WARNING: RAMBLING AHEAD
I thought most of this was already fairly well known, if you look for it. I've read reports that the train system has largely stopped working, that public hospitals have run out of supplies and that there are pseudo-fascists roaming the streets. The existence of sex slavery in Greece shouldn't surprise you by the way, the same thing exists in the Netherlands, Germany and probably the UK. It doesn't get that much attention in the mainstream media, since doing actual investigative reporting is expensive, the story isn't attractive for European people (look at the damage we're causing with our stupid policy) and also doesn't have a nice good guy/bad guy narrative, like the protests in Greater Arabia. (For our American readers: think about the situation in Chicago.) The resident Greeks also seem to prefer to gloat about some tree huggers in Constantinople than about how their state is turning into Weimar Germany 2.0.
I think most of this is also not very surprising, I expect it's the same things that happened in Russia in the early 90s and in other places where the government collapsed (Weimar? Yugoslavia post-Tito?). Personal connections become more important than the law, the police turns into a big armed mob. Aggressive ideologies become more influential.
The situation in Greece does have some things that make it especially bad. Their location makes them one of the main entry points for illegal immigrants into the EU, who tend to get stuck. This is problematic in several of the Southern member states, Italy also seems to have lots of problems with illegals living on the street, while this problem is virtually non-existent in the Netherlands/Germany, as far as I know. Which is surprising, since the latter are richer and you would expect the immigrants to diffuse northwards.
Greece being a member of the Eurozone means they didn't have the option of bankruptcy / printing tons of money, to look for an Argentina style exit. On the other hand, one would think that being part of the Eurozone would cause some solidarity from the other states to help them out, but this has been not the case at all. I think the case that the Euro has been net detrimental for Greece is becoming easier and easier with the day, and this is IMO totally unnecessary.
EU membership and the open borders that come with it seems to have destroyed most of Greece's economy and normally this would lead to depreciation of their currency, so that comparative advantages would pop-up, but this hasn't happened due to Euro. The influx of new EU member states also means that they can't easily undercut wages. If you were to be a free market lover, you might now also argue that their labour laws, which are about as flexible as the Great Wall of China from what I've read, are not helping the situation.
This lack of domestic industry and reliance on imports makes the bite-the-bullet-and-go-bankrupt schemes a lot more difficult. (But this is a general feature of our oil imports based economy.)
I think a solution within the Greek democratic system would have been difficult from the start and is, after the austerity blundering, totally impossible. A stable, centrist coalition with broad popular support would be required. (Incidentally, where is the Greek orthodox church in all of this?) I have the feeling that the corruption has settled far enough down the Greek bureaucratic, legislative and political system that it has become part of the problem, not part of the solution.
What would be needed to solve this is IMO similar to what happens when a city or province goes bankrupt/has severe management issues. The greater entity brings (in this case the EU) brings in some emergency manager and puts the country under legal restraint (I'm not sure this is the correct term in English legalese). I suppose it would be somewhat similar to the post-war occupational zones in Germany + the Marshall plan. Important is to keep money rolling in to pay for government worker salaries and to keep unemployment low. You would slowly try to build up the system from scratch. Then again, such nation building efforts haven't been very productive in American hands recently.
Such an effort is about as feasible as me being elected prime minister of Iran. Giving any sort of authority to the EUSSR/EUSA is very very unpopular right now (though IMO most of the problems have been caused by a lack of Europeaness and a too large focus by all politicians on their own member state instead of the Union.), spending any money on Greece will make lots of people very angry (the bad way the media has reported about all of this doesn't help). Can anyone explain my who thought austerity was a good idea and why?
