Greece : tragic times

We had a great time over the Christmas season entertaining and being entertained by family and friends, even enjoying a delightfully unexpected reunion – Melina and Manoli, that was such fun!! But at Hogmanay as the bells pealed, fireworks crackled, ships sirens went off, and the first-footer having smashed the dried pomegranate outside to bring the household good luck, we all clinked glasses and wondered what this New Year would bring for us in Greece.
Here’s a further picture of what life in Greece is like and what we have to look forward to, given the application of the austerity measures. This is all happening on a background of increasing taxes, food prices, fuel costs, electricity bills and unemployment figures while public sector salaries are being constantly cut, and public sector employers follow suit. Politicians themselves say the following payments are not fair measures, but if they do not suffice then even more drastic steps will have to be taken.

Additional Payment 1
In December 2011 the first of two instalments was added to our electricity bill. This additional property tax is known as the ‘Haratsi’- which my dictionary defines as : poll tax, fine, heavy tax, extortion. I believe the term originally referred to a per capita household tax levied on the Greeks under the Turkish dictatorship - certainly, an equally unpopular levy.
The amount one has to pay under the present regime depends on the size of the property you own and on the area it is in. In January/February property owners will pay the second instalment – our total came to 646 euros. Refusal to pay this results in your power supply being cut off even though you may have paid for these utility services.

Additional Payment 2
This sum is levied through the Income Tax Department and is income related. Depending on their total income - be it from salary, pension, rental income, whatever - declared in the tax declaration for 2010, by the end of 2011 most people have had to pay a lump sum allegedly to support the unemployed. I say ‘most people’ for some, like us, have still not had their 2010 tax declarations processed.

Additional Payment 3
This third measure most decidedly falls within the extortion semantic range and is what I call the ‘dishonesty tax’. This was essentially designed to compensate for private sector owners’/employers’ tax evasion – a firmly rooted practice where, for example, private medical practitioners would regularly declare ridiculously low annual incomes for taxation purposes but were never challenged or inspected.

People like H and myself, former public sector and private sector employees, respectively, have our salaries declared by our public organization/ employers and so are verifiable, yet we are still considered eligible for the dishonesty tax which is where the gross unfairness comes into play.
Essentially what happens is that the Ministry of Finance looks at your property, car, land, pool, etc. - and says ‘Ah – to have all these you would have to have an annual income of x,ooo euros - so we are going to tax you on that amount’ – regardless of what you have actually earned, regardless of how long it may have taken you to accumulate these assets. Nor do we know yet what rate of taxation will be set on this ‘state-inflated income’. We do know it will have to be paid some time in 2012 after the 2011 tax declaration has been processed. In essence, making out your declaration is a rather pointless exercise since they are going to ignore what you have stated as your actual income, anyway.

Now here’s the real anomaly as far as we are concerned: we have never been big spenders, we are not plate-smashing, table-overturning, bouzouki night-club frequenters, we don’t go on expensive trips, don’t do designer. Our money we have spent on home-improvement, on two nice cars and on our pool and garden – our own home-grown holiday resort! H has estimated that the state-inflated income to be imposed on us will amount to a sum that our combined salaries have never ever approached. And we are expected to cough up tax on that sum now when I am drawing a pension, so on a greatly reduced income, while H who applied for his pension last September will have to wait for at least a year before receiving any payment whatsoever. At least they haven’t – as yet - imposed a tax on shirts and shoes, for that would really have us cleaned out!!

In the past couple of years one could see the face of the city change radically as even large businesses folded and commercial properties were vacated permanently. The enormity of the situation is becoming more evident. Just this week it was announced that those who are unemployed and pensioners now outnumber those in employment in Greece. Further figures showed a pronounced increase in the number of suicide attempts over the last three years. People in our circle of acquaintances are losing their jobs: middle-aged people with little hope of finding other employment, young people with mortgages to pay and families to support. We hear of people moving abroad in search of work, replicating patterns of emigration of around 50 years ago to the USA, Australia and Germany.

Trade unionists and politicians, who have promoted and maintained the mismanagement, ineptitude and corruption rife in the system over the last 30 years, continue to make grandiose pronouncements in pseudo-Communist jargon and political cant, reminiscent of Orwell’s Newspeak from ‘1984’. In such critical times the fact that they insist on calling strikes and planning elections clearly demonstrates that their chief interest is in retaining positions and power rather than exercising the responsibilities they have to those who elected them and getting the country out of the mire.
Joseph de Maistre is generally credited with having written, in 1851 in his ‘Lettres et Opuscules Inedits’, that every country has the government it deserves. What this people have done to deserve such governance beats me!
The Greek ‘ti na kanoume?’response is generally a spontaneous, non-considered response. It is one, nevertheless, that left me without an adequate answer…..‘What can we do?’ Two recent events got me thinking and helped me arrive at what is perhaps part-answer, part modus-operandi.

I watched the You-tube recording of Peter Economides’ ’Rebranding Greece’ presentation at the Hellenic Management Association’s 11th Aristoteli Conference in Thessaloniki in November 2011. His talk is not all doom and gloom but has an upbeat tone, stressing that it is not Greece that requires rebranding, but Greeks themselves. We need all the positive vibes there are!
Then came the Bus Incident. A bus driver, furious at another driver having cut in on him, stopped the bus, blocking the roadway, and gave vent to a barrage of foul invective aimed at the second driver, but with us, all the passengers, an unwilling, uncomfortable audience. An elderly gentleman sitting right in front of me spoke up and chastised him for subjecting us to such expletives and for not behaving in a professional manner. Our driver took this in less than good grace (!) but my fellow-passenger continued firmly and politely asserting his position. It takes courage to speak up and afterwards I regretted I hadn’t supported him in his bid to improve our immediate environment, if you like, against an arrogant, offensive uniform-wearer.

On my first-of-the-year meeting with my students preparing for the SAT exams, we talked of what they thought 2012 held and how they felt about it. There was a wide range of very articulate responses and informed opinions Together we decided to devise a New Year Resolution, a 'ti tha kanoume'campaign: that we make a point of behaving towards others with dignity, respect and kindness and of expecting the same from others. And if that means simply speaking up for old gentlemen on the bus, then so be it. In so doing, we are trying to manage and improve our own world, acting on sets of values we hold important, setting an example for others. Albeit a tiny step, it may just go towards changing perceptions in rebranding ourselves and those around us; in sowing seeds to show that there really is something we can do.
We have lost the way ethically and Greece is not alone in this: corruption and injustice are commodities no one holds the monopoly on. So I am sending you all a pomegranate image to wish you a Happy New Year with health, happiness and the moral courage to change what we can.