Plutocracy is a Greek Word
by David Atkins ("thereisnospoon")
As a general strike against austerity stops Greece in its tracks today, it's worth remembering this from May of last year:
The price of houses and flats costing more than £1m jumped 21pc last month compared with a year earlier, new figures from Knight Frank showed. It's the sharpest annual rise since April 2008. For the month, prices were up 1.3pc.
Knight Frank, a high-end estate agency, said that Greeks now account for 6pc of all properties in the UK capital sold for more than £2m, double the level of a year ago.
The Greek Government this week pledged to enforce the toughest austerity measures in its recent history in return for a bail-out from the Eurozone and the IMF. The plans by Prime Minister George Papandreou call for tax increases on a swathe of goods, including cigarettes and alcohol, as well as a series of deep cuts in benefits and public spending.
“Greek buyers have been especially active and have been competing hard for the limited number of high-quality properties currently available,” said Rupert des Forges, a partner at Knight Frank. “There has been a real trend for wealthy Greek families to invest in UK property for a variety of reasons, but the safe haven driver is a big one.”
Keep in mind that one of the biggest drivers of the Greek financial crisis is not so much a generous safety net so much as tax evasion on a mind-boggling scale, mostly by the wealthy. The Greek government has found that attempting to address its tax evasion problems has been fairly difficult, particularly since much of the recent enforcement efforts have fallen regressively on small business and the middle class.
Meanwhile, commentators on the BBC news on NPR tonight were mentioning that wealthy Greeks were reportedly fleeing the country to avoid not only the possible riots, but also the possibility that their wealth might actually be taxed for a change.
In other oligarch news, two Russian plutocrats who may have been attempting to murder one another for years are involved in a lawsuit for a mere $5 billion in damages over the sale of oil investments.
The plutocracy problem is not just an American or even an Anglosphere problem. It is a global problem caused by rise of the new global elite. Countries with a legacy of strong social democracy have fared better than America which was not blessed with such advantages, but Europe and East Asia will not be immune from the economic disease bestowed by the financial Masters of the Universe.
Nations will either cooperate in coming to grips with the problem and bringing the plutocrats to heel in a global way, or the entire world will erupt in the sort of turmoil that we are seeing in Greece and even in Zuccotti Park. It's just a matter of time.
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