Things are now starting to get really frightening. Every day some new demand is made. People can’t play this game any more. Life in Greece is less a game of Rounders in the summer sun than Rugby on a frozen solid pitch in the middle of a blizzard. It wasn’t exactly easy living here, even in the best of times, but now every day brings a new and scarier challenge. I haven’t been paid more than a month’s wages but my bills still keep coming in, and the supermarket still costs more than double the European average.
I’m recognizing the warning signs that my main job may well soon be coming to a sudden end and trying to work out what to do if, or more probably , when that happens. There aren’t many places left to go. Luckily I still have a couple of sidelines, but that’s really all they are. Extras. Bits on the side. Nothing that I can live on.
In many ways I’m one of the lucky ones. The lovely woman I work for, is I fear, about to lose her bar and home. She has two grown up children to support who along with the other 49% of the under 25s will probably be unable to find work.
Unemployment benefit here lasts for 5 months maximum, and that’s available only to those who have paid into the system for two consecutive years. Many employers, illegally, refuse to put their staff into the system because of the huge cost involved. Having been self employed and paying even larger contributions to that seperate insurance fund counts for nothing. You have your own business and it goes bust. Tough. No money. Get a job or starve. Off to the soup kitchen with you.
I worked out some time ago that the Greek Government gets roughly 75% of my wages through tax, whether it be through the extortionate National Insurance payments (round about 110% of my take home wage), or through VAT (23%) on everything including water and power bills, the local taxes levied through the electricity bill, (pay it all or have it cut off), ditto the TV licence for three shitty channels which have interminable ad breaks, or more optional things like taxing a car or motorbike.
I’d love to know where all this money goes. It’s not into education or health care. Now, in order to go to what passes for the largest hospital in this region of the Cyclades you have to pay a flat fee of 5 euro to get through the door. Children have to have extra lessons at private schools to attain even basic standards of literacy, foreign languages, mathematics, etc, often given by individuals more than qualified to teach public institutions but unable to do so because the state refuses to recognize their privately, or foreign obtained degrees.
In the meantime the (un)civil services employ armies of useless idiots, many of which openly boast about not actually bothering to do the work they are paid to. One employee of the local government here is normally to be found drinking coffee or metaxa in a local café during his working hours in the winter. Or on the beach in summer.
The Greek Orthodox Church is the largest landowner in Greece yet pays no taxes. Better still, the state, that’s to say the likes of me, pays the wages of these fat men in black dresses who also get paid again for everything they do. Weddings, funerals, christenings, the lot. There’s no such thing as a poor priest in Greece.
The local soup kitchen now feeds over 40 people on a daily basis and the numbers are increasing. Supermarkets have trolleys by the door for shoppers to place donations of food for the needy.
This isn’t some African basketcase country ruined buy a mad despotic idiot. This is the birthplace of Democracy, Civilization, the place where Western values are rooted and the word Europe comes from.
It’s also a country where the rich pay little or no tax, doctors have to be routinely bribed with their little envelopes (or fakelakis), to do their jobs, and the police force in its’ upper echelons is largely staffed by leftovers from the time of the dictatorship. The two major political parties here are made up of dynasties that make George Bush look like an innocent bystander pushed into office.
This is country that has had enough, but also is unable to change.
11 years ago when the Samina Express sank off the coast of Paros I remember reading in The Independent a comment from a journalist, that modern Greece was only a veneer covering the swirling pot of corruption that was old Greece.
It’s time to empty that pot and put the shits that caused this mess in the sewer that they so richly deserve.
