The Destruction of Greece

A sobering article.

A few purple pansies planted under a huge cypress tree mark the spot on the lawn outside the Greek Parliament building where a life ebbed away.

Here in Athens’s Syntagma Square, just after breakfast time one weekday morning, pensioner Dimitris Christoulas put a handgun to his head and pulled the trigger.

The retired pharmacist had walked out of his flat in a middle-class suburb for the last time. He locked the heavy shutters behind him, and the door where he had hung a sign saying: ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’.

In his jacket he carried a note saying his pension had been cut to ribbons and he couldn’t face a future of ‘raiding rubbish bins for food’....

His only child, Emi, had met her 77-year-old father for coffee the previous evening, though he gave no hint that he was planning to kill himself.
‘Things have got worse for us Greeks since my father died four years ago,’ she says today.
‘Pensioners are in terrible poverty. Suicides have doubled to 3,000 a year. Almost one in three people have no work.
'The young are emigrating. We have men of 40 still living with their parents because they can’t afford to marry or have a family. We have lost hope.’

A political researcher, 46-year-old Emi has agreed to talk about her late father as Greece prepares to tighten its belt yet again on the orders of Eurozone finance chiefs (backed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel) who insist the country must continue to pay back its awesome debts.

The country was brought to its knees by its huge profligacy after joining the EU and then milking the system for everything it could get.
Public sector wage bills doubled and Spanish practices flourished. Paying taxes was optional for the upper and middle classes. Corruption and bribery were rife.

The country’s debts piled up even as the Greek gravy train hurtled towards the buffers. In a sign of those times, hairdressers were listed among the 600 ‘professions’ allowed to retire at 50 (with a state pension of 95 per cent of their final year’s earnings) on account of the ‘arduous and perilous’ nature of their work!

Then came the crash, and the EU finally woke up to the fact that one of its major member states was bankrupt.
A desperate deal was struck: in return for more than £200 billion in bail-outs, the country had to agree to savage cuts and enormous tax rises. Despite this, Greece is still massively in the red.

Pensions, only claimable from a new (higher) age of 67, have been slashed ten times. Hospital budgets are down by half. VAT has soared to 24 per cent. Meanwhile, 71,500 pieces of prime public property, including the nation’s regional airports, are being sold to international conglomerates to pay off the debts. A joke doing the rounds in Athens is that the entire country is ‘up for sale’, apart from the Acropolis.
The Greeks are reeling. One million jobs have gone, while disposable income is down by a quarter. At least 250,000 — notably young — doctors, dentists, engineers and IT experts have upped sticks for jobs overseas.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3647600/We-told-EU-makes-stronger-haunting-dispatch-despairing-destitute-Greece-make-change-mind.html