A 77 year old man committed suicide this morning in Greece. The country recently accepted its second bailout in exchange for further government austerity programs. This means spending cuts across the board for many Greek citizens, including the pension funds they have worked their whole lives to receive.
These cuts taken by the citizens of Greece are the sacrifice needed to ensure that foreign banker multi-million dollar bonuses continue without interruption. The banks ability to move forward without losses also allows them to continue funding the political campaigns for the current leaders in charge. This process should move from country to country as the sovereign debt crisis spreads to Portugal, Spain, Japan and beyond.
We can only hope that the people forced to take austerity cuts do figure out that their leaders can just simply tell the banks that the money lent will not be paid back. This is called default, and it has happened hundreds of times throughout history up until 2008 when defaults were no longer accepted in our financial system. The following was the suicide note left from the first Greek to give up:
"The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945"
