Skip to main content

News and analysis on the Greek economy




 08.10.2011
"Greece is smothered by its bureaucracy. Corruption and nepotism have raised a destructive wall in the midst of the country. Many young people do not have a chance. If this system is not demolished, Greece cannot be saved".



08.10.2011
"the old Greece is fighting to survive". Excellent analysis of the social and political dynamics unleashed, or rather, revealed by the crisis.

Orthodox church appears to be exempt from austerity measures

04.10.2011

 


Church funds are taboo in Greece. Its income is liable to taxation, but there are two major stumbling blocks. There is no accounting system to detail its actual income and no one really knows quite how much land it owns because there is no land register.

This situation suits both the church and the state, "because politicians are reluctant to upset the Orthodox authorities", says Stefanos Manos, an independent MP.

"The Greek church is a national church," says Polikarpos Karamouzis, sociology professor at the University of the Aegean, "which means there is a political connection between the church and the state, for the state awarded it these privileges. Its spiritual role is closely linked to its political function, muddying the distinction between its congregation and Greek citizens, a source of confusion which politicians use in their quest for votes."


 Greeks pay for economic crisis with their health

 10.10.2011

Rising demand and cost-cutting put services at breaking point, while drug addiction, HIV and suicide rates increase.

In a letter to the Lancet medical journal, a team lead by Dr Alexander Kentikelenis and Dr David Stuckler from Cambridge University and Professor Martin McKee from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine warns of a potential "Greek tragedy". They point to signs of a dramatic decline in the health of the population and a deterioration of services at hospitals under financial pressure. 

 

Greece’s unecessary crisis

20/06/2011 By

 

"A sensible EU bailout plan would have directed cheap funds at productive expansion rather than insisting on punitive contraction. Indeed, Greece needs concessional lending (at less than 3%) —which could be financed by means of a new E-bond, a Tobin tax, un-sterilised quantitative easing, or some combination of these and other instruments... The real lesson of the Greek debacle is not that peripheral countries should exit the eurozone (although that is now a distinct possibility); rather, it is that the current situation results from the increasingly rightward drift of Europe and the short-sightedness of our political class".


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spyros Sofos: Bulgaria’s Blackmail is Unfair

  INTERVIEW     13.09.23 19 ПРЕГЛЕДИ                                         At a time when Macedonia is under strong international pressure concerning the constitutional changes, and the region is waiting to see whether it will be coupled to the European locomotive, external views become a dire need for the country to position itself on the right coordinates during the geopolitical developments that will not leave us unaffected. After the interview with the German journalist and specialist on the Balkans Michael Martens, we present to you another conversation, this time with  Spyros Sofos,  whose research at the London School of Economics and Political Science has focused, among other things, on social insecurity, identity and collective action, as well as populism in Southeast Europe. He says that Bulgarian elites playing the nationalist card poses the...
Post a Comment
Read more

In memoriam or A Kurdish Woman in a Turkish Dystopia

As I came across today a set of deeply disturbing photographs of  Turkish soldiers having stripped off the clothes of a young Kurdish girl after killing her, posing with her naked body, shared on social media, I remembered  Klaus Theweleit's  book Männerphantasien (1977), translated in English ten years later as Male Fantasies . In this unique book, Theweleit, provides an insightful  analysis of the proto-fascist consciousness of the Freikorps fighters who roamed the Weimar Republic during the interwar period to fight communists and 'other' enemies. Their ambivalent but, at their core, deeply misogynistic attitudes were central in their worldview and eventually formed one of the cornerstones of national socialist ideology as it was eagerly adopted by the Nazi party and, later on, by state discourse and policy.  The Turkish state, waging war against its own Kurdish citizens allows and encourages similar fantasies to be enacted at the 'battleground' and but...
Post a Comment
Read more

11 December 2009: Turkey's Constitutional Court bans the pro-Kurdish Demokratik Toplum Partisi

Following a lawsuit filed by Chief Public Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya on November 16, 2007, the Turkish Constitutional Court has decided yesterday to shut down the Demokratik Toplum Partisi (Democratic Society Party) due to the party’s alleged links with the  PKK. Following 9-hour deliberations on the fourth day of the case, Constitutional Court President Haşim Kılıç said that its members voted unanimously to close down the DTP as it became a focal point of acts against the indivisible integrity of the state . The result of this controversial decision is that, yet again, voices advocating human rights protection for Turkish Kurds are stifled, and the largest pro-Kurdish political force that had made considerable inroads in the Turkish political system by wining in nine provinces in the 2009 local elections is now seriously impaired. Thirty seven DTP members, including DTP Chairman Ahmet Türk and MP Aysel Tuğluk were banned from politics for five years. The rump pa...
Post a Comment
Read more