Germany's D.....z or S...... or both...

...have done it again.!

Or, "How do you ensure your national football team wins ?"

By ensuring off-sides (i.e. off game limits) goals count, and by ensuring that opponents' goals do not.

How do you do that? Well, maybe a question to the expert kickback corporations, D-Benz or Siemens would provide the answer!

The above is a panoramic view of Dachau, a well-known traditional German holiday escape reserved for foreigners who thwart them.

Council decision 2010/320/EU of 10th May -- or what Greece agreed to do to get bailed out...

In May the EU Council agreed to provide the much-needed bail-out, thereby offering a solution to the matter of Greece's sovereign debt problem.

This decision comes with some duties on either side: one side promises to provide bail-out money (EU partners & IMF) while the other vows to implement certain deficit-curtailing measures.

Salient bits of this decision are reproduced below.

Having regard to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), and in particular Article 126(9) and Article 136thereof...

Article 1 1. Greece shall put an end to the present excessive deficit situation as rapidly as possible and, at the latest, by the deadline of 2014. Article2 1.Greece shall adopt the following measures before the end of June 2010: a) a law introducing a progressive tax scale for all sources of income and a horizontally unified treatment of income generated by labour and capital assets; b) a law repealing all exemptions and autonomous taxation provisions in the tax system, including income from special allowances paid to civil servants; c) the cancellation of the budgetary appropriations in thecontingency reserve, with the aim of saving EUR 700 million; d) the abolition of most of the budgetary appropriation for the solidarity allowance (except a part for poverty relief)with the aim of saving EUR 400 million; e) a reduction of the highest pensions with the aim of saving EUR 500 million fora full year (EUR 350 million for 2010); f) a reduction of the Easter, summer and Christmas bonuses and allowances paid to civil servants with the aim of saving EUR 1 500 million for a full year (EUR 1 100 million in 2010); g) the abolition of the Easter, summer and Christmas bonuses paid to pensioners, though protecting those receiving low pensions, with the aim of saving EUR 1 900 million for a full year (EUR 1 500 million in 2010); h) an increase in the VAT rate, with a yield of at least EUR 1 800 million for a full year (EUR 800 million in 2010) That's it for now, folks. Unfortunately there's more to the above.

Why didn't they ask Evans?

Would you recruit this person...

...as your Director of Finance?
Probably not. His working experience ends as a financial analyst.

Or this person as your chief buyer?
Probably not, this one has absolutely NO work experience.
Chances are, if you did recruit her, you'd go bust -- but before you did, your suppliers will have their field day! Now she's proposing a new purchasing manual to impose on hospitals in Greece. They are notoriously behind in their payments, 3years and a few billion Euro behind, in fact. The new purchasing procedure promises to make things a bit worse.

Why didn't they ask Evans", one wonders. Evans is a category buyer at a major food chain in Greece. He lives in Athens. He is easily join-able. And, most importantly, HE KNOWS THE JOB, for goodness sake!

* Greece's Prime minister looks and acts like he is running a NGO.

* Most of his ministers sport a gravitas looking and acting like adolescents entrusted with responsibility by their parents.

* They play at being grown ups, hoping to get a good mark from their parents.

* Some, more hard-core, ministers are in full pre-electoral regalia.

* The government’s communication tactics include the non-stop television-based, subject-matter deflecting propaganda – Soviet style.

Is the country in danger of disappearing for lack of competent resources in its government?

Greece's present government is, indeed, faced with a tough job.

Its executive cohorts however, have shown that they have neither the skills-set, nor the stamina, nor the experience to tackle the job. To this day, the only immediate-term effective cost-cutting measure they have taken is to leave their bills unpaid!

If it is true that “When the times get tough, the tough get going”, then this country is going nowhere fast.

Someone, anyone, HELP!

Things are getting worse. Do-gooders in Greece are making things worse. So are do-baders, but no-one expects them to do any better.

Someone please guard Greeks from their law-makers!

And please, God, someone, anyone, shut their ministers up and keep them away from f*&^% TELEVISION.

In the three months since the country went unofficially bust,

* unemployment has risen by 45% mostly because a new labour law outlaws all flexible labour and introduces labour union control on recruitment;

* government induced inflation (increase in petrol tax and VAT) is running at 4,5%;

* buying power has fallen further by about 11% for all civil servants, due to pay cuts;

* the ministers seem to follow their own personal route, each supremely unaware of, or uninterested in, what the other is doing;

* the ministers and other politicians still spend much of their mornings on morning shows on television, supporting their individual campaigns and common party lines;

* taxation is so volatile that it changes by the month; on the other hand, all agree that:

• growth is the only way out of this tunnel, and,
• investment is the road to growth
  

* No one seems to notice that, legally speaking, Greek lawmakers do not welcome investments; only investors' money.

* the Prime Minister is... out there somewhere, supremely unaware of what's going on?;

Nothing, not the country’s debt, not the IMF, nothing seems to deter Greece’s ruling political classes from pursuing their personal ends and individual gain. Even now.

They are keeping the hood on the state run and champion loss-making Organisation of Greek Railways ("OSE" which services an unimpressive 25% of the country’s territory) which thereby continues its own “creative” operating style, losing a cool €: 1 bill / annum.

They are sending out "control teams" from the labour authorities to impose fines at will and whim -- or receive kickbacks instead;

They are complicating bureaucracy so as to make absolute conformity impossible: to whit, in order to operate as a temp agency one needs a license. In order to obtain a license one needs to operate an agency.

And, best of all, the Greek government has officially stopped all tax returns and VAT returns and other payments. BUT, for payments due, it does not accept clearance and charges 1.5% interest / month.

So it is time to ask for help from those not vested with political power in Greece but still interested in the country's fate.

The country's creditors, perhaps? In Greece, now more than ever, money talks!