Saturday, March 06, 2010

EU Fears the Greeks Even When Bearing Them Gifts

A German Newspaper reminds the Greeks on how to behave as adults.
If you're reading this, you've entered a country different from yours. You're in Germany.

Here, people work until they are 67 and there is no 14th-month salary for civil servants. Here, nobody needs to pay a €1,000 bribe to get a hospital bed in time.

Our petrol stations have cash registers, taxi drivers give receipts and farmers don't swindle EU subsidies with millions of non-existent olive trees.

Germany also has high debts but we can settle them. That's because we get up early and work all day.

We want to be friends with the Greeks. That's why since joining the euro, Germany has given your country €50bn.


The "non-existent olive trees" refers to Greek dishonest reporting of agricultural assets to gain EU subsidies. Greek taxi drivers are notorious crooks in general and feed off tourists by cheating them. And the Greek work ethic is more of a job ethic---you show up at "work," hang your coat over your chair, and then go out to earn a second salary while your bureaucratic slot earns a paycheck. Mexico has the same system.

Strikes and attacks on Parliament have caused the Greek Finance Minister Papaconstantinou to tell the EUrotards that
European allies should now act to pledge aid should Greece need help financing its growing debt. “Obviously, the EU must undertake responsibility, which it hasn’t done yet,” he told lawmakers. EU nations are working on a contingency rescue plan for Greece to be funded by European governments, according to two people briefed yesterday in Berlin by an EU official.


Doesn't look like the Eurofamily is going to have great days ahead of it.

UPDATE

The Economist has more on this story....

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