing oft-told stories of hospital janitors earning more than doctors because of this system of patronage, known as ''rousfeti'' in Greek, are assured they are not apocryphal.
"Since the crisis erupted in 2008, the politicians have been very slow to respond," a well-placed observer of the system told the Herald, alluding in particular to their commitment to cut 30,000 jobs - the result of which was a cut of 1000 positions and 10,000 early retirements. "Reluctant to fire people, they opted for the easiest way out: increase taxes to keep paying them."
The conditions insisted upon by Europe and barely delivered on by Athens, include the axing of 150,000 jobs from an 800,000-strong public sector by 2016 and a 22 per cent slice off the minimum wage - in a country in which average wages have dropped 15 per cent since 2009. The retirement age is to be lifted from 58 to 65 and restrictive closed shops that control the professions and services are to be busted.
When privately employed Greeks are not complaining about politicians and the government, they vent about tax. "Taxes are so high because almost everybody else, businessmen, professionals and companies, can evade them - and the schemes introduced to reduce evasion don't work," Dimos Charakidas, a 34-year-old finance and investment consultant told the Herald. 'The injustice then is that the government increases the tax on those who do pay."
After making social security payments commensurate with his salary over 49 years, Charakidas's father began drawing a pension of $2430 a month in 2009. "We estimate that in present day values, he must have contributed more than $1 million, but they have just cut his pension to $1580 a month."
And having dispensed with the hoary chestnuts of tax and pensions, Charakidas arrives at prices.
"Despite all the economic loss to middle and lower class families, no prices have gone down - not for food, not for medicine," Charakidas says. "The theory is that you have an internal devaluation by lowering wages and pensions and prices will fall - they haven't."
Popular support for staying in the European Monetary Union is strong - 77 per cent, according to a recent poll, which puts it just seven points above blanket opposition to the cuts proposed by Europe.
Some suspect the Greek government makes regular references to exiting Europe and what is referred to as ''re-drachmatisation'' to maintain Greek support for the euro.
"It's political blackmail to force the cost-cutting measures on us at the same time as they are reluctant to undertake the difficult discussion we have to have on reform and restructuring," a local observer told the Herald. "There is massive disappointment in the political system."
Some defend Greek honour, either by attacks on Germany, with pointed reminders of its occupation of Greece during World War II.
It might be a coincidence that a basement film house torched during Sunday's rampage in Athens was used as a Gestapo interrogation centre, but there is nothing subtle in the wall posters around Athens, depicting Chancellor Angela Merkel in a Nazi uniform or of a one-word headline on a newspaper report on Germany's role in the bailout. It read ''Nazis''.
But the more substantive attacks argue that the Greek economic crisis proves the euro zone to be an impossible construct.
"It simply cannot absorb this earthquake," says University of Athens economist Yanis Varoufakis. "Without change by Europe, disintegration is inevitable."
"The Germans have to share responsibility for the mess we are in; they did make the loans," a young woman says. "Why did they give us more and more money without questioning our ability to repay?"
Surprisingly Charakidas the consultant cuts the northerners some slack. "If you were in their shoes, you would have to see that Greece promised reforms for two years, but did nothing."
The economist Varoufakis spoke after a round of meetings with bankers and other officials in Frankfurt. Initially, he observed his interlocutors to be depressed and anxious, but after some days he claims to have detected a change in their demeanour - ''upbeat … with a spring in their step''.
"The reason for this is they now think they can amputate Greece and Portugal from the euro zone, and cauterise the stumps with no great damage to the rest of the zone.
''They would pump billions into Italy and Spain, but I fear they are profoundly mistaken, because inevitably Italy, Spain and Ireland will go too and the euro zone will have crumbled." Here he arrives at the issue of being Greek in what he perceives to be a German-controlled Europe. "The Germans are now in control; and for Greece to accept new loans to avoid defaulting on existing loans, will be worse perhaps than any other scenario that I can think of."
By Varoufakis's reckoning the proposed bailout is a disaster because it is conditional on further ''savage'' cuts to spending amidst a deep recession.
"The ECB and IMF's own feasibility studies tell us that for this plan to work and for Greece to deal with its debt mountain, we need growth of 2 per cent, but right now we are shrinking at 7 per cent."
A deeply frustrated Greek Finance Minister, Evangelos Venizelos, spoke on behalf of many of his people on Wednesday when he declared "[Greeks] are waging a battle for survival in the euro zone - there are many in the euro zone who don't want us any more".
European and US financial markets reeled, especially when the Greek President, Karolos Papoulias, chimed in, used a military setting to reprimand Venizelos's German counterpart, Wolfgang Schauble, for insulting Greece. "We all have the obligation to make the effort to get through this crisis," he began. "[But] I will not accept Mr Schauble reviling my country. I don't accept this as a Greek. Who is Mr Schauble to revile Greece? Who are the Dutch? Who are the Finns?" And then he, too, made an oblique reference to the German occupation. "We always had the pride to defend not only our own country but the freedom of Europe.''
Delieza Yiouli, who counts herself blessed to have a job as a university quality control manager, sketches a portrait of her family: burnt in a pre-crash stock exchange crunch, they strived successfully to be debt-free. But they worry that they should be investing what is left of their savings abroad, because in the event that Europe abandons Greece, Athens will revert to the drachma "and we will lose everything".
As her parents hunker down, Yiouli is increasingly isolated. "All my friends have left Greece or are thinking of leaving," the 31-year-old says. "Six have gone already - to Paris, Germany, Denmark, Holland … it's hopeless here because there are no jobs, salaries are very low, $480 a month, if you are lucky; and taxes are too high."
Her friends are among tens of thousands of young Greeks who have left in the past couple of years. An Australian ''skills expo'' in Athens late last year, which catered for 800 applicants, reportedly received 13,000 and despite Greek immigration to Australia having come off a post-war high to just a trickle of about 100 a year in the past decade, almost 2500 dual-citizen Greeks who had gone back to their homeland returned to Australia last year.
The economist Varoufakis addresses this exodus when asked where might Greeks end up in their sense of being Greek or European. "This economic free-fall is driving a new migration wave, and the people we are losing are our best-equipped, best-educated human capital.
''It means a country slowly, steadily losing its potential for creativity and recovery."
Despite anxiety about rising homelessness, most Greek families own their homes; the rental rate is one of the lowest in Europe.
The consultant Charakidas explains: "They have loans but they don't pay them and they get renewed protection from bank foreclosure every six months."
Greeks look at today's suffering and they look at their economy and they wonder how the European Union ever believed Greece could be a member. "It will take 10 or more years of reform to change Greece to make it a good fit; when we do return to growth, Greeks will debate if they want to keep that membership," the economist Petrakis says. "I'm not sure why the EU ever accepted us."
In that conversation, Greeks will focus on the truth of the northern European charge that their way of life has been too much Zorba the Greek and Mama Mia - and not enough ''Greece, the cradle of democracy''.
Here there are two views, according to Charakidas. The more popular, he explains, is for Greeks to curse their politicians for failing to tell them the consequences of their rampant borrowing. But this is something of a cop-out, he says: "The compromise was that these not-so-good politicians would be re-elected as long as they didn't impose the drastic measures needed to address the impact of the national borrowing."
He sits back, indicating that he is more inclined to a less popular, second argument: "I'm in the minority. I believe you get the government you deserve … and here that means this crisis will get much worse before it gets any better."
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