Korean Job Discussion Forums

[swinewho]

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/go-greek-for-a-week/episode-guide/series-1/episode-1

You can get the episode from the usual sources....

[comm]

Here's the problem:
The general population were told by their politicians that they could have all of these things AND a sustainable budget. I sincerely doubt that other Europeans would turn down such an offer. As with all deficit spending, politicians were buying votes from major financial institutions which had a vested interest in a high sovereign debt AND the destruction of smaller institutions which would accompany a collapse.

Having been promised a significant pension, citizens likely had little if any savings to live on during retirement and are now doomed to fail with the State. Rather than joke about how gullible the Greeks must have been to vote for lying politicians like this one, we should examine the effects of pairing social programs with deficit spending. Such an arrangement invites politicians to provide services without raising taxes, buying votes at the cost of their nation's future.

[The Floating World]

Hee hee, if you said to my Dad and his mate's you were 'going Greek' for a week, you wouldn't half get some funny looks.

[Died By Bear]

There was a pretty good (streaming) show on This American Life about Greece and it's people and why they all ran out to buy a Mercedes and a 2nd home when the Euro came to town. "It was like a manna from heaven' ... said the chemist that was being interviewed.

Airports that were never built, lakes that were never there but needed saving, companies that were only real on paper, you name it - they pulled it. You have to look at the Greek mindset and then look at the Germans. The Greeks could never in a million years be anything like the Germans. Never. They should have never been allowed in the EU to begin with.

[The Floating World]

[Died By Bear]

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/2012


A friend of mine is working in Greece. He speaks the language, married a Greek prof. He said that the Greek people are saying that the Germans OWE THEM from WW2 and that's why they don't need to pay them back. Now that's second hand info, so don't take my word for it.

Apparently, they even borrowed Euros to prep for the Olympics. At least they got a subway though, eh?

Very emotional people.

[Captain Corea]

Thanks a lot for that link. I'm interested in seeing more of this sort.

[Kuros]

The 51% Tragedy: A Majority of Young Greek Workers Are Now Unemployed

[visitorq]

[johnnyenglishteacher2]

[Fox]

[Kuros]

[thrylos]

Here's a pretty decent opinion, from a historical point of view:

Former Wall Street analyst, Michael Hudson: research professor of economics at University of Missouri;

'From the vantage point of the Irish and Greek populations (perhaps soon to be joined by those of Portugal and Spain), national parliamentary governments are to be mobilized to impose the terms of national surrender to financial planners. One almost can say that the ideal is to reduce parliaments to local puppet regimes serving the cosmopolitan financial class by using debt leverage to carve up what is left of the public domain that used to be called �the commons.� As such, we now are entering a post-medieval world of enclosures � an Enclosure Movement driven by financial law that overrides public and common law, against the common good.'

Their predations will affect us all in due time.

[ontheway]

[thrylos]

^^ Your problem in this case is that it wasn't ONLY the 'socialists' who did this...(in name only after 1985/6, when Andreas Papandreou --Father of the most recent PM-- gave up on nationalizations and a 'socialist' agenda to become a social democrat in the Western European sense of the word, not the 'revolutionary' kind)

The "conservatives" (New Democracy) were the ones in power in early 2000's, when the euro came into effect. They were the ones that hired(colluded with??) Goldman Sachs to 'cook the books' to show that Greece's deficit was below the necessary threshold to join the Euro.

Europe IS NOT the US...Your Paul-ian response is good for the US, but take another page out of Ron's book and don't try to export his ideology abroad-- apples and oranges. I still think the economist's quote is accurate-- in Greece's case, this 'enclosure' happened during the conservatives' watch, in early 2000's....It's only just now that the 'new owners' have returned and have started fencing off their 'new' properties....