Fast-forward seven years into Greece's punishing and unremitting economic crisis and 35 percent of the population appears in danger of falling under the EU's poverty and social exclusion level -- a percentage that could have touched the 50-percent market without social benefits and welfare programs.
By G. Kouros
Fast-forward seven years into Greece's punishing and unremitting economic crisis and 35 percent of the population appears in danger of falling under the EU's poverty and social exclusion level -- a percentage that could have touched the 50-percent market without social benefits and welfare programs.
Figures show that three out of four households are leaving certain bills unpaid, and as expected in an unusually long recession -- by first world standards -- consumer purchasing power is shrinking, spending for super market purchases by households is down 23.4 percent, while on the "real economy" front increasingly high tax rates are shooing off possible investments and causing more businesses to fail.
Nevertheless, for the current government these are simply "numbers", as it ponders the possibility of sacrificing the remaining welfare stipends, aimed at propping up the economically depressed strata of the population, on the altar of debt reduction.
While the elimination of such welfare spending will have negligible results on the budget's "plus column", the possible repercussions for millions will be immediately felt.
Ancient mathematician Pythagoras may have opined in this very land nearly two and a half millennia ago that everything is based on numbers, yet in modern Greece, circa 2016, manipulating numbers appears as a mere children's game for learning arithmetic.
Leaving antiquity for the second half of the 20th century, we're reminded of Swedish statesman Olaf Palme, who foresaw that a future battle should not be aimed at wealth, but rather at poverty.
With that adage in mind, one strains to see a force, on any part of the mainstream political spectrum, waging that battle today in crisis-battered Greece. The emphasis is on "meeting targets of the program" and debt reduction at all costs.
However, when elections again come around in the country, citizens will not be voting on the "grand issue" of debt relief; they will be guided - or misguided - by their day-to-day problems and their economic condition in the very present.
While speculation revved up this month over the possibility of yet another snap election in the country, former prime minister and now retired lawmaker Costas Simitis warned, during a book presentation at London's LSE over the weekend, that "new tempests are coming".
Presenting his new book on the unprecedented Greek crisis, entitled "Is there a solution?", Simitis added that it is still "unknown whether the crew and the passengers will, all of them together, be able to stand up to the ordeals."
Even if the second review of the Greek program is concluded over the next few day, the patience of the "passengers" aboard the good ship "Greece" appears to have been exhausted. The next act in this ongoing drama may be a curt -- and timely Latin American-tinged - Hasta la vista, Comandantes.