Greece puts figure of €279bn on claim for German reparations

[Surya Gayatri]

Source: The Guardian

Greece’s deputy finance minister has said that Germany owes it nearly €279bn (£205bn) in reparations for the Nazi occupation of the country.

Greek governments and private citizens have pushed for war damages from Germany for decades but the Greek government has never officially quantified its reparation claims.

A parliamentary panel set up by Alexis Tsipras’s government started work last week, seeking to claim German debts, including war reparations, the repayment of a so-called occupation loan that Nazi Germany forced the Bank of Greece to make and the return of stolen archaeological treasures.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/06/greece-puts-figure-of-279bn-on-claim-for-german-reparations

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Read more:

Greece sours German relations further with demand for war reparations

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/11/greece-sours-german-relations-further-demand-war-reparations

[DFW]

1. In other words

"You pay off our debts, and we'll stop badmouthing you. For a while, anyway."

This might not go down well with Germany, whose taxpayers have seen their taxes shoveled into Greece for years now, and have gotten their woman chancellor publicly depicted with a Hitler moustache for their trouble.

This argument might not be their best ploy to get Germany to help keep their economy afloat.

[Surya Gayatri]

2. Yeah, a little public shaming and arm twisting going on here.

NOT a win-win negotiating stance, maybe?

[DFW]

25. Greece wants time to "get their house in order"

Just how they plan to do that, with debts equaling what must amount to a few years' GDP, they haven't said. Theory often wins out over reality, whether it's trickle-down or communism. Sometime you can get away with it, but only until no one wants to play any more. The Greeks were horribly lax about collecting taxes, offered retirement to an overbloated number of "civil servants" at age 55 for a long time, and had no money to pay out the pensions. When they had the drachma, all they had to do was devalue and print more of them. With the Euro, the currency is out of their hands, and no longer theirs to manipulate.

Keep in mind that Greece had no business being accepted into the Euro in the first place. Only Goldman Sachs helping cook their books got them in, and aside from a few rich Greeks being able to afford fancy German cars without blowing ever increasing amounts of ever-devalued drachmae on them, it was only good as long as more euros flowed into Greece than flowed out of it. I don't know if that was ever the case, but it sure isn't now.

[magical thyme]

9. seriously.

It's not like anybody has been badmouthing them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/05/16/greeks-work-harder-than-germans-who-knew/
Greeks work harder than Germans. Who knew?
Greeks got a bad rap for being lazy and for not paying their taxes. “If ignominy were tax revenue, Greece might be a big step closer to ending its budget problems,” the New York Times observed in 2013.

As it turns out, Greeks work hard. Greeks work more hours than everyone else in Europe — even more than workaholic Americans, according to a recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study.


http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/why-does-the-laziest-country-in-europe-work-the-most/257792/
Why Does the Laziest Country in Europe Work the Most?

Derek ThompsonMay 29 2012, 3:28 PM ET
This morning, I posted a funny, sad, and telling chart that revealed that the UK, Germany and Spain consider Greece to be the laziest country in Europe.
Greece is the hardest-working country in the EU -- and one of the hardest-working advanced countries in the world -- if you choose to go by OECD's international ranking of average hours worked per person per year, which I've graphed below (with the Y-axis truncated to clarify the comparison):

They simply don't have the high-tech, robotic economy that Germany does, where machines do the work faster. Therefore their productivity is lower.

Of course, they also weren't terribly efficient at torturing and murdering millions of germans either, then, were they? Badmouthing? Or facing facts?

What they were was too forgiving. They should never have forgiven 50% of Germany's debts. They should simply have left them to starve in the rubble of their own making.

[freshwest]

10. DFW? Other than letting the rich get away without paying taxes, what else is going on in Greece?

What is so off kilter there? And how did they amass so much debt that Germany and other nations didn't? Poor social plans? Or just the taxation issue?

If we don't get our tax issues dealt with, do you think this will be our fate as well? Not that anyone is going to lend us the kind of money Germany lent Greece and taxed their own citizens to pay for their social safety net and that of Greece's as well?

It's pitiful what has happened to the elderly and emigrants there in Greece. I'd appreciate an inforned European view, and I can't think of anyone closer to the situation than you, although the British have opinions and more knowledge of this than most Americans...

[Adrahil]

12. Well, they had a VERY generous retirement age for a long time.

Until recently, they had a low retirement age (57), but even worse, it was possible to manipulate the system to retire early with a full pension, with a considerable chunk of the population retiring in their 40's with a full government pension. With an aging population, this became unsustainable, with Greece spending over 11% of GDP on retirement pensions and that number set to grow.

Combine that with low tax recovery rates, especially from the wealthy, and it spells fiscal trouble, especially for a country that does not control its own monetary policy.

[JackRiddler]

23. Every statement in this is bullshit.

Which is why you provide no citations - it's just the right-wing tabloid propaganda based on lies or distorted facts (for example, the proportion of people enjoying early retirement in Greece was no different than in Europe, and of course governed by laws and contracts that have been BROKEN).

Greece was hit by the crash of capitalism in 2008, which originated on Wall Street. It was indeed an enormously corrupt political establishment - thanks to German money! Those people have not been punished, of course. The people who had nothing to do with accumulating the debt are the ones who have been fucked. You are serving up the long-discredited propaganda for an austerity program that demonstrably did not work and resulted in a humanitarian disaster. You are justifying the deaths of thousands of people as a result of a devastated health care system, 25% unemployment, the cutting of pensions to elderly people, the cutting of wages by 30% or more, the end of minimum wage, 50% youth unemployment, etc. etc. You are also indirectly paving the ground for when these policies arrive here - again with the excuse that we were all living too fat and got too old. Shame on you for your lazy thinking and easy cooperation with the worst lies that the capitalist beast has to offer.

[DFW]

26. You can always amass debt until your lender says "enough, no more."

They basically employed a German saying: "Frechheit siegt," and kept asking for more. Argentina got away with it for a while, too. They just keep asking for loans until no one will give them any more. You can't blame them. Asking for more money and getting it beats telling your population they will have to accept 30% unemployment and reduced government services.

[Little Tich]

3. An act of desperation.

However, Greece can’t pay their debts without destroying their country.

[Surya Gayatri]

4. Yeah, their back is against the wall, so I guess:

'Tous les moyens sont bons pour arriver à ses fins...'

('Whatever works is good', loosely translated, or 'all's fair in love and war')

[DetlefK]

5. Germany already paid €70b to Greece as bailout. And could stretch the rest to €1b per year.

And maybe Tsipras can ask his new buddy Putin to return the german pieces of art that Russia took as spoils of war during WWII.

[Surya Gayatri]

7. But, Vlad has a heavy thumb on the Russian media.

No danger of any investigative journalism to dredge that up!

[JackRiddler]

24. Germany paid nothing to Greece.

There was no "bailout" of Greece.

Starting in 2010 there was a massive expansion in Greek debt that allowed a bailout of German and French banks (mainly).

The "bailout" was the assumption by EU taxpayers of debt that had been held by private creditors. It was a banking bailout.

It can't be said often enough. Greeks saw less than 10% of the money. It was a bailout of private banks. It was a transfer of a private debt into public hands. German taxpayer money did not go to Greece, it went to German private banks.

The accompanying measures of austerity were designed to prevent Greece from ever paying anything off. (It doesn't matter what the announced intent was. At this point there is enough experience with Structural Adjustment Programs to know what they actually DO.)

As a direct result of austerity, the Greek economy collapsed, and the debt is now much higher in relation to GDP.

It is absolutely shameful that this kind of right-wing, pro-banker propaganda is put out as though self-evident on this supposedly left-wing website.

[DFW]

29. That's not all they took

Stalin pocketed (for all the good it did him) all the gold in the Reichsbank when the Soviets took Berlin. A friend of mine in the Russian State Bank (immediate post-Soviet era) told me about what happened to that. The Soviets had five immense stores of gold. Four of them held bars and modern coin issues, but one, deep in the Urals, held all the old coins they stole from the Spanish Republic in 1936, plus everything they ran off with from the Reichsbank in 1945 (not to mention what they held already). Around 1990, a rogue bunch of KGB guys saw the writing on the wall, and absconded with all the older gold coins of the Soviet Union. At first, they were selling them through Spink in London. Then, through a shadowy guy (I know his name) who was brokering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these coins through a dealer in Florida. Their word to him was, literally, "your children are already too old to see the end of these coins."

But when the USSR collapsed, this hoard disappeared from their control. I'm sure Putin would have liked the few hundred million in extra ready cash that disappeared onto the pockets of what has undoubtedly financed some very fancy villas in Las Vegas and Southern California. Come to think of it, maybe Northern California, too, as the guy from the State Bank said the ex-KGB guy had a 415 area code.

[Turbineguy]

6. The Greeks

could go without paying taxes for several years on that.

Well, at least the ones that haven't paid in years.

[Surya Gayatri]

8. And, the non-payers are legion, unfortunately...

[freshwest]

11. More than just the wealthy? TIA. n/t

[Surya Gayatri]

13. It's mostly 'liberal' professionals, i.e.

doctors, lawyers, etc. that are mentioned in discussions of the phenom, but tax avoidance is a 'national sport' in Greece for historical reasons.

Read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion_and_corruption_in_Greece

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8509244.stm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/09/how-greek-tax-evasion-sunk-the-global-economy/

[iandhr]

14. Didn't they say 11 billion a few months ago?

[Surya Gayatri]

15. Don't know, don't have time to go look. Is that on the innertubes somewhere?

[cosmicone]

16. I wish India would ask for reparations from Britain

I estimate the total stolen from India to be $27,689,000,000,000 (corrected for inflation)

[Surya Gayatri]

19. I've often wondered why they don't. Plundered, pillaged and

robbed blind they were. Direct redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. Crime against humanity.

OTOH, the Brits did give us a common language!

[cosmicone]

20. Not only that

a lot of priceless treasures of India are in British museums.

The enslaved countries are so ecstatic on gaining independence that they sign a lot of contracts of adhesion, letting Britain keep the treasures and never ask for any of the money back.

If Britain had to return all the stolen wealth, it will have the standard of living of Soweto.

[Surya Gayatri]

21. The Empire was a giant octopus, sucking up cultural and monetary wealth

around the world. How about those Elgin (read Greek) marbles?

[cosmicone]

22. and the porch of the maidens from the Acropolis n/t

[Nye Bevan]

30. Also, due to the Holy Roman Empire, surely Italy owes reparations to the UK,

and many other countries.

[Sunlei]

17. yup, nazis destroyed Greece and many other countries. The Corps who profited should pay.

Many major corps in existence today profited off the slave labor and asset seizures, homes and land.

Corps like IBM provided lists names/addresses. Many other Corps grew and grew from slave labor.

Even when countries like Russia went into Nazi 'owned' Crimea at the end of the war....Russia stayed, used some of the existing labor camps, and dismantled slave factories took them home. Russians also took over lots of the homes & lands from the 2 million Jews exterminated (murdered in Ukraine alone) and stayed.

[Surya Gayatri]

18. I fear if everybody got just reparations for Nazi

atrocities, 'Allemagne' (Germany) would soon be broke.
And, the corps who aided and abetted.

[Nye Bevan]

32. So today's IBM shareholders (including pension funds etc.)

should be liable for paying compensation for Nazi atrocities?

[Sunlei]

33. No one ever has and probably never will. Most Corps never even admited their 'part'.

Our world is now at the point where 20,000, 30,000 dead doesn't even make the news.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

27. These dudes sound more and more like the Bolivarian mooks every day

Enjoy your Bitcoin economy.

[geek tragedy]

28. Maybe they can sue Iran next for the abuses of Xerxes. nt

[Adrahil]

31. It was 70 years ago. Good luck with that claim. n/t

[Blue_Tires]

34. I'm sure they'll get it right after I get my slavery reparations from Washington...