Brazilian Senator Says Greece Epitomized the Global Financial Crisis

Brazilian Senator Cristovam Buarque explains the lessons that Greece taught the world during 2011.”The year 2011 was the year of Greece. More than Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Portugal or Italy, Greece symbolized the worldwide crisis.

In Greece, the dimensions of the crisis were wider: it was economic, with a strong contraction of the GDP; political, because no other country had more strikes and street demonstrations; and social, due to the unemployment, which even included hunger in diverse sectors of the society.

Greece was, in 2011, proof that easy riches are also ephemeral. Moreover, Greece was proof of the failure of a developmental model characterized by the increase of the Gross Domestic Product, above all by progress that is measured by the increase in material production, even at the expense of income concentration, environmental depredation, voracious consumption, indebtedness, bank and governmental irresponsibility, and an artificially strong currency.

In 2011, Greece symbolized this model, but it can also be seen as the origin of the thinking that served for us to adopt and execute that concept of progress today. It was from the classic Greeks’ perception and creation of logic that the basis of science and technology was born almost two thousand years later in the European Renaissance, leading to the Industrial Revolution in England and to the overindulgent, voracious utopia of the last few decades all over the Earth.

Consequently, it is the symbol of the failure of the progress that we, in the 20th and 21st centuries, transformed into the synonym of superfluous consumption, of irresponsible consumerism, which demanded public expenditures exceeding the fiscal equilibrium, financing beyond bank responsibility, ecological depredation beyond the fiscal limits, indebtedness beyond the possibilities of the states, the enterprises and the families.

Greece can serve as proof of failure of a civilization’s model and as the idea of making a turn towards a new civilization, in which the growth of economic production is no longer the standard used to define Well Being and Happiness.

In which a fortunate decrease in growth may even be possible, one in harmony with society and with nature, one without indebtedness and with more free time and more public goods, one with austerity that is creative and rewarding”.

(Source:BrazzilMag)