From the insane drive to allow large corporations to extract oil and minerals from under Greece as quickly as possible, to the bone-headed move to open the country’s forests and coastline to Spanish-style large scale developments, to tourism policies firmly rooted in the 20th century, Greek government ministers are demonstrating that they are small-minded, frightened technocrats unfit to call themselves leaders. This country is rich but their short-sightedness, if allowed to continue, will lead to its true impoverishment.
I am relatively young, university educated and fully bilingual (indeed English is my first language). I could live in any number of developed countries with intact social safety nets, decent salaries, unemployment in the single digits and a functioning civil service.
Yet I choose to live in Greece because I believe it is a rich country. And I refuse to abandon it to morons.
That Greece is wealthy may sound ridiculous given the country’s soaring debt and the crushing economic misery of the past few years. Yet modern-day economics is only one measure of wealth and one that is increasingly being exposed as fundamentally flawed. A pyramid scheme backed by unrepayable debt where the rich reap ever greater benefits just by the virtue of having money, while the poor are told that it is all in their best interests.
Mountains, forests, healthy seas and rivers, and fertile lands are much more important to me than the numbers in computers that we count as money (note that only about 8% of money worldwide actually exists as physical cash, the rest is stored on hard drives).
And when I look at Greece I see one of the richest places in the world with untold potential for a booming sustainable economy, one with more than enough human and natural resources for everyone to live very, very well.
Lees dit artikel door Pavlos Zafiropoulos verder op The Press Project