Tomorrow ABC’s Foreign Correspondent is talking to Greeks about the looming financial catastrophe about to engulf them. Olympus-sized debts threaten to swamp the nation like some modern day Atlantis.
If Greece doesn’t get itself out of this hole then pain will surely radiate out and strike other nations hard. Globally, financial types are watching this drama very closely indeed.
Failure to resolve Greece’s economic crisis could trigger the kind of madcap mayhem currently playing out in Clash of The Titans.
How did Greece get into this $450B mess and how can it possibly emerge from it without a great deal of pain and misery, if at all?
As Christos Kyriakousis, an Athens cabbie, says on Foreign Correspondent; “There’s an old saying here in Greece: the more money you steal, the better off you are. If you steal a few hundred euros you go to jail. If you steal thousands of euros, we’ll talk about it. If you steal a few million euros, you become a hero.”
Foreign Correspondent’s Mark Corcoran takes a white-knuckle cab ride into Greece’s financial maelstrom to meet some locals coping with a looming catastrophe.
Hard-bitten cabbie Christos Kyriakousis is his street-wise guide, former Perth businessman and local hotelier Nick Geronimos wrestles with a glacial bureaucracy, while fashionista and A-list facilitator Renee Pappas decries the burgeoning ranks of illegal immigrants slipping into the country and flogging knock-off Prada in Athens’ historical precincts.
All shake their heads and shrug their shoulders about fakelakia – the rampant and pervasive system of kickbacks and payola that blight the economy and burden everyone.
Corruption has become an accepted norm, a black economy has grown so big that tax receipts are dangerously anaemic and everyone agrees something needs to be done, but by someone else.
Foreign Correspondent ABC Tuesday April 13 at 8pm.
(source: neos kosmos)
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