Sunday, January 24, 2010

This has now got beyond the ridiculous. It is still raining; a steady downpour. I now know the description of leaden skies is a true one and it is depressing. We have had it for almost two weeks. I think this is the longest period of incessant rain I can remember in Crete. Even the farmers have found it, together with the cold, too much to be out in and have called off their blockade with their tractors of the main highways, an oft recurring event whenever their grievances get too much. Well, the old cliché has it that it never rains but it pours and poor Greece, a country in a frightful financial mess, is evidently now having Rumania demanding ten million euro compensation because of the farmers’ blockade that has closed the border and prevented their lorries from delivering goods. Maybe the rain has come to the rescue and the lorries can pass. Evidently it is quite true the farmers are having a really tough time with the cost of diesel being what it is, the cost of living altogether being what it is and the price of crops and EU subsidy not being what it should be, the subsidy on cotton at one time was worth 1.50euro and is now 28 lepta, but in some ways it is their own fault. I am led to believe that, instead of using it for improvements, they squandered their first lot of subsidies: the lure of a new Mercedes or BMW being too hard to resist. Also they will not change old ways; they will not change their crops. Evidently, though I have no firsthand knowledge of this, cotton is an easy crop to grow and therefore gives the farmer an easy life. You don’t have to get up at five in the morning to milk the cotton. But it has created its own problems, mainly in that cotton requires masses and masses of water and has seriously depleted the water table in parts of the country, rather like the Greek exchequer I reckon. Mind you, if it is raining there as it is here I should think the problem has been momentarily eased quite considerably.
As for Greece’s financial situation which is as bad if not worse than the UK (are there any countries not hopelessly in the red?) the question being asked is, will it go bankrupt. Evidently it did once before shortly after it became a nation with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Well bankruptcy may be avoided but what won’t be is the inevitable rise in taxes starting with those usual obvious targets, booze and tobacco, but there is evidently also talk of a new property tax. This probably wouldn’t be necessary if Greeks did not have a thousand ways of avoiding tax altogether. Reducing or even eliminating the the black economy would be half way to getting Greece out its financial fix.

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