Wood, winter and wishful thinking

Nowadays it's now known as fuel poverty, but to older generations it is huddling in cold, damp rooms round an inadequate fire hoping that either the weather will get better or that you'll have enough money to see out the cold spell. With temperatures in Greece dropping below zero in the mountainous northern regions, one of  the government's most hated tax measures is starting to take effect. The decision by Athens to raise heating oil taxation by 40% seems to have backfired as millions decided not to turn on their oil fired central heating and turned to other sources, most notably, wood burning stoves, leaving the government with 790 million euro shortfall.

In the northern region of Kozani heating oil whole sellers reported an 85% drop in demand in comparison  with last year, whilst businesses supplying wood, sometimes logged illegally are seeing a roaring trade as Greeks seek to heat their homes using traditional wood burning stoves known as soumbes.

Already the effects can seen in large cities with atmospheric pollution on the rise, leading many Athenian twitter users to remark on the use of wood along with heavy fog  effected the capital last night.

The government's decision to raise tax on such a basic item as heating in a country with shrinking wages and a 25% unemployment was justified on the grounds that the Greek treasury was losing billions in revenue due to more lightly taxed heating oil was being used in the place of diesel. However, the move has ended up punishing the 2/3 Greek households that till recently relied upon heating oil and lead to the drop in overall government revenues as people simply buy less oil.

However, tax hikes are just one part of the equation, and is with so many other economic issues in Greece the role of cartels and monopolies controlled by local oligarchs has to be taken into account.Like many other tax increases the use of cartels means that any increase in cost is pressed directly onto the consumer and not absorbed wholly or partially by the supplier as would normally happen in a free market with fair competition. In a recent report the IMF similarly warned that one of the reasons for Greece's inability to improve competitiveness was lack of competition in the local oil refining industry which kept prices much higher than in other EU countries.

As today's 'Reuters article on the role of oligarchs in the Greek crisis points out such closed shop policies are only possible with the connivance of the politicians in government who often pass legislation designed specifically to protect the interests of the small group of Greek tycoons who continue to exert a stranglehold on the economy and are defying all attempts to get them to take their share of the nation's tax burden.

Despite repeated claims by prime minister, Antonis Samaras that the worse is over and that Greece will return to growth in the near future the same corrupt political elite that helped create the current debt crisis now poses, to the disbelief of many inside and outside Greece as the country's saviours.

"A hideous ecstasy of fear" - The media and the Greek crisis.

The best things in life are free, a photo by Teacher Dude's BBQ on Flickr.

The possibility of Greece leaving/being forced out of the Eurozone has been dominating the local news cycle for days. Ever since Athens failed to form a government last week, the press has been full of stories of what might happen if Greece once more returned to the Drachma.  'The Gates of Hell will open', 'Greece will live scenes straight out of the Apocalypse'' are two examples of the kind of fear tactics being used by politicians and reporters.

Internationally, the quality of debate is not much higher, nor more informed. Instead, normally sober news agencies pump out the kinds of headlines usually associated with the possibility of Godzilla stomping down town Tokyo. However, behind the hysteria and hyperbole there is also lot of very poor journalism going on with facts taking a back seat to sensationalist "scoops". Whether this is just editors demanding juicier headlines or something darker is going on is a matter of debate.

(For the sake of full disclosure, I don't not live in a aluminium foil lined room for fear of the NSA trying to brain wash me with microwave signals broadcast from Area 51 LOL).

The most commonly misreported story is that Greeks see next elections as either a pro or anti Eurozone vote. This is simply not true as the vast majority of those asked in polls have reported that they want the country to retain the euro, a reminder that the historical fear of hyperinflation is not limited to the German psyche. Nor do any of the parties (with the exception of Greek Communist Party) advocate exit from the Euro as part of its election platform.

To give a taste of just how wide of the mark some of reporting concerning Greece is I've chose this article which appeared on the Reuters site today. It is not the only one of its type and compared with the abysmal domestic examples of panic journalism, not the worse. However, it is riddled through with factual errors, and unsubstantiated conjecture masquerading as in-depth analysis.

The first paragraph of the story claims that Greece will not even have time to print drachmas should it leave the EZ and is based on a interview with Marios Efthymiopoulos, a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University Centre for Advanced International Studies and president of Thessaloniki-based think tank Global Strategy. who says that "You wouldn't be able to pay anyone except in coupons. There is only one (currency) printing press in Greece. It is in the museum in Athens and it doesn't work any more."

Ah, those boring olδ facts are such a drag in the fast moving 24/7 news cycle. Well, first of all there is no Global Strategy think tank, based in Thessaloniki. There is, however, a right leaning organisation called Strategic Initiative headed by Marios Efthymiopoulos and his brother, coincidence perhaps?

Also the idea that Greece has no printing press is also mistaken, As well as the defunct printing press now housed in the museum in Athens, the Bank of Greece also has facilities to print notes and mint coins. The Banknote Printing Works of the Bank of Greece (IETA) is based in Holargos, which is the Halandri district, Attiki.

The author, Peter Apps also says that "Already this week, Greek savers - and smaller numbers elsewhere in the southern euro zone - have begun to take money from banks" Well, people often take their money out of banks, even when there isn't a crisis and without an idea of the scale of withdraws (Link? Source?) this is just so much speculation. Perhaps Reuters is helping recycle the rumour that Greek banks were being deluged by customers taking out their savings and so had imposed a limit of 50E at ATMs. The good thing about a bank run is that just suggesting the possibility of one can make it real. That way analysts can ensure the accuracy of their own predictions.

Later on the article raises the idea of borders being closed and tanks on the streets. No self respecting scare story about Greece these days is complete without at least one reference to either civil war or military coup. (Strange how none of this is ever mentioned in discussions about Spain or Portugal which also suffered both).

The idea is that with a collapsing economy people would stuff their life savings and smuggle them out over the mountains to the north or across the Adriatic, so prompting Athens to close the country's borders. In which case, Greeks would not as they have done so often in the past, either hide money somewhere closer to home or covert it into a more easily concealable form? Rather they would lug suitcases full of cash around the country?

"Troops in the streets" Once again the idea is put forward that the army would be used to bring order to the streets? Who would give such an order if there is no government apart from an unelected caretaker one? And would the army obey? Gone are the days of the Cold War and the possibility that Greece could become a part of the Eastern Bloc. Given that the paranoia and tensions that helped fuel the 1967 military take over no longer exist, could conscript military units be persuaded to take on their own people in defence of a government that lacks popular support? Undoubtedly , there would be some Greek politicians who'd quite happily give the order but whether they would be listened to is unlikely.

As I mentioned before the article is a mish mash of ham-fisted speculation, deliberate exaggeration and sloppy reporting. unfortunately, as the Greek elections approach we are likely to see much more of its ilk as the stakes concerning the future of the Eurozone get higher and the gloves really come off.

Close Pagani Now - stencils

Feel free to download these stencils and use as you see fit. For more on the Pagani immigrant detention centre (Mytilini, Greece) check out these news stories and the No Borders Lesvos 2009 site. For latest developments here is their Twitter page.

"GENEVA (Reuters) - More than 850 people including 200 unaccompanied children are being held in shocking conditions at a detention centre for illegal immigrants on the Greek island of Lesvos, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday.

"The report on the centre at Pagani adds to concern already expressed by UNHCR about Greece's treatment of migrants.

UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic said commission staff had visited the centre, which has a capacity of 250 to 300, earlier this week. Most detainees were from Afghanistan, he said.

"The UNHCR staff described the condition of the centre as unacceptable," he told a briefing.

"One room houses over 150 women and 50 babies, many suffering from illness related to the cramped and unsanitary conditions of the centre," he said."

Reuters

We Hunt People For Jesus

We Hunt People For Jesus, originally uploaded by Teacher Dude's BBQ.

"A U.S. church raised money to send Bibles, printed in the Pashtu and Dari languages, to American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, a report on Al Jazeera documented Sunday night.

It is against military rules to proselytize -- a regulation one of the soldiers filmed by the network readily acknowledged. "You cannot proselytize, but you can give gifts," says the soldier. It is a crime in Afghanistan to attempt to convert anyone from Islam to any other religion. "I also want to praise God because my church collected some money to get Bibles for Afghanistan. They came and sent the money out." The footage is said to be roughly a year old.

The Al Jazeera report also shows a military preacher urging army parishioners to "hunt people for Jesus."

The Special Forces guys, they hunt men. Basically, we do the same things as Christians. We hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the Kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business," he says."

The Huffington Post

The old ones are the best - even in comedy

ATHENS (Reuters) - "I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it."

For those who believe the ancient Greeks thought of everything first, proof has been found in a 4th century AD joke book featuring an ancestor of Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch where a man returns a parrot to a shop, complaining it is dead.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

Here is another Greek joke I heard years ago. After an archeology conferences all the guys get together in the bar and start to chat and swap war stories. After a few more drinks people start to get a bit boastful. One of the German archeologists starts saying that when he was excavating a 14th century castle in Bavaria they found traces of cables so proving that the Germans had phones long before anyone else.

"Bahhh!!!", starts a Greek archeologist, "Last years we were exacavating the Acropolis and guess what we found?" , "Nothing!, So that shows we had mobile long before anyone else."