[civil] "Greece moves closer to eurozone exit after delaying €300m repayment to IMF "

[Dauphin]

The detailed stats are funny. 67% of Germans said Germans were the most hardworking in Europe. 2nd ranked was "don't know", and third was Sweden with 4%.

http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2012/05/Pew-Global-Attitudes-Project-European-Crisis-Topline-May-29-2012.pdf

[C0ckney]

greeks work longer hours, and retire later etc., than the european average, so clearly the idea that they are lazy is false. so the question becomes why do people think that they're lazy, or feckless, or pick any pejorative you've used for them so far in this thread. part of it is probably to do with the bad situation itself and the false, yet powerful, link that people make between work and wealth. but let's not kid ourselves, most people don't just assume that the unfortunate deserve their fate ("they lost everything in the flood, well they must have had it coming"). and that brings us to the intense and depressingly successful campaign to frame the economic problems that greece faces as moral failings of the greek people; it might be seen as an international edition of the centuries old campaign to blame poverty on the poor.

[Dinner]

Greeks don't produce much of value and that is the problem. You can sit there in the family corner store for 13 hours per day but if you only make six sales you haven't generated any roi.

[Sir Og]

And what will Greek export and to whom? China is slowing down now.
Without spending cuts you will just end up with a cycle of inflation. BTW, is it legal to talk about inflation now?

AFIK Greece has one of the longest beach coast lines in the world. (when you add up all the islands) Tourism is a big export industry.

Inflation in low doses is good because it helps with the difficulty of lowering prices. It's like an automatic price reduction for all. Much easyer for markets to clear this way.

[pchang]

Greece had tourism before and it wasn't enough. They will need tourism to grow significantly and I don't see that happening with a default. Germans are their number 1 tourist customer. If they vote no, I foresee inflation in high doses, not low doses.

[The Mad Monk]

greeks work longer hours, and retire later etc., than the european average, so clearly the idea that they are lazy is false. so the question becomes why do people think that they're lazy, or feckless, or pick any pejorative you've used for them so far in this thread. part of it is probably to do with the bad situation itself and the false, yet powerful, link that people make between work and wealth. but let's not kid ourselves, most people don't just assume that the unfortunate deserve their fate ("they lost everything in the flood, well they must have had it coming"). and that brings us to the intense and depressingly successful campaign to frame the economic problems that greece faces as moral failings of the greek people; it might be seen as an international edition of the centuries old campaign to blame poverty on the poor.

Greece isn't lazy, it's incredibly corrupt.

Beware Greeks Bearing Bonds

...

Where waste ends and theft begins almost doesn’t matter; the one masks and thus enables the other. It’s simply assumed, for instance, that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. People who go to public health clinics assume they will need to bribe doctors to actually take care of them. Government ministers who have spent their lives in public service emerge from office able to afford multi-million-dollar mansions and two or three country homes.

Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.

...

The morning after I landed I walked over to see the Greek minister of finance, George Papaconstantinou, whose job it is to sort out this fantastic mess. Athens somehow manages to be bright white and grubby at the same time. The most beautiful freshly painted neoclassical homes are defaced with new graffiti. Ancient ruins are everywhere, of course, but seem to have little to do with anything else. It’s Los Angeles with a past.

At the dark and narrow entrance to the Ministry of Finance a small crowd of security guards screen you as you enter—then don’t bother to check and see why you set off the metal detector. In the minister’s antechamber six ladies, all on their feet, arrange his schedule. They seem frantic and harried and overworked … and yet he still runs late. The place generally seems as if even its better days weren’t so great. The furniture is worn, the floor linoleum. The most striking thing about it is how many people it employs. Minister Papaconstantinou (“It’s O.K. to just call me George”) attended N.Y.U. and the London School of Economics in the 1980s, then spent 10 years working in Paris for the O.E.C.D. (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). He’s open, friendly, fresh-faced, and clean-shaven, and like many people at the top of the new Greek government, he comes across less as Greek than as Anglo—indeed, almost American.

When Papaconstantinou arrived here, last October, the Greek government had estimated its 2009 budget deficit at 3.7 percent. Two weeks later that number was revised upward to 12.5 percent and actually turned out to be nearly 14 percent. He was the man whose job it had been to figure out and explain to the world why. “The second day on the job I had to call a meeting to look at the budget,” he says. “I gathered everyone from the general accounting office, and we started this, like, discovery process.” Each day they discovered some incredible omission. A pension debt of a billion dollars every year somehow remained off the government’s books, where everyone pretended it did not exist, even though the government paid it; the hole in the pension plan for the self-employed was not the 300 million they had assumed but 1.1 billion euros; and so on. “At the end of each day I would say, ‘O.K., guys, is this all?’ And they would say ‘Yeah.’ The next morning there would be this little hand rising in the back of the room: ‘Actually, Minister, there’s this other 100-to-200-million-euro gap.’ ”

This went on for a week. Among other things turned up were a great number of off-the-books phony job-creation programs. “The Ministry of Agriculture had created an off-the-books unit employing 270 people to digitize the photographs of Greek public lands,” the finance minister tells me. “The trouble was that none of the 270 people had any experience with digital photography. The actual professions of these people were, like, hairdressers.”

By the final day of discovery, after the last little hand had gone up in the back of the room, a projected deficit of roughly 7 billion euros was actually more than 30 billion. The natural question—How is this possible?—is easily answered: until that moment, no one had bothered to count it all up. “We had no Congressional Budget Office,” explains the finance minister. “There was no independent statistical service.” The party in power simply gins up whatever numbers it likes, for its own purposes.

Once the finance minister had the numbers, he went off to his regularly scheduled monthly meetings with ministers of finance from all the European countries. As the new guy, he was given the floor. “When I told them the number, there were gasps,” he said. “How could this happen? I was like, You guys should have picked up that the numbers weren’t right. But the problem was I sat behind a sign that said GREECE, not a sign that said, THE NEW GREEK GOVERNMENT.” After the meeting the Dutch guy came up to him and said, “George, we know it’s not your fault, but shouldn’t someone go to jail?”

As he finishes his story the finance minister stresses that this isn’t a simple matter of the government lying about its expenditures. “This wasn’t all due to misreporting,” he says. “In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year.”

“What?”

He smiles.

“The first thing a government does in an election year is to pull the tax collectors off the streets.”

“You’re kidding.”

Now he’s laughing at me. I’m clearly naïve.

...

Tax Collector No. 1—early 60s, business suit, tightly wound but not obviously nervous—arrived with a notebook filled with ideas for fixing the Greek tax-collection agency. He just took it for granted that I knew that the only Greeks who paid their taxes were the ones who could not avoid doing so—the salaried employees of corporations, who had their taxes withheld from their paychecks. The vast economy of self-employed workers—everyone from doctors to the guys who ran the kiosks that sold the International Herald Tribune—cheated (one big reason why Greece has the highest percentage of self-employed workers of any European country). “It’s become a cultural trait,” he said. “The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. It’s a cavalier offense—like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.”

The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement. “If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.” I laughed, and he gave me a stare. “I am completely serious.” One reason no one is ever prosecuted—apart from the fact that prosecution would seem arbitrary, as everyone is doing it—is that the Greek courts take up to 15 years to resolve tax cases. “The one who does not want to pay, and who gets caught, just goes to court,” he says. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the activity in the Greek economy that might be subject to the income tax goes officially unrecorded, he says, compared with an average of about 18 percent in the rest of Europe.
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The easiest way to cheat on one’s taxes was to insist on being paid in cash, and fail to provide a receipt for services. The easiest way to launder cash was to buy real estate. Conveniently for the black market—and alone among European countries—Greece has no working national land registry. “You have to know where the guy bought the land—the address—to trace it back to him,” says the collector. “And even then it’s all handwritten and hard to decipher.” But, I say, if some plastic surgeon takes a million in cash, buys a plot on a Greek island, and builds himself a villa, there would be other records—say, building permits. “The people who give the building permits don’t inform the Treasury,” says the tax collector. In the apparently not-so-rare cases where the tax cheat gets caught, he can simply bribe the tax collector and be done with it. There are, of course, laws against tax collectors’ accepting bribes, explained the collector, “but if you get caught, it can take seven or eight years to get prosecuted. So in practice no one bothers.”

The systematic lying about one’s income had led the Greek government to rely increasingly on taxes harder to evade: real-estate and sales taxes. Real estate is taxed by formula—to take the tax collectors out of the equation—which generates a so-called “objective value” for each home. The boom in the Greek economy over the last decade caused the actual prices at which property changed hands to far outstrip the computer-driven appraisals. Given higher actual sales prices, the formula is meant to ratchet upward. The typical Greek citizen responded to the problem by not reporting the price at which the sale took place, but instead reporting a phony price—which usually happened to be the same low number at which the dated formula had appraised it. If the buyer took out a loan to buy the house, he took out a loan for the objective value and paid the difference in cash, or with a black-market loan. As a result the “objective values” grotesquely understate the actual land values. Astonishingly, it’s widely believed that all 300 members of the Greek Parliament declare the real value of their houses to be the computer-generated objective value. Or, as both the tax collector and a local real-estate agent put it to me, “every single member of the Greek Parliament is lying to evade taxes.”

On he went, describing a system that was, in its way, a thing of beauty. It mimicked the tax-collecting systems of an advanced economy—and employed a huge number of tax collectors—while it was in fact rigged to enable an entire society to cheat on their taxes. As he rose to leave, he pointed out that the waitress at the swanky tourist hotel failed to provide us with a receipt for our coffees. “There’s a reason for that,” he said. “Even this hotel doesn’t pay the sales tax it owes.”

...

The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. Individual Greeks are delightful: funny, warm, smart, and good company. I left two dozen interviews saying to myself, “What great people!” They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible; the collapse of civic life only encourages more lying, cheating, and stealing. Lacking faith in one another, they fall back on themselves and their families.

The structure of the Greek economy is collectivist, but the country, in spirit, is the opposite of a collective. Its real structure is every man for himself. Into this system investors had poured hundreds of billions of dollars. And the credit boom had pushed the country over the edge, into total moral collapse.

...

Plenty more at the link.

[C0ckney]

it's been posted before and it's full of myths, inaccuracies and the sort of lazy moralising that we've seen since the whole thing began (just why are american analyses of the greek crisis always so bad? - not that european ones are much better).

there's certainly a discussion to be had about corruption and tax evasion in greece, but that nonsense article is not the place to start it.

[The Mad Monk]

I had not read the article before now, so it's new to me. What parts are inaccurate?

[The Mad Monk]

I don't know about cabbies in Greece, but cabbies in France ain't happy.

Taxi drivers in France formed virtual blockades around airports and key train stations Thursday, causing chaos in Paris and other French cities as part of a wide protest against the Uber ride-booking service, known in France as UberPOP.

Government and transportation officials urged travelers to take trains to many airports, as the roads around them were completely blocked.

Some 2,800 taxi drivers are taking part in the protest, according to Le Parisien. The newspaper adds that the drivers are angry about "the casualization of [professional] drivers."

Cabdrivers in France and elsewhere have become increasingly vocal critics of Uber, which they see as having an unfair advantage. Uber drivers don't have to buy an expensive taxi license, for instance; they're also not subject to the same regulations and inspections as cabs.

From Paris, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports:

"In Paris, taxis are blocking the beltway, Charles de Gaulle Airport and several train stations. In one part of the city riot police clashed with drivers as they set fire to tires and turned over one Uber car.

"Television footage has shown families with suitcases making their way by foot into the city from the airport, along the highway.

"Uber continues to operate in France while a court examines the legality of its app-based business model.

"Critics say Paris taxis in particular have resisted being opened up to competition for decades, and are now totally unprepared to confront the Uber threat."

Skirmishes over Uber and similar services grew heated in early 2014, when the ride-hailing companies successfully challenged a rule in Paris that would have imposed a 15-minute waiting period on customers who want a ride.

In addition to clashes with police in some areas, the taxi drivers' protests have also pitted rivals against each other. According to Le Monde, a frustrated motorcycle taxi driver pepper-sprayed a protesting taxi driver, and a ride-service driver who was attempting to push through a barricade knocked a taxi driver over, leading to an arrest and a trip to the hospital, respectively.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/25/417370376/thousands-of-cab-drivers-clog-france-s-roads-to-protest-uber

SAN FRANCISCO—Uber's European woes reached new heights Monday, with two of its French managers arrested in Paris following violent protests against the ride-hailing service by local cab drivers.

Uber France CEO Thibaud Simphal and its European general manager Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty were taken into custody in Paris and charged with running an "illicit" business. Agence France-Presse first reported the news.

An Uber statement said the two employees "today attended a hearing with the French police. We are always happy to answer questions the authorities have about our service and look forward to resolving these issues. Those discussions are ongoing. In the meantime, we're continuing to ensure the safety of our riders and drivers in France given last week's disturbances."

The arrest comes as French authorities crack down on the local Uber service, and after violent clashes in the capital between cabbies and Uber drivers.

These protests resulted in rock singer Courtney Love having her Uber car's window smashed as she rode to the airport.

Love tweeted: "they've ambushed our car and are holding our driver hostage. they're beating the cars with metal bats. this is France?? I'm safer in Baghdad." Cabbies caused damage to some 70 Uber cars.

Strong European driver unions have been upset ever since Uber migrated overseas. UberPOP, which is the continental version of UberX, launched in February 2014 and immediately was seen as a threat by cabbies. UberPOP drivers do not have to undergo the same training or pay the licensing fees as unionized cab drivers.

Many European lawmakers responded by banning the service in countries such as Brussels, the Netherlands and France. French authorities have been fining UberPOP drivers, although a New York Times report suggested that Uber was paying those fines.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/06/29/uber-managers-arrested-in-france/29478653/

[regexcellent]

I don't know about cabbies in Greece, but cabbies in France ain't happy.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/25/417370376/thousands-of-cab-drivers-clog-france-s-roads-to-protest-uber

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2...ance/29478653/

Yeah, Uber has made almost no headway in Estonia because all of the taxi companies already operate like Uber anyway. You hail a cab with a cell phone app, the fares are low, and everything is deregulated.

[-Jrabbit]

Sorry this is off topic, but are Uber drivers required to upgrade their insurance? What happens when an Uber driver gets into an accident that damages both people and property? It's something that I've idly wondered about...

OK, now back to the Greeks...

[pchang]

Article:
The country is screwed because our official numbers are totally fraudulent.
Response:
The article is a hit piece because its statistics are total refuted by the official numbers.

[pchang]

Sorry this is off topic, but are Uber drivers required to upgrade their insurance? What happens when an Uber driver gets into an accident that damages both people and property? It's something that I've idly wondered about...

OK, now back to the Greeks...

Completely dependent upon the jurisdiction where the Uber drivers live. Mostly, they are covered under their existing driver's insurance for being a consumer class car owner.

[N35t0r]

If the driver crashes, the accident is his fault, and his passenger gets injured, does insurance pay for the passenger? Over here, most regular insurance policies wouldn't cover the passenger (and definitely not your basic legally required policy).


[Edit:] Also, over here, transporting passengers requires a different class of license.

[pchang]

If the insurer discovers the accident happened during a commercial activity (being paid, e.g. Uber), then they have clauses that would allow them to not pay. I think the accident rate has been pretty low and the Uber drivers probably committed insurance fraud.