What Was Fouskas's Essay Whatever Happened To Greece?

A review of Fouskas’s reasoning in his essay “Whatever Happened to Greece?”

"I think time is against us. I am terrified at the idea of the problems facing the country" (Greek President Carolos Papoulias 2011). In the distance future, when a conclusive history of Europe is set down, Greece will occupy many a chapter. In his analysis of Greece’s monetary collapse, Fouskas in his essay points to Greek political policies over many decades as reasons for Greece’s economic collapse; the political strategy of Greece’s ruling elite, the role of defence spending, and the transformation of the Greek economy in the past quarter of a century. We will examine the validity of these arguments and pursue optional reasoning to support or rebuff his standing.

He refers to privatisation and liberalisation programmes begun by PASOK Prime Minister Kotas Simitis in1996, which he goes on to list numerous companies who benefitted from huge fiscal privileges, tax breaks, and registration in tax havens such as Dubai as so to avoid Greek tax or regulations. There is no doubt this was a major factor in Greece’s downfall, in fact leading to G. Papandreou, the Prime Minister of Greece to declare at the 2010 World Economic Forum, that Greece is a country dominated by corruption, clientelism, and cronyism (Elliot 2010). As Fouskas goes on to point out the “Lagarde list”, named after French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde who headed the international Monetary Fund, went on to list several politicians, an advisor to Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, well-known businessmen, journalists, doctors, lawyers and engineers, actors and civil servants (some of them working at the Finance Ministry), as people who made $1.95 billion in deposits in the Geneva, Switzerland HSBC bank branch. The HSBC data was stolen by a former bank employee Herve Falciani in 2007. While countries like France, UK and Germany pursued tax evaders, Greece kept moving it from one place to another until the Greek Finance Minister, George Papaconstantinou said it was lost, and blamed his aides (Dabilis