Request for Information (RFI) – Weekly SITREP

AO: southern greece

fuel/energy prices: about the same as before, gas EUR 2.05-2.35/liter, diesel 1.85-2.00, propane EUR33/15 kilo refill, kerosene EUR60/18liters

shortages/supply chain: nothing seems different from the past couple months. A few car parts (for a 30+ year old car) were ordered and were in stock and delivered promptly. not much of a datapoint. shelves at stores seem stocked more or less normally.

national level news: the government’s dismantling of the ‘public’ medical system continues to accelerate. Some writted instructions from pretty high up to give priority to ‘vips’ attending some football conference in athens, staying at two of the swankiest hotels (diplomats etc stay at them, usually not tourists) , at the generally acknowledged top hospital in the city. Being that theyre all from elsewhere, theoretically aside from a genuine emergency they ordinarily would have been considered ‘uninsured’ or ‘not covered’ by the public system and if you or i showed up for something we’d probably be told to go to a private doctor or hospital instead (private medical care thrives in greece and is generally way better than the public, and while expensive for greece, is very affordable compared to paying cash in the states). while the government , which has been trying to commercialize the public system a bit at a time, did not back down, there was enormous ‘outrage’ from people who on the one hand have paid into the system all these years (the witholdings in gr for ‘public health’ and ‘pension’ are taken together and are 26% of income, about double what SS is in the states).. but of course the harder reality is that such a system was designed from the beginning to go broke, and it only ever worked when the country was flying on cheap debt in the 80s and 90s. the outraged people cant wrap their heads around that one.
it’s amazing how much of an issue the medical ‘health’ Free Shit is in the mind of the average person in greece. i begrudge them the money they take from me but i have never and do not ever plan to use any of their ‘services’ whether i paid for them or not.. but a majority of people here have been convinced that its their ‘right’. So that got a lot of people’s pants in a twist.
Also a lot of police set up a tent encampment in the big square in front of the parliament to protest their low pay, which especially in the case of mandatory transfers from one’s home area to some other area (there is no local police, there is only one police organization for the whole country), where suddenly people have to pay whatever rent they can find, moving expenses, etc, all on a salary thats usually in the 850-1000 a month range. It’s remarkable how little they pay their enforcers and they still enforce. This is only the second time i recall in the past decade , that cops in uniform did a demonstration. the last time was also over pay cuts and/or some other benefit cuts, and the government called in the swat forces (still police but a different parallel chain of command) to ‘manage’ them.
another anecdotal datapoint, going to the appointment at the police station for the (shotguns only) gun license (they make you renew the license for each individual piece every 10 years) the first thing the guy sees is the ID card.. it’s still the ‘old’ style which until a year or so ago was the only kind. The EU has been pushing ‘biometric’ IDs very hard and at some point greece caved in to that demand as well.. new IDs issued are of the new sort (digital photos automatically processed into facial recognition databases, and fingerprint scans) , but so far the old IDs are still good and legally speaking have no expiration date.. but the cop says, ah, for anything weapon related they gave us orders to not accept the ordinary style IDs, sorry youll have to first get a new ID and then i can handle the license stuff.. good thing one doesnt leave this stuff to the last minute.. if you go to renew after the deadline is up, even though the cops _can_ cut you slack and just charge a penalty for late renewal, if the cop wants to be a *** about it he can, and there are local examples of that.

local news: the water issue is definitely going to be a hot one this year. Yesterday the president of our village got together the presidents of 5 other of the upland villages, and held a public meeting which also included a representative from the ‘municipal’ govt in town, where basically people complained that it was not right to be tripling the water rates on ordinary people, especially in the uplands, to pay for a desalination facility to cover the expanded water consumption of the tourism business in the lowlands.. further twists on that theme included the blatant lack of investment/repairs/maintenance on water infrastructure in the uplands and the drilling of new wells for water consumption in town, which further pull down the water table in the uplands… it’s all for the tourism business, whose profits as always go to a small clique who also have secured the mayor’s office for the past decade or so. The city was further complaining that the water authority is owed something like 4.5 mil in arrears (population here is about 20 thousand so thats a lot of money) but they dont like publicly admitting that the overwhelming majority of this money owed is from big hotels and tourist operations who even if they finally do get squeezed, can just bankrupt a corporate entity and leave the debt hanging forever. the meeting was pretty lively to say the least but getting the presidents of 6 villages together is perhaps a new occurrence. some people were concluding that we need to organize a large presence in town, that several hundred to a thousand people can make some noise.
as the old saying goes, whiskey’s for drinkin and water’s for fightin, right?