{"id":184693,"date":"2012-02-12T23:43:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T04:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/02\/12\/greeks-vote-to-approve-their-own-suicide-while-the-rest-of-the-eu-applaudes\/"},"modified":"2012-02-12T23:43:00","modified_gmt":"2012-02-13T04:43:00","slug":"greeks-vote-to-approve-their-own-suicide-while-the-rest-of-the-eu-applaudes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/02\/12\/greeks-vote-to-approve-their-own-suicide-while-the-rest-of-the-eu-applaudes\/","title":{"rendered":"Greeks Vote to Approve Their Own Suicide While the Rest of the EU Applaudes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Their parliament has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/02\/13\/world\/europe\/greeks-pessimistic-in-anti-austerity-protests.html\">approved the new austerity plan, which will allow them to borrow money and give it to German, French, and British banks<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If I were running Greece, I would start a program of aggressive instruction in German for the populace.<\/p>\n<p>If the Germans want to make Greece uninhabitable, perhaps they should accommodate the refugees.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, Athens burns:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>After violent protests left dozens of buildings aflame in Athens, the Greek Parliament voted early on Monday to approve a package of harsh austerity measures demanded by the country\u2019s foreign lenders in exchange for new loans to keep Greece from defaulting on its debt.<\/p>\n<p>Though it came after days of intense debate and the resignation of several ministers in protest, in the end the vote on the austerity measures was not close: 199 in favor and 74 opposed, with 27 abstentions or blank ballots. The Parliament also gave the government the authority to sign a new loan agreement with the foreign lenders and approve a broader arrangement to reduce the amount Greece must repay to its bondholders.<\/p>\n<p>The new austerity measures include, among others, a 22 percent cut in the benchmark minimum wage and 150,000 government layoffs by 2015 \u2014 a bitter prospect in a country ravaged by five years of recession and with unemployment at 21 percent and rising.<\/p>\n<p>But the chaos on the streets of Athens, where more than 80,000 people turned out to protest on Sunday, and in other cities across Greece reflected a growing dread \u2014 certainly among Greeks, but also among economists and perhaps even European officials \u2014 that the sharp belt-tightening and the bailout money it brings will still not be enough to keep the country from going over a precipice. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s actually going to make things worse, because it will cause the economy to contract, and the <b>last <\/b>thing you want to do in order to get out of debt is to cut your salary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Their parliament has approved the new austerity plan, which will allow them to borrow money and give it to German, French, and British banks. If I were running Greece, I would start a program of aggressive instruction in German for the populace. If the Germans want to make Greece uninhabitable, perhaps they should accommodate the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[973,984,1004],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-europe","category-finance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184693"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}