Showing posts with label greece. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greece. Show all posts
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Monday, June 18, 2012
Greek Elections Fuel Fears Of 'Social Explosion'
Greek Elections Fuel Fears Of 'Social Explosion':
'via Blog this'
ATHENS, June 18 (Reuters) - Pro-bailout party New Democracy may have come first in Sunday's Greek election but the radical left anti-austerity SYRIZA bloc was celebrating like the real winner well into the warm Athens night.
The election exposed a struggling nation deeply divided over whether to implement a harsh austerity package, the price for receiving a total of 240 billion euros in bailout money from the European Union and IMF to save its near-bankrupt economy.
"My biggest fear is of a social explosion," said a senior adviser to the country's likely next prime minister, New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras.
"If there is no change in the policy mix, we're going to have a social explosion even if you bring Jesus Christ to govern this country."
According to official figures with 99.9 percent of the votes counted, Samaras's conservative New Democracy party won just 29.7 percent of the vote, only 2.7 percentage points more than SYRIZA, which almost doubled its support from the previous election held on May 6.
When the votes for Greece's other anti-bailout parties, ranging from the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn to the Marxist-Leninist KKE, are added to SYRIZA's tally, up to 52 percent of Greeks cast ballots against the terms of the international deal.
New Democracy supporters had initially slumped despairing in their seats at the party's plush new headquarters as exit polls showed less than half a percentage point separating them from SYRIZA, only to cheer up as official results showing a better performance trickled in.
Even then, celebrations were muted. "What is there for us to celebrate ?" a member of Samaras's inner circle said. "Our country is in such a deep crisis."
The streets of central Athens are scarred with repeated waves of protests, some hospitals are running short of vital medicines, thousands of businesses have closed, beggars and rough sleepers are multiplying and suicides are rising.
New Democracy's Samaras now faces the awkward task of convincing the centre-left PASOK movement to join a coalition charged with implementing highly unpopular spending cuts and privatisations, while the economy nosedives.
Under the terms of the international bailout, the new government must fire up to 150,000 civil servants, slash spending by 11 billion euros this month, sell off a swathe of state-owned companies, improve tax collection and open closed professions to competition.
Once Greece's ruling party, PASOK's support collapsed to just 12.3 percent in Sunday's vote, giving the two pro-bailout parties just 40 percent of the popular vote, not a strong mandate for austerity.
A PASOK-New Democracy coalition is guaranteed a parliamentary majority thanks to a quirk of Greek electoral law which gives the winning party a bonus of 50 extra seats. But that will not win it the argument on Greece's streets.
The Greek economy is expected to shrink by 5 percent this year after contracting 7 percent last year and unemployment is running at almost 23 percent. Many economists believe that the harsh austerity measures will only make matters worse in the short term.
Full article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/18/greek-elections_n_1604838.html
'via Blog this'
ATHENS, June 18 (Reuters) - Pro-bailout party New Democracy may have come first in Sunday's Greek election but the radical left anti-austerity SYRIZA bloc was celebrating like the real winner well into the warm Athens night.
The election exposed a struggling nation deeply divided over whether to implement a harsh austerity package, the price for receiving a total of 240 billion euros in bailout money from the European Union and IMF to save its near-bankrupt economy.
"My biggest fear is of a social explosion," said a senior adviser to the country's likely next prime minister, New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras.
"If there is no change in the policy mix, we're going to have a social explosion even if you bring Jesus Christ to govern this country."
According to official figures with 99.9 percent of the votes counted, Samaras's conservative New Democracy party won just 29.7 percent of the vote, only 2.7 percentage points more than SYRIZA, which almost doubled its support from the previous election held on May 6.
When the votes for Greece's other anti-bailout parties, ranging from the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn to the Marxist-Leninist KKE, are added to SYRIZA's tally, up to 52 percent of Greeks cast ballots against the terms of the international deal.
New Democracy supporters had initially slumped despairing in their seats at the party's plush new headquarters as exit polls showed less than half a percentage point separating them from SYRIZA, only to cheer up as official results showing a better performance trickled in.
Even then, celebrations were muted. "What is there for us to celebrate ?" a member of Samaras's inner circle said. "Our country is in such a deep crisis."
The streets of central Athens are scarred with repeated waves of protests, some hospitals are running short of vital medicines, thousands of businesses have closed, beggars and rough sleepers are multiplying and suicides are rising.
New Democracy's Samaras now faces the awkward task of convincing the centre-left PASOK movement to join a coalition charged with implementing highly unpopular spending cuts and privatisations, while the economy nosedives.
Under the terms of the international bailout, the new government must fire up to 150,000 civil servants, slash spending by 11 billion euros this month, sell off a swathe of state-owned companies, improve tax collection and open closed professions to competition.
Once Greece's ruling party, PASOK's support collapsed to just 12.3 percent in Sunday's vote, giving the two pro-bailout parties just 40 percent of the popular vote, not a strong mandate for austerity.
A PASOK-New Democracy coalition is guaranteed a parliamentary majority thanks to a quirk of Greek electoral law which gives the winning party a bonus of 50 extra seats. But that will not win it the argument on Greece's streets.
The Greek economy is expected to shrink by 5 percent this year after contracting 7 percent last year and unemployment is running at almost 23 percent. Many economists believe that the harsh austerity measures will only make matters worse in the short term.
Full article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/18/greek-elections_n_1604838.html
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
Greece's super-rich maintain lavish lifestyles and low profiles | Digg Topnews
Greece's super-rich maintain lavish lifestyles and low profiles | Digg Topnews
Three days before Greeks cast their ballots in a make-or-break election, their country could not be more divided. Here there is no talk of the pain of crisis – the only topic of conversation elsewhere in Greek society. The destitution and despair of Athens is a world away – and for many quite clearly it is best kept that way.
"Greeks brought this crisis upon themselves," said a London-based shipowner upholding the sector's vow of silence by insisting on anonymity. "They allowed crooks and corruption to prosper."
Almost 100 years after it was built by a tobacco tycoon, the elegant Poseidonion remains the favourite playground for Athenian high society. The former King Constantine, who was schooled on the island, is a frequent visitor. Tonight, as the crowd sits on its terrace sipping cocktails, staff with long-handled brooms clean the bows of their mega-yachts moored in front of the hotel. A tiny pony takes their children – all guarded by nannies – around the plaza. While locals fret that Spetses, already known as the "new Monaco", is at risk of becoming a "club for the rich" there are also obvious payoffs.
Christina Ioannidis, who runs a high-end clothes shop on the island, says one of them is that the crisis has not affected her at all. "If truth be told, business couldn't be better," she says, knocking on wood. "I've had to employ an assistant all year round because there's such demand, even in winter."
Pumping money into the economy of Spetses – or the islands from which they hail – is a far cry from the world of philanthropy with which Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos and other fabled shipowners were associated. Known as the Golden Greeks, both men left large bequests in the form of charitable foundations. The Niarchos foundation recently gave €100m (£81m) to help civic society fight the crisis's many ills, with the aid including food vouchers for the children of the new poor and support for organisations dealing with the homeless.
But since the outbreak of Greece's runaway debt crisis, its moneyed class has been notable more by its absence than presence. Oligarchs, who made vast fortunes cornering the oil, gas, construction and banking industries, as well as the media, have been eerily silent – often going out of their way to be as low a profile as possible.
Greek shipowners, who have gained from their profits being tax-free and who control at least 15% of the world's merchant freight, have also remained low-key. With their wealth offshore and highly secretive, the estimated 900 families who run the sector have the largest fleet in the world. As Athens' biggest foreign currency earner after tourism, the industry remitted more than $175bn (£112bn) to the country in untaxed earnings over the past decade. Greece's debt currently stands at €280bn.
As ordinary Greeks have been thrown into ever greater poverty by wage and pension cuts and a seemingly endless array of new and higher taxes, their wealthy compatriots have been busy either whisking their money out of Greece or snapping up prime real estate abroad.
An estimated €8bn flowed out of the Greek banking system in May as speculation over the country's possible exit from the eurozone mounted. Another €4bn was reported to have been withdrawn in the last two weeks – on top of an estimated €20bn since the start of the crisis in late 2009. Stories of rich Greeks sending their wives and best friends on "shopping missions" to remove secret hoards kept in banks in Switzerland and Cyprus are legion.
"At a time when Greece, more than ever, needs symbolic gestures from its rich citizens, they seem to be doing practically nothing to help their country," said Theodore Pelagidis, professor of economic analysis at Piraeus University.
"We need to see cool-headed entrepreneurs not only complain about bureaucracy and corruption but do something for Greece."
In an atmosphere that has become increasingly aggravated between the haves and have-nots, displays of wealth are clearly being downplayed, especially in Athens, where the majority of the 11 million-strong Greek population lives and which has been worst hit by the belt-tightening.
Over the past year, Pelagidis said a growing number of very wealthy Greeks had even taken to inviting academics, like himself, to their mansions, in the capital's leafy northern suburbs, to be apprised of the situation. Lectures in particular demand were political, economic and historical in nature.
"They are so cut off they know nothing," he said. "I'm not sure whether it's a case of the spoiled and uneducated rich trying to overcome their remorse, or a case of them simply wanting to fight their boredom but after going once I decided never to go again. I came away thinking it was like a form of psychotherapy for them."
What is sure, however, is that the super-rich appear to have come up with contingency plans to disperse their wealth as the crisis deepens. In recent months, acting on a trend that began soon after Greece's debt woes erupted, a growing number have been snapping up property in London. Increasingly, many have made their way to the door of 88 (London) Ltd, a high-end property brokerage run by Panos Koutsogiannakis. Suddenly the Greek Australian has found himself investing in properties worth £5m and more.
full story: http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/greece_s_super_rich_maintain_lavish_lifestyles_and_low_profiles
Three days before Greeks cast their ballots in a make-or-break election, their country could not be more divided. Here there is no talk of the pain of crisis – the only topic of conversation elsewhere in Greek society. The destitution and despair of Athens is a world away – and for many quite clearly it is best kept that way.
"Greeks brought this crisis upon themselves," said a London-based shipowner upholding the sector's vow of silence by insisting on anonymity. "They allowed crooks and corruption to prosper."
Almost 100 years after it was built by a tobacco tycoon, the elegant Poseidonion remains the favourite playground for Athenian high society. The former King Constantine, who was schooled on the island, is a frequent visitor. Tonight, as the crowd sits on its terrace sipping cocktails, staff with long-handled brooms clean the bows of their mega-yachts moored in front of the hotel. A tiny pony takes their children – all guarded by nannies – around the plaza. While locals fret that Spetses, already known as the "new Monaco", is at risk of becoming a "club for the rich" there are also obvious payoffs.
Christina Ioannidis, who runs a high-end clothes shop on the island, says one of them is that the crisis has not affected her at all. "If truth be told, business couldn't be better," she says, knocking on wood. "I've had to employ an assistant all year round because there's such demand, even in winter."
Pumping money into the economy of Spetses – or the islands from which they hail – is a far cry from the world of philanthropy with which Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos and other fabled shipowners were associated. Known as the Golden Greeks, both men left large bequests in the form of charitable foundations. The Niarchos foundation recently gave €100m (£81m) to help civic society fight the crisis's many ills, with the aid including food vouchers for the children of the new poor and support for organisations dealing with the homeless.
But since the outbreak of Greece's runaway debt crisis, its moneyed class has been notable more by its absence than presence. Oligarchs, who made vast fortunes cornering the oil, gas, construction and banking industries, as well as the media, have been eerily silent – often going out of their way to be as low a profile as possible.
Greek shipowners, who have gained from their profits being tax-free and who control at least 15% of the world's merchant freight, have also remained low-key. With their wealth offshore and highly secretive, the estimated 900 families who run the sector have the largest fleet in the world. As Athens' biggest foreign currency earner after tourism, the industry remitted more than $175bn (£112bn) to the country in untaxed earnings over the past decade. Greece's debt currently stands at €280bn.
As ordinary Greeks have been thrown into ever greater poverty by wage and pension cuts and a seemingly endless array of new and higher taxes, their wealthy compatriots have been busy either whisking their money out of Greece or snapping up prime real estate abroad.
An estimated €8bn flowed out of the Greek banking system in May as speculation over the country's possible exit from the eurozone mounted. Another €4bn was reported to have been withdrawn in the last two weeks – on top of an estimated €20bn since the start of the crisis in late 2009. Stories of rich Greeks sending their wives and best friends on "shopping missions" to remove secret hoards kept in banks in Switzerland and Cyprus are legion.
"At a time when Greece, more than ever, needs symbolic gestures from its rich citizens, they seem to be doing practically nothing to help their country," said Theodore Pelagidis, professor of economic analysis at Piraeus University.
"We need to see cool-headed entrepreneurs not only complain about bureaucracy and corruption but do something for Greece."
In an atmosphere that has become increasingly aggravated between the haves and have-nots, displays of wealth are clearly being downplayed, especially in Athens, where the majority of the 11 million-strong Greek population lives and which has been worst hit by the belt-tightening.
Over the past year, Pelagidis said a growing number of very wealthy Greeks had even taken to inviting academics, like himself, to their mansions, in the capital's leafy northern suburbs, to be apprised of the situation. Lectures in particular demand were political, economic and historical in nature.
"They are so cut off they know nothing," he said. "I'm not sure whether it's a case of the spoiled and uneducated rich trying to overcome their remorse, or a case of them simply wanting to fight their boredom but after going once I decided never to go again. I came away thinking it was like a form of psychotherapy for them."
What is sure, however, is that the super-rich appear to have come up with contingency plans to disperse their wealth as the crisis deepens. In recent months, acting on a trend that began soon after Greece's debt woes erupted, a growing number have been snapping up property in London. Increasingly, many have made their way to the door of 88 (London) Ltd, a high-end property brokerage run by Panos Koutsogiannakis. Suddenly the Greek Australian has found himself investing in properties worth £5m and more.
full story: http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/greece_s_super_rich_maintain_lavish_lifestyles_and_low_profiles
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Did Social Over Spending Cause the Euro-Crisis?
Germany ok when countries were driving up the debt but not willing to help them get out of it. They are trying to destroy the safety net. Seems to be an international movement to destroy the lifestyle of working people.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Greece Still Going Broke, Now Faster And With More Broke-Ness
Greece Still Going Broke, Now Faster And With More Broke-Ness:
'via Blog this'
'via Blog this'
If you could rely on anything in the past couple of years, it is that Greece is always going broke. Now it turns out that Greece is going broke faster than almost anybody expected.
The Greek government is struggling to collect enough tax revenue to cover its immediate bills, the New York Timesreported on Wednesday, leaving it about 1.7 billion euros shy of its budget goals. It may soon need to freeze government salaries and pensions, temporarily halt imports of food, fuel and medicine, or dip into cash intended to help Greece's gutted banks, the Times writes.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Monday, May 7, 2012
Those Revolting Europeans - NYTimes.com
Those Revolting Europeans - NYTimes.com:
'via Blog this'
'via Blog this'
The French are revolting. The Greeks, too. And it’s about time.
Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing.
Needless to say, that’s not what you heard from the usual suspects in the run-up to the elections. It was actually kind of funny to see the apostles of orthodoxy trying to portray the cautious, mild-mannered François Hollande as a figure of menace. He is “rather dangerous,” declared The Economist, which observed that he “genuinely believes in the need to create a fairer society.” Quelle horreur!
What is true is that Mr. Hollande’s victory means the end of “Merkozy,” the Franco-German axis that has enforced the austerity regime of the past two years. This would be a “dangerous” development if that strategy were working, or even had a reasonable chance of working. But it isn’t and doesn’t; it’s time to move on. Europe’s voters, it turns out, are wiser than the Continent’s best and brightest.
Greek neonazi leader gives Hitler-style speech after the elections
LP - The right wing in Greece rises out of the economic ashes.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Europe Braces Itself as Greek Voters Head to Polls | Common Dreams
Europe Braces Itself as Greek Voters Head to Polls | Common Dreams:
'via Blog this'
A man picks up a ballot in the northern port city of Thessaloniki (The Independent)Greece's two main parties, the socialist Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and the New Democracy conservatives, are expected to suffer in the parliamentary poll as voters have continued to express widespread anger over thier imposed austerity measures and the continued handling of the economic crisis.
'via Blog this'
Today Greeks go to the polls for an early general election, which may result in turmoil, threatening to reinvigorate the Euro-zone crisis.
A man picks up a ballot in the northern port city of Thessaloniki (The Independent)Greece's two main parties, the socialist Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and the New Democracy conservatives, are expected to suffer in the parliamentary poll as voters have continued to express widespread anger over thier imposed austerity measures and the continued handling of the economic crisis.Both PASOK and New Democracy want to continue to work with the unpopular "troika" of the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank, continuing the austerity path. This has assured support for a plethora of anti-austerity politicians from all sides of the political spectrum.
"We need to break from this corrupt political system of lackeys of foreign imperialism," Petros Alachmar, 31, an activist from the far-left Syriza party, told the AFP news agency. "We have had enough of austerity measures
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
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