Fuelling the revolution

A friend of mine in Canada asked me about what was going on in Greece.

"I know it's tough as hell there," he said in an email, "but can you help me with the faraway impression? If the Greeks had just paid their taxes, we'd have had a better outcome. True? False?"

He also wrote that "we've heard all about helicopter cameras showing swimming pools in the yards of non-tax-paying citizens, etc., etc. [But] what's really up?"

This rambling response is the best I could come up with in a short time...

What's going on here in Greece is a class war. The Guardian published a commentary that helps explain some of it.

The pools? Get this... an envelop of money in the right tax collector's hands will allow you to dodge taxes on a pool because it's, um, not really a pool. Because, you see, I have this medical condition and I have it for therapeutic reasons. Also popular: explaining away the pool as an environmental solution because it's actually designed to, um, collect rain water.

I know someone who has worked in a public hospital for 27 years and was making 1,250 euros a month. Because of government cuts she's now making 800. Another person I know, who is an accountant and earns a similarly meagre wage in the private sector, hasn't been paid for September and there's talk of the business going under.

It goes on... A guy I know at the Athens News says reporter friends at other publications don't ask him how much he earns, but whether he actually gets paid. A freelance writer I know who was owed 750 euros for a job she did had to badger the publication for 11 months before she got paid recently. My friend, a school teacher, had his monthly salary cut by 500 euros. His wife lost her job. They have to pay for supplementary schooling for their teenage daughters because the public system sucks.

Generally, the poor pay their taxes... but yes, the civil services is bloated, a problem created by the country's two major, family-run political dynasties... handing out jobs for votes... and most people would agree that you can't continue to have one in four workers in Greece employed by the public service.

But equally so you cannot continue to have people not pay their fair share of taxes... take for example the doctor with an office in a trendy part of town who declares 15,000 euros in annual income... or whatever it was, but it was low as I recall.

What else... the violence in the streets... To an outsider like me it seems the violence has turned in a way that Greeks are now beating up Greeks. An example: on Thursday, members of the communist affiliated PAME union battled with so-called hoodies, made up of left-wing extremists and anarchists.

But the prevailing talk on the street is that these hoodie dudes are actually affiliated with the cops. One protestor said her PAME colleagues nabbed one hoodie guy on Thursday, stripped him, and spotted cop ID on the guy. Pix and video online purport to show hoodies getting out of cop cars before concealing their faces with scarves, gas masks etc. While the two groups battle each other, the riot cops watch.

Now what? Selling off public assets to private investors for a song. The end.

Not a pretty picture.