Reply #7: Sadly your understanding seems to come solely from the right wing propaganda.

[JackRiddler]

Greeks have suffered above all from 1) the practice of the rich avoiding taxes and moving their wealth abroad and 2) from trying to sustain a currency that brings them into direct competition with the likes of German and French industry.

The fairly generoous pension payments are a much better alternative to what would exist without them: higher unemployment, more poverty, greater economic depression. The problem is not that Greece takes care of its own people (thus raising net labor costs) but that other countries do not, and therefore gain an advantage in attracting international capital which cares only for profits and does not care at all for the fates of peoples.

Greece needs to default (tough to the creditors - in most cases an amount equivalent to principle was already paid off). Greece needs restore their own currency, devalue it, and generate and keep its own capital in-country. Greece needs to achieve a historic withdrawal from the neoliberal globalist project. It will be tough going but the country needs to achieve autonomy against the omnipotence of capital flows.

Europe as a whole needs to spank the bastard speculators who are looking to destroy countries as a means of making fast windfalls. Fuck the international banks and hedge funds. As soon as the Greek crisis is considered resolved, one way or another, the speculators will immediately pounce on Portugal or Spain or Italy as the next target of their international class war. They are the real problem and they need to be stopped.