46 online
 
Most Popular Choices
Share on Facebook 46 Printer Friendly Page More Sharing
General News    H1'ed 5/20/13

My Big Fat Greek Minister

By       (Page 1 of 1 pages)   2 comments
Follow Me on Twitter     Message Greg Palast
Become a Fan
  (67 fans)
http://gallery.mailchimp.com/33e4ec877eed6a43863a4a92e/images/Pangalos.jpg

It wasn't too difficult picking out the Fat Bastard in the crowd of Russian models, craven moochers and media mavens. Besides, Fat Bastard and I were both desperate for coffee and heading for the same empty urn.

(We'd both signed on for Kazakhstan's annual Eurasia Media Forum, a kind of Burning Man festival for Eastern oilgarchs and their media camp followers.)

Now, it is my policy never to mention an interlocutor's weight, nor question the legitimacy of their birth, given my own vulnerabilities. (A would-be groupie told me, "You could do a few sit-ups, you know." Yes, I know.)

But this particular Fat Bastard is asking for it. I had tried to put the belly of this beast out of my thoughts, but I still had a New York Times story folded in my pocket that begins:
ATHENS -- As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.

Fat Bastard -- or Theodoros Pangalos, leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), Greece's equivalent to UK's Labour Party -- thinks the little Greek kiddies should stop belly-aching. Pangalos, as you can see from the photo below, is not bent over with hunger pains. In fact, he looks more likely to be bent over with labour pains, but in truth he probably just can't bend over at all.

Pangalos is best known for blaming the working people of Greece for the horror and the hunger among the ruins of what was once Greece's economy. However, it is, of course, not his fault; until last year, and through the core of the crisis, he was just Greece's Deputy Prime Minister -- why should he be held accountable for anything?

Minister Pangalos is much loved by Europe's banking chieftains, by vulture speculators and by Prussian President Angela Merkel because they've got themselves a gigantic Greek who will mouth their mantra: that his nation's sudden collapse can be blamed squarely on olive-pit-spitting, lazy-ass Greeks who won't work more than three hours a week, then retire while they're still teenagers to swill state-subsidized ouzo.

Pangalos leads the Fifth Column of Greeks calling to accept Germany's terms of economic surrender: austerity, meaning cuts in food allowances, in pensions, in jobs. As of this week, more than one in four Greeks (27 percent) are out of work.
While we hunted for caffeine, Fat Bastard told me that anyone who complains about the austerity diktat, "Is a fascist or a communist or a conspiracy theorist." He didn't tell me which of these three categories the 11-year-old kids complaining of hunger pains fell into.

Just for the record, those Greeks who can get a job, work 619 more hours per year (see table) than the average German (and way, way more than Britons or Americans as well). But in the world according to Pangalos, Merkel and poobahs of the media, Greece went to hell in a handbag because the entire nation suddenly turned into work-shirking grifters.

But there's another explanation for wrack and ruin: Greece is a crime scene. And its working people are not the perpetrators of the crime, they are the victims -- scammed, defrauded, their national industries looted and their treasury drained by financial flim-flam.

In 2001, Greece dropped the drachma for the euro. The drachma was good enough for Aristotle and very good for tourism, Greece's main industry. But when sun-and-fun was re-priced in euros, tourists swam across the Adriatic for kofte meatballs priced in dirt-cheap Turkish lira. Pre-euro tourist visits to Greece outnumbered those to Turkey by millions; but by last year, it was the just the opposite, with two-thirds of tourists tanning in Turkey.
With its Treasury bleeding hard currency, the government of Minister Pangalos' PASOK joined together with the opposition in a complex international currency kiting operation to conceal the losses from the public and, most importantly, from the European Central Bank.

Why the cover-up of the deficit? The answer is that the euro is more than a currency: it is a straitjacket, a set of constricting rules that, for example, prohibit any euro nation from running a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP.

That's impossible in a recession -- not to mention plain insane -- as it requires cutting public spending when spending is needed most. The USA, China, Brazil, India -- the nations that pulled the world from depression's brink -- all ran deficits way over the nutty 3 percent cap. I asked finance wiz Nomi Prins to calculate America's debt-to-GDP ratio using euro rules, and she estimates that Obama's deficits are now way down from recession's peak -- to 10.2 percent of GDP.

Greece, fearing expulsion from the euro loony bin, turned to Goldman Sachs. For a mere $400 million in fees, plus golden sacks of ill-gotten trading gain, the investment bank was willing to cook the nation's books via a complex set of derivatives transactions. [For the particulars of the derivatives con, see How Goldman Sacked Greece.]
Since the con was busted open in 2009, the Greek public has had to pay cheated bondholders a premium to insure against default of the nation's debts. The credit default insurance costs an average of $14,000 ( -9,218) per family per year.

When I was a racketeering investigator working with the US Justice Department, in the days when we pretended America still had justice, we would have called the derivatives trick a "fraud on the market". We'd handcuff the perpetrators, lock 'em up, or, at the least, make them cough up their purloined profits.

So, should Goldman pay up? Not according to Pangalos, because -- in the worldview of our rulers -- the victims of the scam are as guilty as the victimisers. Pangalos even put it into a famous (or infamous) motto: mazi-ta-fagame. That's Greek for "We all ate it together".

But the visible evidence suggests Pangalos, not Pantelis -- the kid doubled over with stomach pain -- ate all the pies.

The mass privatization of public property at wiener schnitzel prices has German speculators dipping in their spoons as well, though the Federation of German industry is complaining about Greece's own "princes" gobbling up the assets.

I was going to invite Minister Pangalos to lunch to test his theories, but he left in a pachydermic huff when I asked him about Geir Haarde. Haarde, the former Prime Minister of Iceland, was found guilty of concealing his knowledge of the trickery used by Iceland's banks before they melted that nation's finances.

I asked Fat Bastard, "Do you think you should be in prison for" similar conduct in the Greek government?

Maybe that's why Minister Pangalos didn't want to go to lunch with me.
Well Said 4   Must Read 3   Supported 3  
Rate It | View Ratings

Greg Palast Social Media Pages: Facebook page url on login Profile not filled in       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Greg Palastà ‚¬ „ s investigative reports appear in Rolling Stone, the Guardian and on BBC Television. His latest film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, on how Donald Trump stole the 2016 election, is available on Amazon. Palast is Patron of the (more...)
 
Go To Commenting
The views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
Follow Me on Twitter     Writers Guidelines

 
Contact AuthorContact Author Contact EditorContact Editor Author PageView Authors' Articles
Support OpEdNews

OpEdNews depends upon can't survive without your help.

If you value this article and the work of OpEdNews, please either Donate or Purchase a premium membership.

STAY IN THE KNOW
If you've enjoyed this, sign up for our daily or weekly newsletter to get lots of great progressive content.
Daily Weekly     OpEd News Newsletter
Name
Email
   (Opens new browser window)
 

Most Popular Articles by this Author:     (View All Most Popular Articles by this Author)

UAW Files Charges Against Romney for Auto Bail-Out Profiteering

Placebo Ballots: Stealing California From Bernie Using an Old GOP Vote-Snatching Trick

Aaron Swartz Died For Piers Morgan's Sins

TrumpCare dies, XL flies -- and the secret winner is...

The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis

GREECE'D: We Voted 'No' to slavery, but 'Yes' to our chains

To View Comments or Join the Conversation:

Tell A Friend