Τα δημοσιεύματα του ξένου τύπου για την Ελλάδα

“Our people went in and couldnʼt believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after heʼd returned from the I.M.F.ʼs first Greek mission. “The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasnʼt even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.”

...

Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greeceʼs rail passengers into taxicabs: itʼs still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isnʼt a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finlandʼs. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.

...

Minister Papaconstantinou (“Itʼs O.K. to just call me George”) attended N.Y.U. and the London School of Economics in the 1980s, then spent 10 years working in Paris for the O.E.C.D. (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Heʼs open, friendly, fresh-faced, and clean-shaven, and like many people at the top of the new Greek government, he comes across less as Greek than as Anglo—indeed, almost American.
When Papaconstantinou arrived here, last October, the Greek government had estimated its 2009 budget deficit at 3.7 percent. Two weeks later that number was revised upward to 12.5 percent and actually turned out to be nearly 14 percent. He was the man whose job it had been to figure out and explain to the world why. “The second day on the job I had to call a meeting to look at the budget,” he says. “I gathered everyone from the general accounting office, and we started this, like, discovery process.” Each day they discovered some incredible omission. A pension debt of a billion dollars every year somehow remained off the governmentʼs books, where everyone pretended it did not exist, even though the government paid it; the hole in the pension plan for the self-employed was not the 300 million they had assumed but 1.1 billion euros; and so on. “At the end of each day I would say, ʽO.K., guys, is this all?ʼ And they would say ʽYeah.ʼ The next morning there would be this little hand rising in the back of the room: ʽActually, Minister, thereʼs this other 100-to-200-million-euro gap.ʼ ”
This went on for a week. Among other things turned up were a great number of off-the-books phony job-creation programs. “The Ministry of Agriculture had created an off-the-books unit employing 270 people to digitize the photographs of Greek public lands,” the finance minister tells me. “The trouble was that none of the 270 people had any experience with digital photography. The actual professions of these people were, like, hairdressers.”
...

Once the finance minister had the numbers, he went off to his regularly scheduled monthly meetings with ministers of finance from all the European countries. As the new guy, he was given the floor. “When I told them the number, there were gasps,” he said. “How could this happen? I was like, You guys should have picked up that the numbers werenʼt right. But the problem was I sat behind a sign that said GREECE, not a sign that said, THE NEW GREEK GOVERNMENT.” After the meeting the Dutch guy came up to him and said, “George, we know itʼs not your fault, but shouldnʼt someone go to jail?”
As he finishes his story the finance minister stresses that this isnʼt a simple matter of the government lying about its expenditures. “This wasnʼt all due to misreporting,” he says. “In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year.”
“What?”
He smiles.
“The first thing a government does in an election year is to pull the tax collectors off the streets.”
“Youʼre kidding.”
Now heʼs laughing at me. Iʼm clearly naïve.
...

Tax Collector No. 1—early 60s, business suit, tightly wound but not obviously nervous—arrived with a notebook filled with ideas for fixing the Greek tax-collection agency. He just took it for granted that I knew that the only Greeks who paid their taxes were the ones who could not avoid doing so—the salaried employees of corporations, who had their taxes withheld from their paychecks. The vast economy of self-employed workers—everyone from doctors to the guys who ran the kiosks that sold the International Herald Tribune—cheated (one big reason why Greece has the highest percentage of self-employed workers of any European country). “Itʼs become a cultural trait,” he said. “The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. Itʼs a cavalier offense—like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.” The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year
...


I walked down the street and found waiting for me, in the bar of another swanky tourist hotel, the second tax collector. ... The first was an Athenian construction company that 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.


Arsenios grabs me and takes me for a walk. We pass Byzantine chapels and climb Byzantine stairs until we arrive at a door in a long Byzantine hall freshly painted but otherwise antique: his office. On the desk are two computers; behind it a brand-new fax machine—cum—printer; on top of it a cell phone and a Costco-size tub of vitamin-C pills. The walls and floor gleam like new. The cabinets exhibit row upon row of three-ring binders. The only sign that this isnʼt a business office circa 2010 is a single icon over the desk. Apart from that, if you put this office side by side with the office of Greeceʼs minister of finance and asked which one housed the monk, this wouldnʼt be it.

Two months earlier, on May 5, during the first of these protest marches, the mob offered a glimpse of what it was capable of. Seeing people working at a branch of the Marfin Bank, young men hurled Molotov cocktails inside and tossed gasoline on top of the flames, barring the exit. Most of the Marfin Bankʼs employees escaped from the roof, but the fire killed three workers, including a young woman four months pregnant. As they died, Greeks in the streets screamed at them that it served them right, for having the audacity to work. The events took place in full view of the Greek police, and yet the police made no arrests.
...
But thereʼs a second, more interesting question: Even if it is technically possible for these people to repay their debts, live within their means, and return to good standing inside the European Union, do they have the inner resources to do it? Or have they so lost their ability to feel connected to anything outside their small worlds that they would rather just shed themselves of the obligations?
...Thereʼs no question that the government is resolved to at least try to re-create Greek civic life. The only question is: Can such a thing, once lost, ever be re-created?

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Tι να πουνε και οι απλοι πολιτες εκει εξω..?

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παντως σαν ελληνες δεν ηταν,ντυμενοι,,οτι ηθελαν χορευαν,,οτι ηθελαν φοραγαν.

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