Posted on 07/03/2015 8:10:40 PM PDT by Rockitz
Greece in teetering on the brink of ruin - and it is hard not to feel sympathy for the pensioners crying in the street and the mothers facing empty supermarket shelves.
Yet those reading a new book may find themselves feeling a little less compassionate towards the Greeks. It reveals an eye-popping catalogue of benefits scams and tax avoidance schemes that have robbed the public purse.
James Angelos' The Full Catastrophe: Travels among the New Greek Ruins lays bare the corruption which filtered through all levels of society - from the islanders who pretended to be blind, to the families who forgot to register their parents' death and the doctors who 'earn' just €12,000 a year - yet live in Athens' most exclusive neighbourhood.
It was the rumours of an 'island of the blind' which first bought Angelos, a journalist, to Greece in 2011.
He had heard that on Zakynthos, something like two per cent of the population were registered blind.
All was not quite how it seemed, however, and it transpired that 61 of the 680 'blind' residents were quite happily driving around the island.
In fact, an astonishing 498 of those 680 were not blind at all - or even partially sighted.
But being 'blind' had its advantages - in particular, the €724 paid in benefits once every two months, and a reduction in utility bills.
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(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Antinous
When bankers foolishly keep lending to spendthrift people and governments, they lose money and go broke, as they SHOULD! The only reasons theses fools kept over lending to Greece was that they EXPECTED to be bailed out. When bad behavior gets rewarded, we get more and more of it, which is exactly what we have seen in Greece, Portugal, Iceland, Italy and France.
The “Greek bailouts” have really been bank bailouts, not Greek people bailouts. The Greeks just had billions of new debt piled on top of excess debt they already couldn’t manage in 2012. It is like they were given new credit cards to keep making payments on already maxed out credit cards.
The ECB couldn’t care less about the Greek people. What they care about is the German and French banks that allowed this mess in the first place. And, now Angela Merkel cares about herself, because the billions in bad bank loans that the ECB bought from German and French banks, with no taxpayer approval, is in a slow motion train wreck on her watch.
Congrats...nicely done!
The U.S. has tax rates more than sufficient to make many businesses unprofitable to run. And I'm sure the rapid increase in the disability rolls represents fraud and not some mysterious affliction affecting Americans.
There is no doubt in my mind that the U.S. will face the same fate as Greece. It is only a question of time. And when the time comes, millions of Americans will be lined up outside our banks wondering what happened.
It’s like looking at our future.
The official tax rates are irrelevant. They could be 95%... or 5%... it would have absolutely no real-world consequences.
As Jeff Goldblum famously said in "Jurassic Park," "Life finds a way." When it comes to paying taxes, that also applies to the Greeks.
Regards,
The ones I feel sorry for are the “migrants.” They came from Africa, looking for all the free benefits from the EU. Now, they are in Greece, and Greece is about to go bankrupt - no free handouts for the “migrants.”
Wow. Talk about getting screwed!
Now they will be forced to move to another country in Europe where they can get free stuff.
Aren’t the Greeks noted for being in arrears?
So, the Greeks finally ran out of other people’s money.
Here in NJ, this is the present: Few jobs, high costs, countless “For Sale” signs/foreclosures, huge government workforce, and a huge welfare population driving late-model cars...
When food pantries in one of the wealthiest counties in the US are complaining about running out of food, it doesn’t bode well.
It takes two to tango. There is nothing non-conservative about wanting businesses, and their shareholders, to feel the effects of their bad business decisions, and not be bailed out by governments as being too big to fail. This just allows the same sort of bad decision making to occur again and again. A true free market demands that businesses, which presumably these banks are, be allowed to fail. The best survive and the losers disappear. Unfortunately, his dynamic has been significantly erased in the banking sector.
Sure; that is why the “War on Poverty” created a permanently-dependent class that hasn’t seen a W-2 in generations...
What is helping to bring matters to a head here in the US is that this has spread to the descendants of the WASPs as well; we tolerated it when it was urban blacks, even the illegals, but now whites are in on the game. The gravy train has gone off the rails.
From my limited experience, I’d say 75% of children born today in the US (of all colors/ethnicities) are “golden ticket welfare bastards” conceived to provide a life of leisure for one or both parents.
no, these are largely EU Central Banks.....not private banks...though some money is private bond money.
And I’m not exonerating the EU, but to harp on the EU’s problems instead of the Greek greed and naivete, much like our own “gimme” citizens here, is to focus your question to Mrs. Lincoln on “other than the shooting, how was the play?”
“A whole island pretending to be blind...: New book reveals how Greeks cheated THEMSELVES into ruin”....
And the liberal U.S. population will keep their heads in the sand while it happens here as well.
There are a few factoids of truth in what you said...nothing I didn’t know....but again, I stand behind the fact that you’ve written many words on this and have yet to blame the Greek people and the Greek politicians one iota -and that’s odd, that’s not proportional, it’s weird.
Are you Greek? Is this hitting a tender spot?
And THIS is the salient point, yes.....and BTW, we saw a good analogy for this as the UAW almost ruined our auto industry.
WIC provides food for pregnant women and infants. The school lunch program covers the breakfast & lunch of pre-school and school age kids (and some schools are extending this to non-school days and summer vacations). Meals-on-wheels delivers all 3 meals to the elderly. And greatest of all EBT cards (food-stamps) are now covering 46 million.
Who is left who actually needs "food pantries" to feed them? How are these "food pantries" not also being scammed by those taking the food and/or scams of those running them?
They don’t have their heads in the sand; they are usually profiting from it financially, and certainly politically.
In the book “The Godfather”, Don Corleone describes how so many of their countrymen allowed “rings to be put through their noses” when they arrived in America - they were basically livestock for the wealthy. Our government-dependent population is very much the same; they have turned over all decisions to their masters.
Here in NJ we have a large population that until recently was well-off, that is now unable to pay their bills. Most probably don’t qualify for welfare etc., but are in very real danger of losing their homes.
Someone I know in England is getting govn. “disabilitiy” money saying she is an alcoholic and can’t work. It is true she is an alcoholic but that is her choice to drink until she passes out on the couch.
In this country, could I drink lovely Amaretto until I’m tipsy, then apply for SS disability? If you say yes, pardon me while I fill my glass. :o)
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