The Greeks and the Germans-a Love Affair

(Hat tip to Linnea-I won't use her last name.)

Left: Focus- "Cheats/Swindlers in the Euro-Family"
Right: Topos-"Our debt? Take this (meaning 'here's your payment')"

Then the small print says "of course after you pay us the war reparations that you owe us (Meaning the gold that the Nazi's stole from the Bank of Greece).



Well, our friends in the EU are having another internecine feud. It seems that Greece, under the socialist government of George Papandreou, is broke and can't pay its debts. How could that be? Well, it's the old California formula, mostly- profligate spending, corruption, all-powerful labor unions and cooked financial books (with a little help from Goldman-Sachs). Here's an article on the crisis from that blog run by everybody's favorite Greek, Ariana Huffington.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/cleaning-up-greeces-augea_b_474730.html

At the risk of digressing, it seems like for all of my life, every time something about Greece comes up, the president has been some guy named George Papandreou. What's that all about?

So now, of course, Greece is asking the EU to bail them out. France and Germany are protesting. In the case of Germany, this has led to the biggest diplomatic row since...well, when Germany was occupying Greece during World War II and hauling off the its gold from the Greek treasury. Now the German government and the German public are asking why they should bail out Papa George and irresponsible Greece.

All of this was captured in the back and forth between German and Greek publications "Focus" and "Topos" (My Country) in the past few days.