Tax policy

When voting for a party, it’s like a contract. You read what they have to say about current affairs, what they promise to deliver in the next 4 years and you vote based on that.

So, when New Democracy, the ruling part of more than 4 years wrote its manifest about what they were going to do from 2006 to 2010, what we expected was the most basic premise that was repeated throughout the document they published: Lower taxes

So what does the Finance Minister, George Alogoskoufis, do in the summer? He works on a plan that sees taxes go through the roof by increasing all sorts of taxes, making people poorer.

And all this amidst scandals of bribed MPs and parties and rich ministers.

What are you doing with my country, Mr Prime Minister?

Greece gets a gold medal: in doping!

This news leaves little to the imagination and hardly needs any explanations:

Greece only received one gold medal in doping, as 15 athletes were not allowed to participate at the Olympic Games in Beijing, which ended today.

“You had won the gold medal in the doping discipline- terrible but true” said the President of the International Olympic Committee Jacques Rogge during the meting with the president of the Greek Olympic Committee Minos Kyriakou. [Source]

Rogge said that Greece have to start investigating the doping scandal immediately.

So, what do “we” have to say to the International Community? That we were being “targetted”. That our athletes were being tested more often. And that maybe, even, the test results were faked. As if the WADA has anything to gain by doing that.

It is in fact the Greek anti-doping mechanisms that prove to be inadequate, both by inadequate testing and by not punishing offenders.

It was in 2005 when Greek sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou were acquitted of doping charges in the Athens 2004 Olympics, when the whole world knew they were doped-up. A year later, they confessed at IAAF, but they could not be charged again in Greece, so they were given a “get out of jail free” card.

In contrast, in the U.S., worldwide star sprinter Marion Jones received a 6-month jail sentence and was stripped of all five of her Olympic medals.

So, if the athletes and their coaches thrive on the state’s inability to check and punish bad players, isn’t it also the state’s fault for encouraging this kind of behaviour?

Crime rates up; policing rates down

Numbers speak the truth and refer to 2007:

• Vehicle thefts up 9%
• Breaking and entering up 7%
• Bank robberies up 17%

Australian tourist clinically dead in Mykonos

Of course a lot of tourists die while on vacation. Excess drinking combined with lurking in dark alleys can lead to many unwanted situations. But this tourist was no victim of any such situation.

The 20 year old Australian was beaten by a club bouncer in the street. The bouncer thought that the Australian and his friends were snatching purses, so decided to pretend he was a cop and ask for ID. The Australian didn’t show him any ID, so the bouncer thought it was justify that he punched the guy in the face and then hit him with an iron club.

The Australian tourist was moved urgently to Athens at Errikos Dunant hospital, where he was pronounced clinically dead.

To be perfectly honest, unfortunate as the whole situation may be, the government and police could not have done anything to prevent it. This could have happenned anywhere, anytime.

The only difference is that if happenned anywhere else except in the Banana Republic of Greece, the club would be closed the next day, the club’s owners would be prosecuted and the bouncer profession would be regulated, requiring bouncers to take frequent physical and psychological exams to get a licence, and even not let them practice if they have a criminal record.

But hey, when your friends give you money under the table you don’t ask them to come down town with you to the police station to have a souvenir photograph taken, do you?

Shipyard accident leaves 8 dead

We are appalled, but not surprised.

Eight people were burned to death on July 24th after an explosion in the Perama Shipbuilding Zone (PSZ). Maintenance works on the ship Friendship Gas were under way at the time. The ship is under Panamanian flag and belongs to Greek shipowner Mr Petridis.

Shipbuilding accidents are hardly news. Last year, two people caught on fire in the PSZ and in 2006 there were another two victims. The reason for the accidents is simple. Cutting back on health and safety procedure is one of the things that keeps the shipping industry in Greece competitive.

The fire fighters that were first on the scene were untrained to deal with ship fires and lost time, possibly costing the lives of 3 people who were reported missing at the time.

The local government is blaming central government since 2006 for cancelling a law that required that all companies doing maintenance works be registered. The Registry would require higher standards and effective monitoring of health and safety procedures. But in the shrine of national competitiveness in one of the biggest shipyards in the country, safety was not a priority

Witnesses working on the ship say that there was also a fire the day before, which they themselves managed to put out. The management did not report the fire to the authorities in order to avoid ‘unnecessary’ hassle and delays.

At the time of the fire more than 50 people were on-board. Safety regulations were not in place and therefore some of them were not even registered, which could mean that they would be declared missing if an accident was to take place.

Employees assigned to safety duties were arrested. Politicians, company owners and management were not!

Money Laundering in Greece and Zorba(s) the Greek

Don't forget to add detergent!

It can’t be!

The Financial Action Task Force finds that Greece is Non-Compliant with regard to enacting money laundering legislation.

In a detailed report issued in June 2007, the FATF finds that Greece has taken exemplary action to ensure that:

• The Greek independent Authority for money laundering has no human or other resources, as it only employs 3 people when the law spoke of up to 50; it is underfunded; and it is under-equipped.
• the Authority is not independent at all since it is managed by high ranking employees of certain ministries.

The FATF also finds that laundered money is not $1.6 billion per year as Greece reports, but much higher.

So what did the government do about it since then? Let’s take a look…

Last year, the government covered up a scandal of huge proportions, where the public was taken into a scam in the magnitude of €280 million in state bonds.

The government said it’s up to the judicial to find the culprits. Mr Zorbas, a public official who was the only one determined to uncover the truth, got into a clash with the government and was summarilly forced into early retirement from the judicial and was placed as head of the committe for black money.

To make things worse, now that the Siemens scandal is raging as who how much money the two leading parties had received from the megacorporation in exchange for public projects, Zorbas owed the government one.

So, in his new position he started digging.

And what did the government do when he found something?

They created a bill that was voted into law the same day (a procedure that normally takes months or years) that disbanded the committe effective immediately and ruled out retired public officials from being chosen to participate in the new committee whenever it might be formed, effectively keeping Mr Zorbas out of reach of sensitive information that might damage any of the two leading political parties.

Mr Zorbas makes us proud. Corrupt governments do not.

Imported Rape

This is hardly the Greeks’ fault, but the news is interesting.

The UK Foreign Office is warning the British that there’s been an increase in rapes of British girls on the Greek islands.

Sexual offenses and rapes have more than doubled in the last decade (39 last year; 17 in 1998).

The only problem with these numbers is that the number of British tourists has also more than doubled in these years and in the majority of these cases, the offenders are also British.

Sixteen people injured in train wreck yesterday

After the ship wreck two weeks ago, now there’s train wreck.

A passenger train collided with stopped wagons that the previous cargo train accidentally left behind on the tracks.

The good news is that there was no loss of human life. The bad news is that this sort of thing happens all the time, because our rail system sucks. So whether the next time there are casualties or not, depends mainly on random factors, since no warning systems are in place.

The Fire and Rescue service took 90 minutes to get to the site.

Greek Diplomacy

Greek Diplomacy suffered two losses this week.

The first had to do with the EU’s recognition of the muslim minority living in Greece as “Turks”. This is important because this can be the stepping stone for Turkey in the future to claim certain Greek areas as their own.

The second defeat was the fact that the FYROM bought a college in London, and named its departments “Alexander the Macedon” “Philip the Second”, insinuating that they were born in FYROM.

Nationalism politics aside, both our neighbour countries have the muscle to do these things. Why? They persevere, whereas we don’t.

Greece is so centralised around Athens that its growing population means that the rural areas are dying out. Other nationalities move in and slowly build communities (sponsored from their own states, of course) which will later claim rights and then land.

With so many funds being misappropriated every year, it’s no wonder rural development is so bad in Greece.

Abuse of Power

How come every single group has power?

Civil servants, truckers, power company employees. They’ve all held the whole country hostage in the first half of 2008, simply by not doing what they were hired to do.

Workers unions have this belief that no progress should be made. They believe that it’s only them, the workers that should benefit from any situation, simply because they can.

Case in point.

DEI, the only and state-run power company in Greece, was to sell part of its shares to the German RWE. This move was welcomed by the government, the shareholders, the consumers and the business community. Why? Because any private company is bound to run things more efficiently than the state.

Efficiency is beneficial to all. Shareholders will see their shares go up because of this, the government will develop its infrastructure, the businesses will benefit from shorter down-times in power and the consumers will certainly benefit from lower prices.

So, what does the worker union do? It promptly goes on strike, blocks the streets, demands that their jobs are protected and shuts down the power for 2 hours a day to show that they have negotiation muscle.

The whole country is in need of such deals and these people are abusing their power to avoid losing their job security, because they’ve enjoyed the power monopoly for so many years that they never had to worry about working too hard.

They want to enjoy this extra protection that all the others do not have.

How selfish is that?