And who is paying that person's salary?

Professor of Economics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

http://en.econ.uoa.gr/staff/teaching-and-research-staff/alphabetic-order/giokas-dimitrios.html

Still don't know what his income sources are.

It's hard to imagine anything much worse than they've already been through. While imported products will be unaffordable, domestic products will be favored, and that means a much more favorable position for labor to be in.

If they do say "fuck it" and leave, defaulting on their debt and thumbing their noses at the IMF, Germany, and the other banksters, they will be very interesting to watch. Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Ireland will certainly be watching and learning.

First people to start will be importing things like fish and olive oil after their agriculture rebounds.

in every game the final score is Bankers 1, People 0

capitalism. However, a genuine democratic socialist revolution inside Greece (under a common front of Syriza and KKE) could allow Greece to renounce all ECB and IMF debt (basically telling German and French creditors to take a hike), to provide for the common welfare of its citizenry along socialist principles (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need) and to organize self defnse units to protect Greece against the scenario outlined in #11, as practiced by the imperialist powers.

'finance their operations.' Marxism 101.

As citizens of the EU, they can simply relocate. Greece will not be able to touch their money.

Next plan to produce finance where there is none?

1. How much money would that bring in (assuming it hasn't already fled)?

2. Then what happens?

Greece isn't self sustaining and the government has done nothing to make it so. I doubt the amount of money they could steal would cover their debts let alone allow them to meet future expenses. Even if the government gave each citizen a per capita share of the stolen funds outside suppliers aren't going to deal with a nation that just up and steals whatever it thinks it needs. Argentina also learned that stealing other people's property means those other nations will reciprocate.

Why isn't Greece self-sustaining?

It's not like they haven't been there in some form or another much longer than the USA has.

They are an ancient country in some respects. How did they get along without all of this debt and being in the EU?

I would think it would be good for Greece itself and for the EU if they can't get along.

we did to the cradle of civilization, eh?

Fucking thing and start over.

Some measure of economic sovereignty can't be worse than what is happening now. Fucking austerity. This is straight up economic imperialism and there is no easy, immediate solution.

worked for the common Russians (non-bourgeois) in 1917 and the mass of Chinese (non-landlord) in 1947.

Someone's lost in La-la land.

Though for some reason I might prefer the latter.

Are you kidding?

Once they'd confiscated everything and run through it they had a trashed economy and a real problem. They locked it down by stopping currency transfers. And they had a NEP to try to restore some economic functioning.

Kolyma, a prison camp that Lenin said he despised and promptly shut down, was reopened. It gave some place for his political prisoners to go--at a huge death rate--but more importantly it provided gems and precious metals that Lenin could sell. That happened quickly after stability was re-established, and it was a huge secret at the time. Because it was, essentially, a "campaign promise." This is just the history of Kolyma and the reasons given in the archives, and comes from histories of that particular camp, the one that Shalamov was at.

Lenin stabilized things under the NEP. Stalin launched large industrialization schemes, but at a horrible price: Men were put into barracks and worked for room and board. And the death rate at his construction sites were large. And even then, Stalin's push didn't match the rate of industrialization under the tsar before WWI.

All the problems were in spite of owning all the assets and telling people where they'd work and what they'd do once the NEP was over. In spite of free labor from college students during the summer. And "subbotniki", "volunteer" Saturdays that the urban proletariat were obliged to "donate" for things like harvesting potatoes or wheat.

Another economic analysis post 1991 pointed out a bit of a disturbing fact, however. The USSR's economy improved, held steady, and finally became stagnant and declined over the period from the late 1920s to the 1980s; there was a major hiccup because of WWII. But besides WWII-related things, the state of the economy was directly related to the number of prisoners in the work camps.

In other words, the USSR was, to a large extent, dependent on slave labor. It was true for some of the engineering and scientific progress they made--many of the political prisoners were "intellectuals" with degrees. It was true for a lot of the low-skill goods. This analysis was completely separate from the history of the Kolyma camp.

In the mid 1990s they opened the archives. By 2001 Putin was seeing to it that the archives were being closed again. It was far too humiliating, all those contemporaneous records.

to return to the system of the USSR.

A nostalgia for the past is not proof that shit didn't suck back then. People tend to remember the positives, and forget all the bad shit.

The policies of China after the 1940s led directly to the Great Famine which killed somewhere between 20 and 45 million people. And you think that was a success? How many people dying would it take to qualify as a failure?

The Russian Revolutions in 1917 led to famines and a sharp downfall in industrial production, and it led to the rise to power of Joseph Stalin who killed somewhere between 35 and 50 million people, not counting wartime deaths.

Truly a wonderful set of examples for Greece to follow.

even a glance in that direction.

Oh my.

...go right on ahead.

Those countless millions of bodies in China, Siberia, and Ukraine? Western capitalist propaganda.

20 million or so dead between those two catastrophic revolutions and the famines, mass killings, and mass forced migrations after them...

slide.

It's stunning just how bad most "economic" articles are.

Following the dictates of the troika, and trying to remain in the Euro, has already led to a depression that exceeds both the depth and duration of the Great Depression experienced by the U.S. in the thirties.

Something has to give. Further attempts at austerity will only make things worse.