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Thursday, April 05, 2012

Suicide Note From Greece

The note left by 77-year old Dimitris Christoulas, who took his own life yesterday morning in front of the Greek Parliament building in Athens (via Athens News):
"The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945."
[Georgios Tsolakoglou was the first collaborationist prime minister during Germany's occupation of Greece during the Second World War.]

CBS News: "Before the financial crisis first began, Greece had the lowest suicide rate in Europe at 2.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Eurostat. That has now almost doubled and is rising at an alarming rate. A Greek Ministry of Health study found the suicide rate in the first half of 2011 was 40 percent higher than the year before."

The suicide rate in Greece is now 6 per 100,000 people. Last year's rate in the U.S. was 19 per 100,000. (In 2000 the U.S. rate was 10.4; in 1950, 13.2.)
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2 comments:

  1. William M. Connolley2:14 AM

    You can't Godwin your opponents and then try to claim you're dignified.

    If the pension was paid "with no help from the state" then it is, presumably, not a state pension. So why is he complaining about the state? This all needs some facts.

    Note also his claim to have got a really spiffy pension after 35 years: that is one of the complaints about the Greek pension system: it is over-generous.

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  2. bcecere@aol.com8:36 AM

    over-generous. here's what's over-generous: ceo's making $192,000 per week... $5,000 per hour. is there something a ceo does 200 times better than someone making $24 per hour ($50k per year or 10.4 hours of the average large-company-ceo's pay)?

    is there a memo or a speech or an employee tour or a "good morning, mary... any calls this morning?" that is worth $5k/hour? under what measuring devise is this disparity considered just/fair/equitable? capitalism?

    we don't live under capitalism. corporatism is the operational system that allows corporate heads to make more in 11 hours than most of the population in/from which they arise.

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