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Now I ask you, dear readers, how can anyone take these Greek politicians seriously? Constantine Karamanlis, dead for years, called the military junta crooks, but Taki knew better when he sent food packages to the wives of the coup leaders while they rotted in jail. Karamanlis oversaw the first period of corruption when he managed to talk Greece into the EU back in the late Seventies. Andreas Papandreou, father of the present Greek premier, known as Ali Baba because he and his 40 ministers stole the country blind, turned lying and stealing into a Greek art form, a far more profitable endeavour than building useless edifices like the Parthenon ever was. Another Karamanlis, a nephew, fired a metaphorical coup de grâce into the economy when for five long years he sat on his very fat ass and watched the public sector steal whatever was worth stealing.
Do you follow me? The only people whose hands are clean are those Greeks who keep government away from their businesses, a tiny minority. Managing a business in Greece is a bit like running a diner on the mean streets of New York during the Godfather’s time. Sooner or later some wise guy — the government — will come in and demand a cut. Business in Greece is dependent on political influence, and without it there is no business. I haven’t got the patience, nor the space, thank God, to list the cases I know of Greek-Americans who brought money into the country in order to start a business in good old Hellas, and got screwed out of it by government officials.
It is very simple. If one wants to conduct business in the birthplace of electrolysis, one has to bribe government officials, and government in Greece is thoroughly, totally, completely 100 per cent corrupt. I was forced to sell a real estate/hotel complex now worth €100 million for less than one tenth of its value because I refused to pay a bribe to the National Bank of Greece to lower the 35 per cent interest I was paying. Dumb? Definitely.
This was 20 years ago, but it gave me great pleasure to walk away and return only on my boat in order to check out the women on the beaches. Some of you old-time readers may remember that just about then some gangsters also blew up the boat I had inherited from my old dad. I refused to pay them part of the insurance money I collected. They began to blow up things that belonged to people who worked for me. When I finally cornered them, they acted as if they were the government. ‘Others have paid, why won’t you?’ was the way the head hood put it to me. Years later the guy sent me a Christmas card and praised me for standing up to his gang. (He was found bound and gagged but alive in the boot of a car in the meantime.) I forgave him because if the government acts like a gangster what is a poor hood supposed to do?
So, Greece has once again been rescued by the EU, but for how long? Government debt is forecast to reach 170 per cent of GDP. How in heaven’s name can anyone believe that Greece will pay off more than 10 per cent of its GDP — closer to 20 per cent — for decades simply on interest. It is yet another con by professional banker-Eurocrats and Greek professional politicians. Greece has been on default since the day she entered the EU and began spending like Abramovich. European taxpayers will be left holding the bag and the bureaucrooks who run our lives know this but are simply playing for time. George Papandreou knows this, Merkel and Sarkozy know this, Brussels knows this, yet the burlesque goes on, an Archie Rice-like fiasco to the bitter end.
Will there be a coup in Greece? I sure hope so but the answer is never. People have turned soft after years of feasting on other people’s moolah. I am even building a house there, just like King Constantine is. Mind you, the King has an excuse. He suffers from excessive Hellenophilia. I do not have an excuse. But I do like to live dangerously.
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