New Greek Scheme: Pay Pedophiles, Thieves, Arsonists, Masochists

GREEK BEAT
Who says Socialism isn’t working in Greece just because the government has dismantled social welfare programs, cut worker’s pay by 30 percent, raised their taxes (making the poor pay while rich tax evaders don’t), has slashed pensions, is now planning to take away auxiliary payments needed for luxuries like food, and is going to lay off hundreds of thousands of workers? Showing it still has its heart in the right place, the government, in this desperate time of need in the midst of an economic crisis the like of which no civilized western country has ever faced, is going to find the money somewhere to pay people who need it most: pedophiles, thieves, exhibitionists, fetishists, sadomasochists, gamblers, and – thank Zeus – arsonists, because there are so many of them and they provide summer entertainment burning down half the country’s forests. These are the kind of people this country needs! Now it makes no sense to beat yourself up over a guilty act because it could come with compensation.
In the You-Can’t-Make-This-Up department, the Greek Labor Ministry said at the same time it’s cutting benefits to the blind, crippled and truly disabled, that it’s going to expand a list of state-recognized disability categories to include people who like to diddle little children, which could give some priests a little extra pay and come just in time to solve a problem on Crete, where there has been a spate of child molesting cases, including charges a 22-year-old female teacher used Facebook to lure boys 10-15 for sex. Those people now are not only absolved, but they could get paid for their actions. The money, of course, will come from the blind and crippled.
For some reason, The National Confederation of Disabled People (NCDF) called the action “incomprehensible,” and said that pedophiles could get a higher disability pay than some people who have received organ transplants. That’s not fair, of course, because all 300 Members of Parliament and all the government ministers are on a list to receive a heart since they have none, although they have a soft spot for felons because they could one day find themselves on that list of the unfortunate who can’t stop themselves from doing what they must.
The Labor Ministry said the new categories of sickos added to the expanded list were included for purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating financial assistance.

An NDCP leader, who is blind, said that the new list could create new difficulties for disabled Greeks who are already facing benefit cuts due to the country’s financial crisis. “I think there is some big mistake. The ministry should have a different policy on disability,” Vardakastanis told the Associated Press. “The list contains major changes to disability quotients, which could effectively remove many people from access to benefits,” he said. The new list gives pyromaniacs and pedophiles disability pay up to 35 percent, compared to 80 percent for heart transplant recipients. Generally speaking, convicted pedophiles and other criminals go to jail, but, after all, this is Greece. “It’s really not serious to grant Peeping Toms a 20-30 percent disability rate, and 10 percent to diabetics, who have insulin shots four or five times a day,” said Vardakastanis.
You’d think a man in his position would have more sympathy for people who have compulsive disorders, and it’s time to add other people who can’t control their desires to this list and get payments from a bankrupt government. It’s unfair that smokers and alcoholics aren’t included because their addictions, they insist, are a disease like the plague or AIDS or Ebola and not just a selfish behavioral disorder. This could be good news though for the Turkish spies who tried to burn down the country’s forests in the late 1990’s because now they could be eligible to get benefits too, if they’d just come back into the country and present themselves and the gasoline cans and matches they used.
Since tax evaders are costing the country more than $60 billion and almost no one in Greece gives receipts so they can hide their income, Greece is broke. But in order to appease international lenders who are giving the country $152 billion in rescue loans, and actually contemplating giving the people who run Greece another $169 billion they won’t pay back, the government is considering ending a monopoly of so-called closed professions including the likes of architects, engineers and lawyers, and reducing the categories of “hazardous” professions such as hairdressers and television announcers, who could have retired early because of the stress of cutting hair and speaking into a microphone. Fortunately, pedophiles, thieves and arsonists are an open profession and there’s no hazard involved, unless you’re a child or have been burglarized, a rising crime as a lot of people have no other source of income because the loan money is being kept by the politicians and the rich elite who used to own Greece until the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank Troika took it over.
But, of course, in every crisis there is an opportunity, and enterprising Greeks who want to make enough money to survive can just strip naked, put on some panties and high heels and do jumping jacks in their window to expose themselves to their neighbors while setting themselves on fire before racing into the streets to break into a neighbor’s house, rush over to their favorite dominatrix before the fire goes out, take a beating, get out of their chains in times to place a bet in one of Greece’s legal betting parlors (new odds on Greece defaulting? 100 percent) and, if they’re still alive, find a park where some children are playing and try to grab up a couple so they can present themselves at the Labor Ministry and pick up their check, although it would be the first time in Greece anyone would need to bring their own receipts.