A letter I received via email. Interesting. Is it true? Don't know. But it is thought provoking:
I AM GREEK AND I AM GOING TO EXPLAIN GREECE TO YOU
A few weeks ago, I read a beautifully written seven page article in Vanity Fair, about the crisis in Greece. Unfortunately 80% of it was untrue. However, there was an interview that summed up the average Greek's experience pretty well.
“….An Athenian construction company had built seven giant apartment buildings and sold off nearly 1,000 condominiums in the heart of the city. Its corporate tax bill honestly computed came to 15 million euros, but the company had paid nothing at all. Zero. To evade taxes it had done several things. First, it never declared itself a corporation; second, it employed one of the dozens of companies that do nothing but create fraudulent receipts for expenses never incurred and then, when the tax collector stumbled upon the situation, offered him a bribe. The tax collector blew the whistle and referred the case to his bosses—whereupon he found himself being tailed by a private investigator, and his phones tapped. In the end the case was resolved, with the construction company paying 2,000 euros. “After that I was taken off all tax investigations,” said the tax collector, “because I was good at it.”
[link to
www.vanityfair.com]
Another huge misconception I keep hearing is that Greeks do not pay their taxes and they retire at 50. Reality be told, the retirement age in Greece is 65. While being the most expensive country in the Eurozone, Greece also has the lowest income, family income is between 15,000 to 35,000 Euro. Average tax is between 6,000 and 9,000. If they don't pay tax, they go to jail.
An example of how “Greece kills her children” is freelancing. A freelancer MUST pay mandatory insurance. 200 Euros a month for new freelancers, 1,200 a month the closer they get to retirement age. Don't pay? Go to jail.
The only people who do not pay taxes are a small number of 150,000 people (which are mostly, but not limited to, doctors, lawyers, and engineers). These people have been declaring between 9,000 to 12,000 while having millions in their bank accounts.
Bribery is huge in Greece, mostly done in the public sector. Politicians give money to people in exchange for political support and protection. Add to mix, people were being forced (and some choosing to) pay off “bribery fees” to bypass complicated bureaucracy and having documents forged. Even bribing a judge to rule in somebody's favor, no matter how guilty they are, is not uncommon.
Another misconception is that Greece is a Socialist country, and I have to laugh every time I hear somebody parrot to me what they have heard of TV.
The current political party (PASOK) was formed under the pretense of Socialism. But in reality what is infront of us is a mafia-style party. But we must strep back to understand.
In the 1980's Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou (today's current Prime Minister’s father) took out extreme loans to bribe people to support his political party.
In 1999 then PM Kostas Simitis went on TV telling people to invest in the stock market. Fraud companies started popping up everywhere, but then there was the crash; the stock market suddenly fell less then 20% - its original index value. Many people lost their savings while others found themselves indebted to banks.
There was a sudden surge of credit cards, which previously was hard and rare to get. This kept debt increasing in the private sector.
It was time to enter the Erouzone with deception with CDS and Golman Schacs moving debts toward later years to produce a low enough deficit in order to enter the Eurozone. They called this “creative logistics”.
Now to the most recent events that led to the IMF. After the crisis in the U.S., Greece was starting to shake a little bit, but not bad because the economy was isolated. Andreas Papandreou's son, George Papandreou kept making attempts to overthrow the New Democracy government, all the while an extremely overpriced Olympic Games was adding to the debt.
The moment George Papandreou became PM, he and his friends organized the purchase of 1.2 billion Euros of CDS through the Hellenic Post Bank. Then he and his minister of economics toured the world, spreading rumors that the Greek economy is like the Titanic and ready to collapse.
In cooperation with the bank of Greece (which is very much like the Federal Reserve) they changed the CDS laws from T3 to T10. This meant: depending on the course of CDS, the speculators could cancel CDS purchases; the original 3 days was moved to 10. This gave them the time to maximize profit with out depositing one single Euro. Therefor, they launched “spreads” (bond payoff difference from the Germans) from about 120 to over 800. That meant from every bond, the Greek country would have to pay an extra 7% of interest on all spectators.
George Papandreou managed to turn a small crisis of debt into a massive market crisis. And while doing this, he was working to bring the IMF into the Eurozone. And this is how the IMF came to Greece.
Just because Greece doesn't have its own currency, there has to be an inside deflation. Within one year of being in the IMF, GDP increased rate went from +3.1% annually to -6%. This can be compared to the Great Depression of the United States.
A 110 billion loan from the IMF and EU were given to convert bonds to mortgage enabled national loans on which Greece resigns sovereignty.
the IMF is demanding control over the country’s economy so they may be strictly in charge of a privatization program that will sell off Greece’s public assets and funell proceeds to the banks.
Greece is to sell off (if not has already done so now) all major companies, the Hellenic Postbank, utility companies, the Thesslakanki and Piraus ports, beaches, islands- all for pennies for the dollar. As I type this, Steve Forbs, the Chinese, and various other vultures from all over the world are in Athens for the pickings.
So far the banks have received 108 billion Euros of guarantee from George Papandreou. With this money the banks go to the Central European bank and take loans with 0.78% interest rate, and return the money on loan to Greece with interest of 5%.
What we are witnessing, is treason at its height.
