Behold! The wisdom of a bureaucratic client state revealed:
Greek public servants walked off the job for 24 hours Thursday to protest austerity measures, paralyzing state services, closing schools and grounding close to a hundred flights.
Public-sector umbrella union ADED/Y with its 400,000-strong membership has called the industrial action, the latest of a series of strikes that have plagued the debt-ridden Mediterranean nation, to protest against wage cuts and tax increases that have hit many of their members very hard.
“We sent the message that we will continue our industrial action against increasing austerity, high unemployment, the hikes to indirect taxes and increasing bills from state controlled utilities and organization,” ADEDY said in a statement that threatened further strikes.
The socialist government has cut public-sector pay by as much as 30% in some instances and imposed a three-year wage freeze as part of the conditions for a €110 billion ($153.3 billion) bailout from the International Monetary Fund and European Union that was needed to stave off certain bankruptcy.
The day-long strike has shut down tax-collection offices, customs offices, municipalities across the country and many ministerial departments. Air traffic controllers are participating with a four-hour work stoppage. This will ground all flights to and from Greece between 1200 and 1600 GMT, creating chaos for travelers.
Athens International Airport said that 72 flights have been cancelled and another 152 have had to be rescheduled out of an original total of 590 flights that were scheduled for Thursday.
Teachers at public primary and high schools are also joining in, closing classrooms and creating problems for working parents. Universities have also been shut down as lecturers and administrators joined the protest. A walkout by doctors means public hospitals are running on a skeleton staff and dealing only with emergencies.
[…]
September saw a strike by truck drivers who are angry about plans to open up the trucking industry, and by railroad workers who are set against privatization of the deeply-indebted state railway. More strikes are expected later this autumn as lawyers, pharmacists, taxi drivers and others try to prevent liberalization of their occupations, entry into which has long been rigorously controlled.
Crazy, I know: but when the government is the main employer of its citizens, the citizens won’t react kindly when that same government realizes it can’t afford to keep paying them, having wrung all they can out of the dwindling private sector.
Writes TerryH in an email, “Even though the Grecian economy is on the verge of catastrophic failure, visions of other people’s money and the ability to seize it through the force of government — which is the root cause of the pending failure — proves irresistable.
Closer to home Team O! brings big labor on board to achieve some Grecian style social justice for the rank and file. If the PIGS are an indication of where this leads, this is most definitely not change you can believe in.”
Well said, but alas, Terry suffers from longterm thinking. And morality. To the “progressives,” the idea is to keep the people dependent upon the government, because doing so means the rank and file will necessarily need the government — an enormous, centralized state — to keep the spigot flowing toward them at the expense of those in the private sector, even if they realize deep down that such a bargain must eventually drain the well.
They just hope they get “theirs” first — and let the future worry about the future.
Isn’t that a remarkable statement? Put another way, a huge majority entrusts a tiny minority to manage its most important affairs — income, health, well-being, environment, and in a strong sense, its spirituality or humanism.
One asks, wtf? Why, in our case, would we have so very much of our lives be directed by roughly .002% of us?
This is a madness whose name we dare not speak, calling it instead progressive movement toward an end state (and State) we know from history will quite literally find a way to kill us dead.
Judas.
A bureaucratic state is wise??
Only to the so-called “Reality Based Community.” Problem is they are nowhere near being based in reality, but they think that they are. Morons.
I was being facetious, David…
I know that when I was 13, I had a pretty dim understanding of my parents’ means and their ability to afford this or that.
Of course, my parents didn’t have the entire EU to rely on for a bailout if they decided to buy me a couple dozen sports cars, send me on a four-star tour of Europe, and support me in luxury for the rest of my natural life.
Which they totally didn’t.
Because they were mean and they hated me.
The entire EU isn’t available to help the bailout, dicentra. Unfortunately for the Germans, it’s largely them. The club of crapped out Euroflops may be highlighted by Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy, but the trend is more wide ranging.
Remember the retard WR? He/she/it/Willie The Catshagger seemed to think there was some sort of EUtopia. What a maroon. If Dave Cameron does nothing else, preventing the UK from joining Greece, Spain et al. in the crapper will be a legacy.
I assume a few people haven’t heard “PIGS” before. It’s a shortened acronym for the countries Silver Whistle listed above.
Btw, does anyone else feel weird when they start feeling sorta sorry for the Bundesbank?
Remember the retard WR?
He’s the guy who thought Spain was just great because they’re still pretending they have money, right? Never mind the 20% unemployment and the junk bond status — they still have socialized medicine (for a few more months, anyway)!
Yeah, he was some kind of maroon. Prolly thinks that California will be okay once they start taxing the scenery.
There’s their trouble: making it possible for a “public servant” strike to actually affect things that matter.
You’d almost think they’d never heard of the solution to the phone-sanitizer problem. Did HHTG not get translated into Greek?
Okay, I just tried to post a follow-up correcting my acronym for Hitchhiker’s Guide and it didn’t get posted but the system won’t let me re-post it. But if this one works you’ll at least know I saw the error and tried to correct it.
@#$!! comment system.
Hey, look! They’re finally running out of other people’s money…
That only because “other people” aren’t working hard enough. Hoarders! Wreckers!
#12 – damn straight, they just need to squeeze the Kulaks a bit more…
Vanity Fair recently had an article about Greece that profiles it as a third world country.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-201010
What’s a Grecian Earn?
Nothing, increasingly.
Apologies to John Keats.
Who knew dyeing your hair could cause such problems?
(looks around) C’mon! 15 comments in with no Grecian Formula jokes?
Oh, if only our socialist government were smart enough to adopt the Grecian Formula….
Btw, does anyone else feel weird when they start feeling sorta sorry for the Bundesbank?
I have to say, the old Deutsche Mark had das gewisse Etwas. I’d give you a pfennig for the new Euro. Deal?