The Full Catastrophe by James Angelos Read Free Book Online

reform gusto. Still, it was a large sum, particularly when compounded over several years. It was also only the beginning of a process to uncover wider fraud. The new digital registry would be emulated by other ministries to track an additional five billion euros in social welfare benefits handed out annually in Greece. When at this time I tried to find out the precise number of the social benefits in Greece, an aide to a labor minister told me no one knew for sure how many exactly, because management of the benefits was spread among several ministries. There was, it seemed, the possibility to discover more fraud.
    The social security system was another problematic area. The Greek labor ministry at the time also undertook a “census” to determine how many people in Greece were collecting a pension, and what kind of pension they were receiving. Greece had an array of underfunded social security agencies that handed out pensions to various segments of the population (this included disability pensions, a separate category from disability benefits). At one point, labor ministry officials said a dubiously high 8,500 pensioners inGreece were over one hundred years old, at least on paper. That figure, were it legitimate, would have meant that Greece was by far the world leader in terms of its per capita number of centenarians. Rather, government officials determined that a great number of retirement checks were being paid to dead people—or “ghost retirees,” as the Greek media called them—whose family members had failed to notify the state of their loved ones’ passing. About 40,000 pensions were shown to be fraudulent, the Greek labor minister announced on television following the initial census results. The total cost of all social security fraud since Greece entered the eurozone was hard to measure, and Greek government officials threw out some widely disparate figures. In 2014, the labor minister estimated the cost at some five billion euros. To be sure, fraudulent benefit claims—costly as they were—were not the reason Greece found itself in a financial crisis, but the phenomenon did hint at the broader levels of waste and graft that, together with the custom of political patronage, had cleaned out the government’s coffers.
    On Zakynthos, a preliminary police investigation found that 498 of the 680 people who received or requested a blindness benefit did not qualify for it. Sixty-one of them had driver’s licenses. The apparent scheme on the island cost the state some 9 million euros, according to an initial estimate. Bolaris, the deputy health minister, and other government officials vowed to get back wrongfully taken money, though that would be no easy task.
    During my conversation with Bolaris, I asked him why it had taken so long for the government to do something about these “thieveries,” as he put it at one point. He answered with what seemed like a line he had used before. “Greece passed through an era of the fat cow,” he said. “Now we are the skinny cows. If it didn’t matter to some people before, for us today, it must matter.” He then offered a historical explanation for why these things happened in Greece. Perhaps someone like me could not understandit, he said, because I had never lived in a nation that has experienced foreign occupation.
    “We, Demetri,” he said, using my Greek middle name, “in Thessaloniki, in Macedonia, in 2012, we’ll celebrate one hundred years of freedom.” Thessaloniki is Greece’s second largest city, located in the north, and the liberation he was referring to was from the Ottoman Empire. “People had above them the sultan. The one who didn’t pay taxes to the sultan was smart. He was a
magas
,” an untranslatable and complimentary term that can loosely be understood to mean “badass.” “He was resisting the sultan. This happened here in Athens for four hundred years. In northern Greece, for five hundred years. These things don’t go away