Ένα ξένο βλέμμα στα τεκταινόμενα της Ελλάδος και την οικονομική κρίση...

[Gandalf dr685sm]

διαβάστε το με ανοιχτά μυαλά.. ο τύπος΄μπορεί να μας φαίνεται εμπαθής , αλλά τα στοιχεία που μπαίνουν εκεί μέσα, είναι πέρα για πέρα αληθή και δίνει μια εικόνα στο πως φαινόμαστε στους εκτός.. μπείτε στην δική του θέση και κρίνετε όλοι σαν να είσαστε αλλοδαποί. Είμαι σίγουρος πως θα προβληματιστείτε πάρα πολύ.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/f...?currentPage=1 (σελίδες 7 στο σύνολο)

Gandalf

[Anty12]

Ρε μάγε....απ' την Τρίτη γραμμή το παράτησα....που τα βρήκε τα 1.2 τρις χρέος.....?????

[Gandalf dr685sm]

Διάβασε το όλο και θα καταλάβεις απο που προέρχεται.. .πρέπει να το τελειώσεις πρώτα.

Gandalf

[sniper]

Ε αμα το γράφει το Vanity fair... έτσι θά 'ναι...

[Gandalf dr685sm]

Είπαμε... "ανοιχτά μυαλά"...

Gandalf

[Gandalf dr685sm]

Νομίζω οτι ειδικά το τελείωμα τα λέει όλα..

. The question everyone wants an answer to is: Will Greece default? There’s a school of thought that says they have no choice: the very measures the government imposes to cut costs and raise revenues will cause what is left of the productive economy to flee the country. The taxes are lower in Bulgaria, the workers more pliable in Romania. But there’s 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?

On the face of it, defaulting on their debts and walking away would seem a mad act: all Greek banks would instantly go bankrupt, the country would have no ability to pay for the many necessities it imports (oil, for instance), and the country would be punished for many years in the form of much higher interest rates, if and when it was allowed to borrow again. But the place does not behave as a collective; it lacks the monks’ instincts.

It behaves as a collection of atomized particles, each of which has grown accustomed to pursuing its own interest at the expense of the common good. There's 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?

[thePrince]

Αν ξεπεράσει κανείς τα νούμερα που αναφέρονται στην αρχή -που στο κάτω-κάτω, είτε ρεαλιστικά είτε όχι, μικρή σημασία έχουν πλέον- και διαβάσει όλο το άρθρο, θα δει μερικά πράγματα που οι λιγοστοί σκεπτόμενοι άνθρωποι στη σημερινή Ελλάδα ήδη αντιλαμβάνονται.

Είναι γεγονός πως ο καθένας είναι μόνος του στην καθημερινότητα μας και δεν φταίει καμία κυβέρνηση για αυτό· έχω μιλήσει με αρκετούς νέους ανθρώπους που κατηγορούν το ΠΑΣΟΚ και τη ΝΔ για την αθλιότητα που βιώνουμε αλλά, δυστυχώς, δεν είναι τόσο απλά τα πράγματα. Καλά τα λέει ο συγγραφέας του άρθρου και το συμπέρασμα (το bold στην παράθεση του Gandalf dr685sm) συνοψίζει μια χαρά το άρθρο αλλά και το πρόβλημα του Έλληνα ― και απαντώ με βεβαιότητα στο ερώτημα της τελευταίας πρότασης: όχι, δεν γίνεται.

Τα χειρότερα έρχονται.

[Gandalf dr685sm]

ξέρεις φίλε μου τι είναι εμφανές σε όλο το άρθρο και με προβληματίζει ακόμα περισσότερο;... πως ακόμα και αν ο αρθρογράφος είναι εμπαθής, και μόνο απο αυτά που διαβάζεις και τον τρόπο που κινούμαστε και ζούμε καθημερινά δείχνει ακριβώς αυτό που καταλήγεις και εσύ....

Οτι δεν θέλουμε.. οχι δεν μπορούμε... να τα καταφέρουμε να το κάνουμε. Μας "χαλάει" ατομικά γιατί έτσι έχουμε μάθει διαχρονικά να ζούμε..

Every man for himself and not a colective entity... όπως σωστά λέει το άρθρο.

[thePrince]

Εγώ δεν είδα εμπάθεια στη γραφή — ίσως να μην είμαι αρκετά οξυδερκής ή καλλιεργημένος.

Το every man for himself είναι για τους περισσότερους συνειδητή επιλογή και για τους υπόλοιπους, μέθοδος άμυνας. Δεν μπορείς να τα βάλεις με τους πολλούς - μόνο να προστατευτείς και να προστατέψεις αυτούς που αγαπάς. Η κατάσταση αυτή δεν είναι αναστρέψιμη και εκείνο που σκοπεύω εγώ να κάνω με το/τα παιδιά μου (όταν αισίως έρθει η ώρα) είναι να τα διώξω, σε κάποια άλλη πολιτισμένη χώρα με «βάρβαρους» γιατί εδώ δεν υπάρχει μέλλον. Αν μάλιστα καταφέρω να «αποσυρθώ» σε κάποιο κωλοχώρι στη μέση του πουθενά, ακόμα καλύτερα!

[spyro]

αρκετά διασκεδαστικό ... πολύ καλά γραμμένο ... μονοπλευρη αντιμετώπιση σε αρκετά θέματα κατα τ' αλλα αρκετά καλό άρθρο απο δημοσιογράφο του Vanity Fair

[John Steed]

At the dark and narrow entrance to the Ministry of Finance a small crowd of security guards screen you as you enter—then don’t bother to check and see why you set off the metal detector.

In the minister’s antechamber six ladies, all on their feet, arrange his schedule. They seem frantic and harried and overworked … and yet he still runs late.

Both had been removed from high-status fieldwork to low-status work in the back office, where they could no longer witness tax crimes.

“If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.” I laughed, and he gave me a stare. “I am completely serious.”

As he rose to leave, he pointed out that the waitress at the swanky tourist hotel failed to provide us with a receipt for our coffees. “There’s a reason for that,” he said. “Even this hotel doesn’t pay the sales tax it owes.”

“After that I was taken off all tax investigations,” said the tax collector, “because I was good at it.”

The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting.

The structure of the Greek economy is collectivist, but the country, in spirit, is the opposite of a collective. Its real structure is every man for himself. Into this system investors had poured hundreds of billions of dollars. And the credit boom had pushed the country over the edge, into total moral collapse.

There the single most helpful hotel employee I have ever met (ask for Olga) handed me a stack of books and said wistfully how lucky I was to be able to visit the place.

these places come as a shock. There’s nothing modest about them; they are grand and complicated and ornate and obviously in some sort of competition with one another. In the old days, pirates routinely plundered them, and you can see why: it would be almost shameful not to, for a pirate.

she had found herself seated on a flight not long ago beside Father Ephraim, the abbot of Vatopaidi (business class).

“At Salomon we used to call [the head of the Greek National Statistical Service] ‘the Magician,’ ” says Xafa, “because of his ability to magically make inflation, the deficit, and the debt disappear.”

Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government’s true level of indebtedness.

In came the I.M.F. to examine the Greek books more closely; out went whatever tiny shred of credibility the Greeks had left. “How in the hell is it possible for a member of the euro area to say the deficit was 3 percent of G.D.P. when it was really 15 percent?” a senior I.M.F. official asks. “How could you possibly do something like that?”

for if Greece walks away from $400 billion in debt, then the European banks that lent the money will go down, and other countries now flirting with bankruptcy (Spain, Portugal) might easily follow.

No: what bothers them is when some outside party—someone clearly different from themselves, with motives apart from narrow and easily understood self-interest—comes in and exploits the corruption of their system. Enter the monks.

“If they put Arsenios in charge of the government real-estate portfolio,” a prominent Greek real-estate agent said to me, “this country would be Dubai.

The monks eat like fashion models before a shoot. Twice a day four days a week, and once a day for three: 11 meals, all of them more or less like this. Which raises an obvious question: Why are some of them fat?

Most of them—maybe 100 out of the 110 now in residence—resemble their diet. Beyond thin: narrow. But a handful, including the two bosses, have an ampleness to them that cannot be explained by 11 helpings of raw onion and cucumber, no matter how much honeycomb they chew through.

Apart from that, if you put this office side by side with the office of Greece’s minister of finance and asked which one housed the monk, this wouldn’t be it.

Thus began what became a three-hour encounter. I’d ask simple questions—Why on earth would anyone become a monk? How do you handle life without women? How do people who spend 10 hours a day in church find time to create real-estate empires? Where did you get the crème de menthe?

“The whole government says they are angry at us,” he says, “but we have nothing. We work for others. The Greek newspapers, they call us a corporation. But I ask you, Michael, what company has lasted for 1,000 years?”

When we are introduced, Ephraim clasps my hand and holds it for a very long time. It crosses my mind that he is about to ask me what I want for Christmas. Instead he says, “What is your faith?” “Episcopalian,” I cough out. He nods; he calibrates: it could be worse; it probably is worse. “You are married?” he asks. “Yes.” “You have children?” I nod; he calibrates: I can work with this. He asks for their names …

They owned this lake, they said, and they wanted the Ministry of Finance to pay them cash for it. “Someone had given them full title to the lake,” says Doukas. “What they wanted now was to monetize it. They came to me and said, ‘Can you buy us out?’ ” Before the meeting, Doukas sensed, they had done a great deal of homework.

“I said, ‘Listen, contrary to popular opinion, there is no money in the Finance Ministry.’ And they said, ‘O.K., if you cannot buy us out, why can’t you give us some of your pieces of land?’ ”

After Doukas declined, he received another call—this one from the prime minister’s office. Still he said no. Next he receives this piece of paper saying he’s giving the monks government land, and all he needs to do is sign it. “I said, ‘Fuck you, I’m not signing it.’ ”

the monks, it seemed to Doukas, had some kind of hold on the prime minister’s chief of staff.

They put the monk’s real-estate and financial assets at less than $2 billion but more than $1 billion—up from zero since the new management took over. And the business had started with nothing to sell but forgiveness.

moments later, from the monk’s long dormitory, the beep beep beep of electric alarm clocks.

“We have this adviser in the American stock market,” says the monk. “His name is Robert Chapman. [I’d never heard of him. He turned out to be the writer of a newsletter about global finance.] Father Arsenios is wondering what you think of him. Whether he is worth listening to …”

Here is Greece’s version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don’t really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies.

Most of the Marfin Bank’s 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.

It behaves as a collection of atomized particles, each of which has grown accustomed to pursuing its own interest at the expense of the common good.


ΑΠΟΛΑΥΣΤΙΚΟΤΑΤΟ άρθρο...

Δεν ξέρω τι να κάνω, να κλάψω ή να γελάσω...

[Gandalf dr685sm]

Να αναφέρω οτι σας το έδωσα πιο νωρίς απο τον Ελληνικό τύπο που το πήρε χαμπάρι μόλις ΣΗΜΕΡΑ (19/9);...

http://www.zougla.gr/page.ashx?pid=2&aid=174278&cid=6

Να το πω...χαχαχαχαχαχα

Το άρθρο όπως είπα... έχει πολλές αλήθειες μέσα και τις ξέρουμε όλοι... απλά μας ενοχλεί να το αναφέρουν άλλοι. Είναι χαρακτηριστικό μας άλλωστε.

Gandalf