Greece continues to writhe on the hook of its financial crisis. A third set of austerity measures announced Wednesday has brought further protests from the trade unions.

The latest budget tightening includes a freeze on pensions, cuts in public sector pay, and a raft of indirect tax rises.
The aim of the Papandreou government is to honor its pledge to the EU to cut its budget deficit from 12.7 percent to 8.7 percent during this year. The Greek deficit is currently four times permitted under the euro-zone rules. Though Brussels, having decided that earlier plans were insufficient, has expressed satisfaction with the latest cuts, there remains considerable doubt that the Athens government will be able to deliver.
Even now there is still suspicion over revised official figures supplied by the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry. There are also unanswered questions over the 2001 debt-swap deal done for Greece by the U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs, which enabled the country to conceal the extent of its debt problems. This transaction may yet land Goldman in serious trouble with the U.S. authorities. It has certainly exposed the sleight of hand pursued by successive Greek governments as they avoided the difficult choices of straightening out the country’s chaotic finances.
It was not so much the governments but the Greek people who created the circumstances that have permitted this country to drive itself into the financial sand. One of the charms of Greece is its laid back approach to life. Laws, such as the recent smoking ban in public places, are there to be disregarded if people do not agree with them. True, the Greeks can apply themselves ferociously to a task if they wish to -- the Athens Olympics was a remarkable demonstration of this -- but by and large, obeying inconvenient rules has always been for suckers.
Thus the collection of taxes, both corporate and individual, has long been a scandal. Easy-going tax collectors would turn a blind eye to blatant evasion in return for a bribe. And whenever any government tried to crack down on a visible part of the economy, it simply disappeared from official records. It is not uncommon for even large companies to keep two sets of books, one for their own use and the other to be handed to the taxman, with a brown paper envelope of banknotes placed strategically inside.
When Greece was playing by its own rules, this fiscal shambles was rarely questioned. Now it is has euro-zone regulations it has been found out and must pay a huge accumulated bill. But it is in reality the Greeks, not their governments, who have brought this on themselves by striking and demonstrating whenever even modest attempts were made to reduce their featherbedding