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Cypriots Give Samaras Ammo Against Troika

What Greece should tell the Troika too
What Greece should tell the Troika too

The resounding 36-0 rejection (not counting 19 cowards who sat on their hands and wouldn’t take a stand) by the Cypriot Parliament of a tax that would have confiscated up to 9.9 percent of bank account deposits could provide Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras with bargaining chips as he readies to continue negotiations with the same international lenders that are demanding additional austerity measures.
Samaras, the New Democracy Conservative party leader – as did his predecessor and former PASOK Socialist leader – didn’t put up a fight when the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) demanded big pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions in return for continuing rescue packages that will constitute $325 billion over two bailouts.
He didn’t push for privatization of state enterprises and the sale or lease of state lands, nor fast track Foreign Direct Investment to lure companies to hire public workers who should have been let go from a hugely bloated workforce, hundreds of thousands of whom were hired over generations of alternate administrations of New Democracy and PASOK.
He didn’t get rid of the red tape of a labyrinthine bureaucracy that scared away potential investors who didn’t want to have pay a round robin circle of bribes to corrupt civil servants with their hands out, unsatisfied with a no-heavy lifting (and sometimes even no-show) job guaranteed for life even if they killed their boss.
He didn’t, until just recently, give any hope or incentive to entrepreneurs, especially the young, so that some Greek could have walked into a garage and walked out with the next Google. He hasn’t capitalized on Greece’s greatest asset – the sun – to boost solar energy beyond the Helios park that would have its revenues dedicated to paying back interest on foreign loans instead of generating monies and jobs along with electricity. With an average of 250 fully sunny days a year, some 3,000 hours, it’s mostly being wasted giving sun tans to people doing nothing.
Greece has done almost nothing to promote its other great assets, such as agricultural products, including honey, saffron, olive oil, and wine. Greece is the world’s third-leading producer of olives, cultivating them since ancient times. Some trees planted in the 13th Century are still producing olives, but Greece resells much of its product to Italians, who put it under their names and tap world markets.

Tourism is Greece’s biggest revenue engine, bringing in almost $13 billion a year. But because of poor promotion, Greece ranks behind the likes of Ukraine – as well at Turkey – in luring visitors despite a picture-postcard country. The government has ammunition at the ready besides austerity but has not used it. Now, thanks to the Cypriots standing up to the Troika after Greece bowed down, the Prime Minister can finally get a little tough when the lenders come back to town and keep demanding without listening.
To be sure, Greece needed reasonable austerity, but not only austerity and not of the type that is unjust and created the kind of bitter resentment that fueled protests, strikes and rages and successive governments whose ineptitude put Greece in the hands of foreign lenders and ceded away the sovereignty of a country that fought invaders to the death for milennia.
INSANITY, NOT AUSTERITY
Greeks aren’t numbers, but human beings whose lives are being wrecked by foreigners who blow into town, stay at 5-Star hotels, their bills paid by Greeks, issue orders and fly out first class before coming back to do the same. Public workers who are laid off, and should be, could be retrained and hired by private companies if the government hadn’t created a record 27 percent unemployment in the private sector while keeping a 0.0 percent jobless rate in the public sector.
After Cyprus’ forked tongue newly-elected President Nicos Anastiades rolled over and reneged on his ink-still-wet campaign promise not to seize money from Cypriots – including people with a single euro in the bank – so that he could protect rich Russians and mobsters using his country’s banks like a money-laundering slot machines, it was up to the Cypriot people to stop him and the Troika.
The first to do so, Cypriots held up their hands, their palms inscribed with a big “NO” to the Troika. Samaras can do the same, give them a big “NA!” and start making some demands instead of taking them. That’s what leaders do, instead of being led around by the nose. He has plenty of alternatives to the axe he’s always being handed, and it’s time to turn it around and start swinging back the way Greeks do to injustice.
Cyprus’ banks were pushed into insolvency when former Greek finance minister Evangelos Venizelos, now the leader of the PASOK Anti-Socialists who is sitting in his big house downing oysters and drinking wine from the skulls of Greeks, imposed 74 percent losses on investors, including those in the Diaspora, some of whom put their life savings into believing in their homeland. He pushed Greek and Cypriot banks into near-ruination.
Cyprus – like Greece – needs a sane and balanced plan to save the economy and it isn’t legalized bank robbery. There are alternatives that could save the banks and the economy and none of them involve politicians without guns holding up the banks. The Troika isn’t going to pull the plug on Greek loans without toppling the Eurozone so Greece holds some cards too. If the Cypriot plan had gone through it would have created a run on the banks and closed them the same day and anybody who keeps money in a Cypriot bank after this deserves to be robbed.
The ECB threatened to pull the plug on liquidity to Cyprus’ central bank if the plan to steal money from Cypriots bank accounts failed, but they didn’t of course, just the way the Troika won’t stop giving loans to Greece even if the insanity of all-out austerity that has taken away 46 percent of Greeks disposable income is stopped. Former NBA great Charles Barkley, who always spoke his mind, said that so many young players squandered their talent along with their wealth because they didn’t know how to say the magic word to people trying to bleed them dry. No.
There’s a public display at the Syntagma Square metro station, just inside the outdoor center where protests, strikes and riots have been going on against austerity for three years. It’s called Rethink Greece, exactly what Samaras should do. Maybe he can start thinking like a Cypriot and hold up his palm and show them a big NO.
 
 

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