Tag: Greece

Wanna See Our Future?

Hundreds of people jostled for free vegetables handed out by farmers in a symbolic protest earlier on Wednesday, trampling one man and prompting an outcry over the growing desperation created by economic crisis.

Images of people struggling to seize bags of tomatoes and leeks thrown from a truck dominated television, triggering a bout of soul-searching over the new depths of poverty in the debt-laden country.

“These images make me angry. Angry for a proud people who have no food to eat, who can’t afford to keep warm, who can’t make ends meet,” said Kostas Barkas, a lawmaker from the leftist Syriza party.

Other lawmakers from across the political spectrum decried the images “of people on the brink of despair” and the sense of “sadness for a proud people who have ended up like this”.

People have seen their living standards crumble as the country faces its sixth year of recession that has driven unemployment to record highs.

Greece has been forced to push through painful wage and pension cuts demanded by its European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders as the price of bailout funds to avert bankruptcy.

FARMERS ANGRY

Greek ships sailed again from the busy ports of Piraeus and Rafina on Wednesday after the government ordered seamen to end a six-day strike aimed at securing wages and union rights.

At dawn, smiling passengers who had been stranded at Piraeus carried their luggage across the port, relieved to be boarding the ships.

But in northern and central Greece, farmers protesting high production costs and fuel prices placed their tractors on the sides of highways, threatening to block the country’s main road artery if not satisfied.

In the capital, bus and trolleybus workers held a four-hour work stoppage, as did journalists at state broadcasters.

The free food handout in Athens began peacefully as hundreds of Greeks lined up in advance outside the agriculture ministry, where protesting farmers laid out tables piled high with produce, giving away 50 metric tonnes (55.11 tons) of produce in under two hours.

Tensions flared when the stalls ran out of produce and dozens of people – some carrying small children – rushed to a truck and shoved each other out of the way in the competition for what was left.

One man was treated for injuries after being trampled when he fell to the ground in the commotion.

“I never imagined that I would end up here,” said Panagiota Petropoulos, 65, who struggles to get by on her 530-euro monthly pension while paying 300 euros in rent.

“I can’t afford anything, not even at the fruit market. Everything is expensive, prices of everything are going up while our income is going down and there are no jobs.”

via Reuters.

I’m willing to consider any logical and rational explanation as to why this won’t happen here.  But frankly, I don’t see how it can be any other way.

Our debt to GDP ratio is now just over 100%  in that we have over $16 trillion in debt and a estimate 2012 GDP of $15.8 trillion.

As recently as 2007 Greece’s ratio was a mere 105.1.  Today it’s 157.  How did this happen so quickly?  Because the debt kept growing faster that the economy was expanding; they economy was actually contracting for awhile (as was ours.)

Spend a few minutes over at Shadow Government Statistics and you’ll see that sound economists believe this is exactly what is happening here.  Our debt keeps growing and growing and the economy is actually shrinking.

This wouldn’t be the first time your government was lying to you.

Tough times ahead.  Plan accordingly.

Spain – The New Greece (and we’re next)

Spanish trade unions are holding a general strike across the country today to protest new labor reforms, and by all accounts it has been a largely peaceful protest.

While for the most part conditions on the ground are relatively normal, photos from Madrid, Barcelona, and Pamplona indicated that some young protestors are escalating the angst, painting symbols supporting anarchy on walls, and causing small bouts of destruction.

Such events are reminiscent of similar protests in Syntagma Square, Greece, where groups of youthful protestors turned riotous despite generally calm strikes.

Two major points give us particular trepidation: the fact that these and similar protests closely resemble early protests in Greece a few years ago—when almost no one realistically considered the possibility of a Greek debt restructuring—and the sheer scale of Spanish youth unemployment.

As in Greece, young people have been seen as responsible for escalating peaceful political protests to violent riots. Spain’s unemployment data suggest that protests there could eventually be much larger—nearly half of young people are already unemployed and they face a tough future and a shrinking social safety net amid economic contraction and austerity measures.

via Business Insider.

For sixty years liberals and academics have been telling us to be more like Europe.  This has been a mistake.

The only way for our youth (especially minority youth) is to improve our schools, reduce government waste, and grow the private sector so our newly educated children can get jobs.  But our schools are current not providing the education needed in order to succeed.  That needs to change.

In the meantime… we need the unions, religion, politicians, and community organizers to begin an honest dialog — toning down the language (e.g. denouncing the #KillZimmerman hashtag) and finding productive ways to work together instead of just yelling at each other.

Countries Move to Isolate the U.S.

Are other countries planning for a U.S. demise?

“I was in Australia earlier this month and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you’re not dragged down with it. It is faintly surreal to be sitting in paneled offices lined by formal portraits listening to eminent persons who assume the collapse of the dominant global power is a fait accompli. . . . Greece’s total debt is a few rinky-dink billions, a rounding error in the average Obama budget. Only America is spending trillions. The 2011 budget deficit, for example, is about the size of the entire Russian economy. By 2010, the Obama administration was issuing about a hundred billion dollars of treasury bonds every month — or, to put it another way, Washington is dependent on the bond markets being willing to absorb an increase of U.S. debt equivalent to the GDP of Canada or India — every year. And those numbers don’t take into account the huge levels of personal debt run up by Americans. College-debt alone is over a trillion dollars, or the equivalent of the entire South Korean economy — tied up just in one small boutique niche market of debt which barely exists in most other developed nations.”

Same page there’s this:

I’m a Canadian, and you might be interested to know that the Harper government are working very hard (in the background) along the same lines as the Aussies. They are doing everything possible to diversify Canada’s export markets away from the US as fast as possible, for example the pipeline to move Alberta and Saskatchewan oil to world markets via the sea, not to the US. Ditto aeroplanes, rail cars, fibre-optic electronics, robotics, lumber, and a wide range of other products.

The quiet back-room planning is driven by the alarming extent to which the Obama administration has already deeply damaged the US economy (compared to Canada) with its policies, actions, and insane deficits. The Harper government are now moving to shut down US environmentalist activity in Canada — “We’re not going to be your National Park.” says the PM — and are already developping scenarios for maximum-possible disconnect from the States in the event Obama and his crew are returned to power in the coming elections.

via Instapundit.

Hummm… not good.  Not good.

Athens Burns

[B]uildings burned across central Athens and violence spread around the country.

Cinemas, cafes, shops and banks were set ablaze in central Athens as black-masked protesters fought riot police outside parliament.

State television reported the violence spread to the tourist islands of Corfu and Crete, the northern city of Thessaloniki and towns in central Greece. Shops were looted in the capital where police said 34 buildings were ablaze.

via Reuters.

Does anyone think this cannot, will not, happen here?