what is happening in Greece?

[Tjerk12]

Friends, what is happening in Greece? I have some skill in mathematics (even up to Laplace transformations), but economics is for me something like the Chinese language. When I read the newspapers or look to the news on TV, it seems that Greece is totally bankrupt. How did that happen? Normally somebody goes bankrupt when he spends more money than he earns. In Greece it concerns immense amounts of money. Who did spend all that money? I know that there is a big tourism industry in Greece. It is a beautiful country, with a nice climate, but one of the main reasons is that they are cheap. So the people who work in that industry cannot earn a lot of money. I also feel that the average people in Greece are not rich or high earners. Therefore it is unlikely that they are the reason for these immense deficits. But who are? Is it only the Government? Or is it a small layer of people, the upper class that sucks up all the wealth? If the latter is the case therefore we should worry. Our society is also riddled with CEO’s and managers who earn far too much money. Will that destabilize our society in the same amount as it did in Greece, so that we have to worry about the future?
I think we should help the common people in Greece. They are hardworking people like you and me. We should help them by giving money. At the same time we should find ways to teach their government to find ways to bring income and expenditure into balance. But what seems more important, to make an end to parasitism of the upper class (and learn lessons for our own society).
It is about since thirty years that banks invented ways to let common people spend more money than they actually can (mortgages and loans). This system failed. It was their invention, let them bleed for it. Not the common tax payer.
Greece is not a rich country, but to say that it is less trustworthy than Burkina Faso, as you can read nowadays in the newspapers, I think is a big lie. There’s a snag in it.
So the final question is who is the big thief in Greece?
Maybe Greece friends or people who understand economics can give me the answer.

 

[ritsuka]

The EU/IMF austerity terms are absolutely indefensible; the people should not have to pay for the parasitic gambling of the financial/political elites. Greeks, like people in many countries (Iceland, Spain...), are tired of the system that has been keeping them down, and refuse to have this pogrom imposed on them from the outside. You don't have to be a rich, corporate-friendly country to maintain a social welfare state that takes care of everyone; and no one should feel they have a right to come along and tell a nation not to do that. Deficit spending is what you are supposed to do when the economy sinks; it is a positive thing, and if debts are a problem, then all global financial institutions have to do is forgive them.

Here is a good article by a dissident economist on the situation in Greece:
http://anonym.to/http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson06032011.html