Greece: Is This Where We’re Headed?
For more than a decade, my wife and I have visited Greece every year; in the past 16 months we’ve been there for more than six weeks. We saw the transition from drachmas to euros, and the chaos of preparation for the 2004 Olympics. We’ve seen the damage caused by forest fires and winter ice storms, and marveled at the stunning beauty of the islands and the rugged mainland terrain on which the ancient Greeks laid the very foundations of Western civilization.
We’ve observed first hand the demonstrators who, camped out in Athens for more than two years now, have proven role models for the assorted “occupy” protestors across the U.S. in recent months, and now presumably for Time magazine’s newest Person of the Year.
Yet we’ve also spent many weeks in the Greek equivalent of “flyover country,” listening and looking at the lives of ordinary Greeks as their country is gripped by political and economic crisis. It’s these latter folks, the real people, whose stories are most important today — their experiences both mirror and foreshadow our own here in the United States.
We love Greece. And so, in a way, it pains me to share these observations about daily life in a country where the government has long since doubled down on unsustainable spending complemented by cronyism, corruption, and a pervasive and out-of-control sense of entitlement. Now the party is ending, as it becomes apparent to all — both those who wish it to stop and those who want it to continue, consequences be damned — that the Greek government has, to use Margaret Thatcher’s prophetic phrase, simply run out of other people’s money.
What have ordinary Greeks experienced during this process? How are things working out there, when those who take well outnumber those who make? How does the productive minority feel about the state of affairs? Let me report what I have heard and seen.
The Occupation of Athens
First, let us quickly reconnoiter Athens, whose metropolitan area is home to about half of Greece’s population of roughly 11 million. Constitution Square, or Syntagma, the broad plaza in central Athens, is bordered by the Parliament and the Tomb of the Unknowns at its upper end and by three of the city’s classiest hotels along one side. At the foot of the square, along streets such as Ermou, lies a chic quarter in which fine shopping and upscale offices abound. Nearby, tourists and locals alike stroll to the shops and tavernas of the Plaka, and to the foot of the Acropolis.
For more then two years now, Syntagma has been occupied by protestors. Most call themselves “indignants,” an appellation that reflects their attitude. As with the more recent “occupy” movement in the U.S., these protestors claim allegiance to a variety of unions and left-leaning activist groups. They squat in a scruffy tent city. Their message is mixed, but is essentially a demand for more unsustainable spending. They have an audacious sense of entitlement. Their conduct is marginal at the best of times, frequently flaring into violence and vandalism.
Spray paint is ubiquitous, besmirching the marble steps leading up to the front of the Parliament, the walls and columns of the surrounding streets, and the storefronts in the nearby shopping district. The odor of urine is an unwelcome companion, not just in back alleys but along the sidewalks of major streets near the Parliament and along the walk to Hadrian’s Arch. Windows have been broken, marble walls and columns smashed.
Let’s be very clear about who is being targeted here. The shops that have been trashed are not just the chic brand names one finds in major cities all across Europe. No, these noble protestors have not confined their destruction to icons of wealth and power. They are equally destructive of small religious goods stores and assorted “Mom and Pop” establishments. They disrespect all businesses, small and large, in the same ugly fashion.
The police, union members after all, have done little to prevent the violence and property destruction. And their inaction, as we heard many say, has simply emboldened the thuggish elements among the protestors.
For ordinary Athenians the ongoing “occupation” has had a variety of unpleasant consequences. A young schoolteacher we know shops for her parents; they are afraid to leave their apartment. Other Athenian friends tell us that union thugs sympathetic to the “indignants” frequently intimidate ordinary citizens, whether they are shopping or going to work or simply out for a walk. This is understandable when one considers that the protestors’ goal is to bring everything to a halt. Quite simply, that means disrupting the public’s ability to carry on with daily life. People are told they should have known what would happen, they should stay off the streets.
The disruption, of course, is aimed at more than the general population. The strikes and other unannounced work stoppages cause electricity and water service outages frequently. Many of these are deliberately timed for late afternoon, to maximize discomfort for tourists checking into hotels, for restaurants preparing evening meals (it’s tough to cook and wash dishes without electricity or hot water), for merchants trying to make sales at the peak shopping time of day (electronic cash registers and inventory systems go “down” when the power fails), and so on.
The tourism-based economy has experienced at least two consecutive years of double-digit declines in hotel bookings. Business is bad. And guess what? That kills private sector jobs and shrinks tax revenues.
Moreover, security concerns have led to a number of very visible — not to mention annoying — changes in daily life. Women are warned not to wear expensive jewelry, and to carry their purses carefully, in downtown Athens. Banks in the same area all have “air lock” entrances; that is, customers must enter one at a time, stepping first through an outer door into an enclosed compartment where they are observed and photographed before the inner door opens to admit them to the lobby of the bank.
Excellent article coming from first hand knowledge and observations. I note your hopeful tone at the end too. Unfortunately Greece is a good example of the socialist toxic brew of government unions, unfulfilled promisse of the EU, huge unproductive government, and the insidious degradation of a country losing it’s core values and work ethic. This is no accident. This is a disease that has been diagnosed years ago but for some strange reason modern man seems incapabable of recognizing that socialism is the enemy and if eventually leads to facisim. Europeans have been so buy pissing on everyone over the past decade about how great their society was, when in reality the rot had already begun and the cascading impact of a hollowed out economy, unions, thugs, and leftists creeps and communists etc etc etc No wonder they are going down the tubes. What is left is not pretty nor is the future at all bright. Greece cannot be saved even if they go off the Euro and back to the drachma. Why? They are NON COMPETITVE in the real marketplace. Except for the accident of geography who gives a crap about Greece and then who would want to visit a polluted place like Athens now in the grip of these pathetic fools. They have no products which the world wants at any price. All you socialists go figure this out and report back. I say it looks like North Africa will be occupying Greece too in about a decade. The Greece who invented the great Athenian democracy and the Spartan warrior is dead.
“It pains me to share these observations about daily life in a country where the government has long since doubled down on unsustainable spending complemented by cronyism, corruption, and a pervasive and out-of-control sense of entitlement. Now the party is ending, as it becomes apparent to all — both those who wish it to stop and those who want it to continue, consequences be damned — that the Greek government has, to use Margaret Thatcher’s prophetic phrase, simply run out of other people’s money.”
Oh, you mean you’re NOT talking about the United States? For a moment there, I thought you were. These are the same problems we are having right now and soon the party will be over for us, too. Unless we do something to stop it right now, this is what we have to look forward to. I especially liked the part in this story where Greeks would not do a lot of jobs they thought were “beneath” them, so they import a lot of immigrants. Sound familiar, anyone? This really is where we are headed. So in 2012 we, as a nation, have a choice. Do we stop the madness and vote Conservatives to take over all of Congress and the White House, or do we go the “Greek Way” with Obama and be overwhelmed by more debt and, eventually, bankruptcy?
There is a very real choice to be made in 2012, and the direction of this country is literally in our hands. I hope we don’t blow it, again.
What we, and the Greeks, are going to find out is that pitting rich against poor is nothing compared to pitting Americans/Greeks against aliens, who don’t care about the fate of a foreign country (even if they’re residing there for the moment). Think a bunch of Mexicans/Arabs give a damn what happens to America/Greece? No, why would they? Do you care what happens to Central America? Hell, no.
Saddly Greece could soon get into a more severe Social unrest, we all forget they were “forced” to take the second bailout, not that they solved problems with the first one. But change has to come from the goverment and its electors in providing a less dependant economy driven from the states. Pensions, Jobless benefits, etc. These are simply unafordable.
Saddly Greece could be an example of the Europe to come, back some 70 years since WWII, into a place of hunger and necesity.
Excellent article. I’m very interested in the impact of Greece’s problems on ordinary Greeks. My view is that if things in both Greece and here at home do not turn around then watching Greece will give us a good indicator of what to expect when the same political-economic collapse happens here. Your article provides excellent insight. I would love to have additional links to ongoing online sources of this information.
We will soon be Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Iraq, the Balkans, Serbia, Israel, Libya, Nigeria, Belgium, Malaysia etc.
If diversity is a strength – then Yugoslavia should be a superpower… Where are they today?
The difference between Greece and the US is: That the US will soon have marshal law that the senate passed, soon to be made the law of the land, and the Fema camps that are currently looking to hire staff to open for operation.
The greeks will protest and cause problems, the US will just round us protesters up and bye bye, we being terrorists and all.
Yes, a vote to change direction is what the US needs, as long as the new prez does not follow the same game plan.
Think of the US as Greece on steroids.
The situation desribed in this article is essentially one where normal political operations have become impossible, the only solution to this is martial law and a military govt. If you look carefully at events here in the US you will see many parallels, and bear in mind that the borrowing party is still in full swing in the US, there have been no cuts at the Federal level and only minor cuts at State and municipal levels. When financial discipline is imposed the uproar will be huge, if financial discipline is not imposed the damage to peoples lives will be even more. I think that there is a very real possibility of a military coup in the US in the next decade, we will become the northern Argentina.
These things could be communicated to the American public at large, but they are not. Why is that?
Is’s abundantly clear that the people who control the media in this country don’t want this infomration to be widely known. We are all aware of that, along with the myriad of other information that, if it was honestly dispersed, would turn the American public decisively against the federal politicians and bureaucrats who are leading us down the path to becoming Greece.
So that leads to the next question. Why does the media hide the information?
To me at least, it’s clear. The media represents powerful forces that want the country to become Greece, or in other words, to revert to a way of life prior to the one that emerged in the modern western countries after the American Revolution; the way of life that changed the power equation from one of Aristocrats and Serfs to one where power is based on accomplishments.
The media is the mouthpiece of the power elite that wants to turn the clock back to 1750; to the time when they had total power, and when the people like us had no chance to control our destiny and instead served our time on earth in subservience to self-appointed masters.
As Pat Buchanan writes in “Suicide of a Superpower, “…what most modern conservatives, who dislike Nietzsche almost as much as Karl Marx and Hillary Clinton, don’t grasp is that what looks like decline, decadence and decay to conservatives appears to the champions of such trends as progress and the birth of a new civilization.” While we conservatives see our country being destroyed, the liberals see progress toward their utopia in that destruction.
Every adult in America should read Buchanan’s book. It is brilliant. It is depressing. It is truthful.
I read this piece after finishing Hannan’s “The New Road to Serfdom.” While it isn’t a great book and I don’t agree with some of his analysis, it provides some insights into the EU. Given this context, I am not at all optimistic about Greece. The folks leading Europe just don’t get it and they are rigid ideologues at least as bad as Obama. Also, I love how liberals are so dismissive when you point to Europe and say “there lies our future”. Even O’Reilly said, during the Romney interview, that we aren’t “out of control” like Greece. What do you call debt equal to GDP and borrowing 40% of the money the federal government spends? Our finances are in such bad shape that we wouldn’t qualify us to join the EU! But we aren’t “out of control”?
GREECE CAN IMPROVE WITH SIMPLE STEPS
Stop hiring government employees.
Bring back the draft, to draft from the militia that is capable of work.
If a shortage of employees actually results in a government office, draft retirees.
Monasteries and other sites of religious contemplation also engage in simple trade such as cheese or wine. Surely a religious community can be found which could collect taxes more honestly than the tax collectors.
If nothing works, they should try BACKWARDS IMPERIALISM.
–Send two top members of the Greek embassy in D.C. to the House of Representatives, petitioning to be seated as delegates from Greece, which wants to leave the EU and become a member of the US Commonwealth in Categories III or IV. An internet and news media question in Greece can take care of the plebiscite. A downloaded copy of the Greek constitution can be handed in.
Once accepted as a US Territory, the meddlers from the House of Representatives and page-turners from the FBI can sort things out.
This year, we saw widespread riots in Greece and the UK. Largely, those riots featured people who don’t want any cuts in their freebies. Those riots were destructive and even deadly. OWS shows we’re being primed for similar riots here in the US. We have millions of people who’re dependent on a vast collection of government welfare programs and who will be highly upset in any changes to life as they know it.
We have a Greece of our own – California. With their massive debt, I don’t understand how they have managed to continue without declaring bankruptcy. The only explanation is that the bondholders are betting on the federal government to bail them out, sooner or later, if worse comes to worse. Otherwise, why lend California money? California is in need of a Greece solution, to open the eyes of Americans of what will happen to the federal government, if we continue our out of control spending. The U.S. government is not “too big to fail”.
Excuse me Jarmo, but Illinois is the real Greece of America. California is our Portugal.
What’s with the photo: they play baseball in Syntagma Square?
How many times is this going to be asked. OF COURSE this is the direction America is being ushered towards. Hence the rise of the Tea Party movement.
I remember a Greek tour guide on one of the shore excursions from the Mediterranean cruise I took a few months ago. On the bus ride to Olympia, she spoke quite candidly about the state of things and reasons for it. As she put it, political candidates “bought” votes by promising more and more government jobs. This eventually swelled the public sector to the size of France’s, a country with 5 times the population of Greece! Once installed, these workers would try to justify their existence by making more and more regulations. Which paralyzed the private sector – no one wanted to invest in projects when they couldn’t be sure that the laws affecting their business would be the same by the end of the process as when they started. And so on and so on….Damn, I wish she could have been the tour guide for Obama as he stepped towards those pseudo-Olympian Greek columns in Denver back in ’08. But of course he wouldn’t have listened…sigh.
I enjoyed this article very much. I have hated Greece for years. I remember having the pleasure of telling a Greek navy captain I met at the NATO Defense College in Rome that my whole family had come to hate Greece as the result of its anti-Americanism. I hope things get worse for the Greeks. They deserve it.
I understand your sentiments and why you would feel the way you do, but hating Greeks isn’t worth it. I’ve met my fair share of un-informed Greeks/Europeans in my time too. Our scorn would be better directed at Socialists/Activist groups that have indoctrinated the youth of Greece with anti-western populist literature and an air of entitlement (+hubris) for at least the last four decades. The Marxist poison is not unique to Greece it’s global and has infected academia, media, the arts and most facets of our own US culture also.
The Obama supporter hoping the president will pay for her gas and healthcare is no different to the Greek who demands Europe pay for their lifestyle and retirement. The greatest challenge is overcoming the progressive mindset of the self proclaimed ’99%’ers. Sometimes a major recession/depression, is the only real lesson. Life is full of consequence. We either learn or we are doomed to repeat our mistakes.
Do I have high hopes for Greece? No, not immediately. Far-future, maybe they can turn their current malaise around. The country is broke, it has little in resources, a general apathy for hard work, overall accountability is lacking for any true reckoning to work and Eu policy and centralization has effectively subjugated Greeks from Greece. Their sovereignty is all but worthless. They have little recourse while they remain in the EU, and the brain-drain will continue to grow as their brightest, most enterprising individuals leave the country in droves. The influx of illegals from the ME and Africa does not help matters either, again their sovereignty is undermined by policy from Brussels.
Greece needs and economic and national cathasis, a chance to renew and start afresh. In Greece’s current state this most likely involves a hard default and leaving the Eurozone, question is do their leaders have the nous and courage to do it?
There are indeed some underlying similarities between our nations, and we’re starring down the same road of self-destruction (increasing debt, reckless spending, govt. largesse, stagflation). However, we have our sovereignty (for now), and with that we can pursue and determine our own future. Indeed we can begin to alter our trajectory next year, it’s up to us.
writing in english and using an american name doesn’t make u american TURKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
We live in very dangerous times. Greece is just one of perhaps six European nations, which on paper, can not survive. The members of the European Union have broken a fundamental rule: In exchange for the benefits of a common currency, each nation would be fiscally responsible. However every economist knew that any one nation could cheat, and lean on a disciplined neighbor, let them do the hard work. Now comes the day of reckoning. If European history is any guide, next will come a Hitler, who will blame all of the ills on those other people: Jews, Romas, etc. Mussolini came to power promising stability and trains that would run on time. Or else. Next comes militarization, then war.
However, Europe has leaned on Uncle Sam to stay alive since 1945. Uncle Sam faced down the USSR bear as Europe went to the Med and played. Europe could not defend itself today, without US money and muscle. Unfortunately for everybody, the US is now broke, war weary, and a sizeable minority also wants to play. California is worse off than Greece. The only new things are WMD, lots of extremely hard working Asians, and a bloated, unionized government payroll cohort.
We live in dangerous times.
When one watches for the inevitable consequnces of socialism, one is not surprised to see the actual resulting misery and the further unraveling of wealth and order. Europe is in the process of trying to dance along beside the grave yard, not yet willing to recognize the game is up. All of the Marxist,Fabian, and Keynseian psuedo economic fantasy comes with quite a price when market reality sets in.
My expectation is that Greece is too far gone for any sort of quick recovery. The sensible people described in the article are vastly outnumbered by parasites.
Here in America we are going to find out what the ratio of parasites to productive types is in about 10 1/2 months. My bet is that we are a lot closer to Greece than most currently suspect.
An excellent article. While I agree that we are in danger of ending up like Greece I don’t believe our situation is nearly as hopeless as some seem to think. The great thing about the United States is that we place a much higher value on the rule of law than Greece does.
Even among those who have a decent work ethic in Greece the system of bribery has become so common place that it’s simply accepted. They may complain about it but people over there who have a good work ethic still participate in the corruption. There’s a strange mindset over there that “what other people do is a problem but it’s okay if I do it.”
The bottom line is that you will never be able to get modern Greeks to adhere to the rule of law. If they don’t want to do something they simply won’t. It’s how the modern Greek culture works (or doesn’t, as the case may be) and even when it leads to collapse they will not change. Their history since the end of WWII has been “Every man for himself,” a mindset that I believe started during the civil war between the royalists and the communists.
Democracy and Power 101: Government is Power
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse. -James Madison, Speech in the Virginia State Convention of 1829-1830
Government, in its last analysis, is organized force.
– Woodrow Wilson
Government within its jurisdiction has a monopoly on power. Government has the power to tax and enforce the collection of taxes, the power to regulate, the power to incarcerate and even take the life of a person.
Every act of government has an element of power, which is executed by force or coercion. Every government rule and regulation involves compliance with the power of government. For example, public education is overwhelmingly accepted as a public good. However, all aspects of public education are enforced by the power of government: taxation, compulsory attendance, jurisdiction, and curriculum.
“The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.”
George Washington
Greece, plus all of western Europe, and the USA are examples of a very simple truth: When you protect fools from the folly of their actions you fill the world with fools. We are on a ship of fools, soon we will be floundering on the shoals of depression.
“Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
Ronald Reagan
The Guardian has reported that 60,000 Italians a year have left in your time frame and that last year almost 10% of Greeks doctors left the country.
The Eurozone countries most affected by the crisis are losing citizens at an accelerated rate. One can’t help but wonder how immigration from the Third World has undercut salaries and undercut tax and economic revenues by the presence of underground economies that send their disposable income out of the country to support their families.
The Vietnam gov’t turns a blind eye to smuggling people out of the country because of the enormous amount of revenue it receives from those immigrants. Europe has shot itself in the foot with its immigration policy.
In America I saw a story about jobless in Denver and asked myself how many jobless there were in Denver and how many illegal aliens. The idea illegals don’t affect the American economy in a negative way is ridiculous. It’s not rocket science: turn our illegals and jobs will appear with higher wages.
Greece is not alone in Europe and it seems that with the enormous sum just borrowed by EU banks from the central bank that worse is on the way, just put off at ever higher interest rates. This is worse than robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The bottom line is that the high birth rates in the Third World together with corrupt or casual policies that don’t address the realities of the Third World are bringing down the West, economically, culturally and economically.