Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves by Albert Goodwin

Do you follow me? The only Greeks whose hands are clean are that tiny minority who keep government away from their businesses. Managing a business in Greece is a bit like running a diner on New York’s mean streets during Don Corleone’s time. Sooner or later some wise guy—the government—will come in and demand a cut. Business in Greece is dependent on political influence, and without it there is no business. I haven’t got the space, nor the patience, to list the cases I know of Greek Americans who brought money into good old Hellas in order to start a business and got screwed out of it by government officials. It is very simple. If one wants to conduct business in the birthplace of electrolysis, one has to bribe government officials, and government in Greece is thoroughly, totally, completely, 100 percent corrupt. I was forced to sell a real-estate/hotel complex now worth one hundred million Euros for less than one tenth its value because I refused to pay a bribe to the National Bank of Greece to lower the 35% interest I was paying. Dumb? Definitely. This was twenty years ago, but it gave me great pleasure to walk away and return only on my boat to check out the women on the beaches. Some of you old-time readers may remember that just about then some gangsters also blew up the boat I had inherited from my old dad. I refused to pay them part of the insurance money I collected. They began to blow up things that belonged to people who worked for me. When I finally cornered them, they acted as if they were the government. As the head hood put it to me: “Others have paid, why won’t you?” Years later the guy sent me a Christmas card and praised me for standing up to his gang. (He had been found bound and gagged but alive in a car trunk in the meantime.) I forgave him because if the government acts like a gangster, what is a poor hood supposed to do?

So Greece has once again been rescued by the EU, but for how long? Government debt is forecast to reach 170% of GDP. How in heaven’s name can anyone expect us to believe that Greece will pay off close to 20% of its GDP for decades simply on interest? It is yet another con by banker-Eurocrats and Greek politicians. Greece has been on default since the day she entered the EU and began spending like Abramovich. (It’s easy to blow ill-gotten gains.) European taxpayers will be left holding the bag. The bureaucrooks who run our lives know this but are simply playing for time. George Papandreou knows this. Merkel and Sarkozy know this. Brussels knows this, yet the burlesque goes on, an Archie Rice-like debacle to the bitter end.

Will there be a coup in Greece? I sure hope so, but the answer is never. People have turned soft after years of feasting on other people’s moolah. I am even building a house there, just like King Constantine is. Mind you, the king has an excuse. He suffers from excessive Hellenophilia. I do not have an excuse, but I don’t need one—I like to live dangerously.