Greek Government Abruptly Shuts Down State Broadcaster 230
An anonymous reader writes "The Greek government shut down broadcasting of all TV and radio channels operated by the state-owned broadcaster ERT at midnight local time, with police ejecting journalists and other employees occupying the building. The above link is a prominent Greek economics professor's (and Valve's in-house economist) analysis of the political motivations for the move."
Full story at, err, 11? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if that means lower taxes...
Re: How silly. (Score:4, Interesting)
Most European counties have state television next to commercial television. This nothing to do with capitalism and in most cases state television (or state funded independent television) is more objective and has more integrity. For educational and cultural productions, news and documentaries this is very noticeable.
The problem in Greece is mainly due to lack of involvement of the government and too much uncontrolled capitalism.
As a Greek (Score:4, Interesting)
i should tell you that i feel very happy about that decision
* They said that the "ERT tax" on power bills will be over (it was about 10-30% of the bill, depending on the size of the bill, believe it or not!)
* In the same time that they ask for minimum wage to be lower than 500euros/month, they were hiring journalists with ten times this wage in order to control them. You can read about that in Varoufakis blog.
Re:Whisky Tango Foxtrot? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the rest of Greece's commercial broadcast media like?
same as the rest of the worlds: Owned by the rich and serving their interests by promoting political views and pressuring the government "in the right direction"
Re: How silly. (Score:2, Interesting)
Is Greece even a proper country? (Score:0, Interesting)
Some nations are not what they seem. Europe has many of these- pseudo nations that exist to serve the geopolitical purposes of their neighbours. Greece hasn't been relevant since the time Ancient Rome took control.
Greece only hits the news today because the chumps that 'rule' that laughable region do something like ban all hand-held computer games, and promise to imprison tourists that travel with their 'gameboys' (yes, this actually happened for real, when the corrupt Greek politicians banned ALL computer gaming devices to hit out at the businesspeople who were running gambling machines without giving the said politicians their cut of the action).
Today, Greece is an extreme-right-wing satellite of Israel (Greece funnelled Israeli weapons of mass destruction to the Serbian butchers when Serbs were exterminating the Muslims of Bosnia- the famous bread-queue bombings were carried out with Israeli fragmentation weapons, honed to slaughter civilians in Gaza and Lebanon).
Re: How silly. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem in Greece is mainly due to lack of involvement of the government and too much uncontrolled capitalism.
This is sarcasm right? It's kind of like looking at a car with a flat and claiming the problem is that the driver hasn't punctured the other three tires too. Greece didn't get into the mess it is in by unfettering capitalism, a thing incidentally that it has yet to do.
No, endemic levels of tax evasion (come on, you honestly expect me to believe you had no idea Greece was a tax haven) mixed with equally endemic levels of corruption means that Greece's tax revenues have consistently fallen below expectation. So even when the Greek minister balanced the books, the companies in Greece simply didn't pay tax.
It was cheaper to pay off the tax collector than to pay tax. Essentially companies could do what they wanted as long as they kept the right palms greased (which is cheap for any multinational).
Next thing you're going tell me is that your shocked that some Thai girl offered to have sex with you in Bangkok when prostitution is illegal in Thailand.
Greek needs new public TV/Radio/Internet-Station (Score:4, Interesting)
I do not speak Greek or are able to evaluate the quality of the public TV-station there, but I know that in Germany the public TV plays an important role in fighting dumb TV for the masses with some of their information programs (even though they also provide shows which can only be watched if you had a lobotomy, just like the US TV ;-)). So from that point of view, I think this is a bad move for Greece. The Greek should start a new public TV station funded by the public and controlled by a council where every group of the Greek population has a seat in (no payments) and they have to agree on consensus on elections for directors. that will realize an independent media house, which is in high demand in Greece (and the rest of Europe).
BTW: I personally do not like the way Greece have been treated by the rest of the EU, especially Merkel, but I also think, they should get rid of their present politicians and demand more public influence in all processes. A little like Switzerland.
Re: How silly. (Score:3, Interesting)
There's some problems here. Countries only have so much power to set pricing, without turning into authoritarian states. Australia, for instance, has long had problems with stuff costing much more there than in the US and other places. For a long time, they just accepted it because of the usual excuses of it being a smaller market (1/10 the population of the US), and the long distance away. However, now with so many digital goods and cheap shipping, it's become glaringly obvious that many sellers are just greedy and inflating prices because they can, such as with digital downloads costing more in Australia than in the US, even though it's the same product and there's no extra cost to provide a download to someone in another country as in the US. The Australian government called many software makers on the carpet to explain this ridiculous state of affairs. As I recall, the software makers didn't have much to say about it in their defense, didn't change the prices, and nothing was done. The government can bitch and complain, but the Australian government is still a western democratic country (probably a constitutional republic like most other such countries), not an authoritarian regime, so like most other places, unless there's some compelling public interest for the government to enact specific regulations or worse, a regulatory system (like they do with public utilities), sellers can charge whatever they want for goods and services. It's not up to the government to look at every business and every item their selling and determine if it's fairly priced or not.
The EU could do it with airlines because airlines are already a heavily regulated industry (being so safety-critical, after all). Furniture sales is not a regulated industry.
Finally, as I understand it, the whole point of the EU was to basically be a trade confederation, where there was free trade between member states, and a common currency, and a few key things done at the EU level, but where the member countries mostly kept their own sovereignty. If you have the EU government setting up regulation for pricing furniture and other such things, then basically you've given up on the idea of member countries having any sovereignty at all, and have decided to make the EU into a single country, just like the US, only worse (our US federal government does not regulate furniture pricing, and AFAIK there's nothing stopping companies from charging 3x as much in stores in Maine as they do in stores in California).
Of course, if it's that much cheaper to buy furniture or other things in other countries than Greece, what's keeping people from setting up new businesses where they buy the stuff from stores in those other countries, then drive it over to Greece and resell it there at a markup smaller than the difference that the original seller has in place? After all, that's exactly what would happen here in the USA if IKEA tried selling stuff at such a severe markup in one state for some weird reason. Heck, you could make a business just advertising IKEA stuff on the internet (without even having any stock), along with appropriate shipping costs, and then when people buy it, you run out to your local IKEA and buy it, then ship it to them.
Re:Full story at, err, 11? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know why you were modded "troll" but I'd have modded "overrated" because the comment is completely inaccurate. The poor pay few or no income taxes, but a very high percentage of their meager income on gasoline taxes, tobacco taxes, alcohol taxes, and other federal excise taxes. The middle class is taxed at twice the rate of someone whose income is from gambling on the stock market. Plus, the more you earn the more loopholes you have.
This [rollingstone.com] is why they're despised. You think it was the poor and middle class who destroyed the economy?
Three things about ERT (Score:4, Interesting)
1. It was one of the worst channels on greek TV and I doubt anyone will miss it
2. Since always everyone was complaining about the fee they had to pay for it every month. Saying I dont want to pay for state television is the same as saying it should close down. Now all the people who side with the ones fired from ERT are just a pretentious mass. They didn't support ERT when it was working, now they can't act all high and mighty and on their side because it closed
3. ERT was another corrupted part of the public sector. It was a channel with horrible censorship and with people in higher positions paid more than they should've been. There were more than a few incidents when ERT refused to show things in the news that ALL the other channels were showing. As someone put it "ERT, you weren't there for us when all of that was already happening to us for years now, why should be there for you?"
4. Comparing ERT to the BBC/CNN is a horrible insult for both of these channels. ERT was worse than FOX news and people complaining about how greece is left only with private channels don't seem to understand that all those private channels are and have always been much better than the mess that ERT was.
Re:How silly. (Score:5, Interesting)
When you're poor, stop spending money on non-essentials.
That's common sense when you're talking about an individual, or a household. The problem is that that people extrapolate that to whole economies, or governments.
Money goes around in loops. At the level of a household, the loops have little significance. If you spend $10 on a movie ticket, that money's spent, and the route that connects it to your next piece of income is so long that it has no bearing on your decisions. At that scale, you might as well think of spending as a sink, and earning as an unending source.
But at the level of corporate and government spending, the loops are very significant. Pay 1000 roadworkers $20,000 dollars each, that money will go into a chain of transactions, most of which are taxed, keeping dozens of people in work.
*Don't* employ those 1000 roadworkers, and they'll spend less, slowing down the entire economy.
Re: How silly. (Score:4, Interesting)
Again, it's simple supply and demand. Sellers will always try to price things as high as they can, to maximize profit. Why wouldn't you? It'd be stupid not to. Sellers are under no obligation to lower prices just to be nice (unless you're dealing with an essential good or service with little or no competition, like a utility, in which case the government jumps in and regulates the market, for the good of society as a whole). But they lower prices in response to lower demand. Excessively-high prices cause low demand, so you reduce prices to increase demand, and increase sales volumes. If you lower prices too much, you get excessively low profits (or at an extreme, no profit, and instead a loss). In the middle of that curve there's a local maximum where profit is maximized.
If a seller finds that buyers in one country are apparently gullible fools and are willing to pay excessively-high prices for a product (more so than in another country), why shouldn't they raise prices there? If you don't like it, you're free to not buy the product. You do not need a Nexus 4 to live. You can buy a competing device, or an older device, or just do without. Or you can just go to another place where it's cheaper and get it there (or just order it on the internet from someplace cheaper). As long as the government doesn't put up artificial trade restrictions preventing you from exercising these options, there's no problem. If people continue to be stupid and willingly pay higher prices, that's their problem.
In fact, why aren't more people just buying on the internet? We've had the same problem in the USA: local brick-n-mortar shops charge high prices on consumer electronics, especially in more rural areas. So, people just go to amazon.com or newegg.com and buy it at a much lower prices. The brick-n-mortar shops bitch and complain, but too bad. If I can buy something from Amazon for so much less than locally, that I end up saving a lot of money, even after paying sales tax (Amazon charges it now) and shipping fees, then obviously the local shop is charging too much. In the end, the local shop goes out of business, and I really don't care. Of course, a bunch of people bitch about how this is driving the "wonderful" local mom-and-pop shops out of business, that people should be happy to pay 50-100% more for the same product just to get the "service" that local shops offer (yeah right), it's "unfair", etc. Do people say the same things in your country when people drive over the border (or order on the internet) to avoid paying local prices?