Everybody knows that indirect taxation is by nature unjust taxation and actually unconstitutional since the principle of proportionality (according to which all contribute according to their ability to the financial needs of the country) is not met. Neither is the principle of/Right to securing economic action activities to all Citizens without exception, two of the basic principles stipulated in the Constitution and staples in any State of Justice.
When we refer to indirect taxation, our mind goes directly to VAT, a truly repulsive tax that restricts not only economic development and individual development of the Citizens from a social class downwards, but also the freedom of choice of these people since, by means of this taxation, they are restricted access to goods they would otherwise be able to have access to. VAT also stuns development of the small self-employed professionals since it forces them to price their goods and services too high by adding VAT to them, and in combination with their lack of access to raw materials free of added charges by middlemen, they cannot develop economically as opposed to the ease of expansion of multinationals which are free of such added raw material costs.
But apart of VAT, there are a multitude of other indirect taxes, equally deleterious and restrictive, which burden systematically incomes at the low end of the income distribution and boost those at the top (the super-rich ones) both directly and indirectly. Such indirect taxes are the toll taxes, fuel taxes, alcohol and tobacco taxes, traffic taxes, the various property transference / bequest / granting of immovable property, all added and extra dues to special stamp tax, such as stamp tax for the new 2001 national airport, stamp tax for state-buildings, etc. All these are added taxes and surcharges because they cover needs of the State already paid for by the people through direct taxation and in fact are coercively enforced since they have to be paid forth to permit realization of or access to a liberty of Right that the State is supposed to guarantee and provide for without any further change to this effect. This is the reason for the existence of direct taxation, and it is unfortunate that revenue from such taxation is not broken down proportionally so that we could see where it is expended upon to cover needs of the State, and so, the State is sustained through cooperative action that involves all of us, so that we are able to benefit from all services provided for the common good by the State, and not, like a bouncer at the door of a night club, let the State be the judge of who to grant access to a service and who not to. It is for these reasons that State Enterprises were set up (made with and maintained by the money of the Greek Citizens, as in all cooperatives) to bring revenue to this State of Citizens by offering specific long-range services at prices that are de facto accessible to everyone and which services, due to their long-range make-up, can yield great profits.
This is why every such indirect tax is in fact illegal in a State ruled by Justice and of course it is unconstitutional. It is also the proof that those at the helm of the state apparatus are usurping speculators and not servants of the total of the Greek (or of whoever) People.
The only thing we may think of to come to grips with the magnitude of this criminally speculative behavior that sets them up, and which behavior would befit gangsters and not humanistic democrats, is the fact that all indirect taxes constitute a form of extortion, especially regarding access to goods and services that the Citizen is not offered an option for in bypassing VAT. In other words, especially for goods of primary needs, like food and clothing, the state precludes the Citizen from accessing these unless the illicit surcharge is paid first.
Even more exorbitantly extortive are the Public Benefit Organization charges, particularly those of DEI (State Power Company). Apart from the fact that goods like drinking water and home power supply for the average Citizen carry top VAT charges, on top of the cost of the particular service, the bill includes charges that have nothing to do with the original service cost, such as municipal dues and state television dues. In other words, the Citizen is threatened to have his/her power supply cut unless he/she pays third parties, such as the Municipal Authority and the State Television Network. This however amounts to blackmail, and when attempted between Citizens such practice is harshly dealt with by the Law. In case the state enforces such conditions of blackmail by law, the Supreme State Court or the State Audit Council (who are there to uphold the Constitution and therefore to justify their existence) ought to have criticized such law that allows for such conditions to exist and demand its repeal and restitution paid to the Citizens. This is because by taking advantage of the Citizens’ non-negotiable need to have the said services provided, as the latter are vital and immediate, are forced to pay extra charges to parties irrelevant to the provision of the service and which do not have a fixed, standard charge added to the cost but charge proportionally to the service bill or the Citizen’s property. This could sound just and fair but it is not in reality because there is no provision for any Citizen with income below the taxable minimum to have free access to those services, or if the Citizen declares officially that he/she does not need or make use of the services of the particular state enterprises. (The added-tax scheme and charging of services offered by Public Benefit Organizations, and why it is unfair/illegal and how it could become just, is an analytic task which will be taken up in another article).
The clear fact is that as in all cases of taxes and surcharges, there is no provision for the protection of the low income earners or even of the Humanitarian or Democratic principles of the Constitution. Instead they are used as extortive schemes to further illegal wealth of those infesting the state.
And we come to the day-time robbery of the Citizens by the government: devaluations and inflation, top of which has always been the euro (and euro-zone).
In the words of Konstantinos Mitsotakis, interviewed on television, the whole scheme was explained of how People’s money is stolen by means of this mechanism” starting with a devaluation of currency, curtailing the purchasing power of the Citizens and triggering inflation. The sum total of Citizens gets poor in a single day while those with various investments and the ability to flow their money in and out of the economy which is hit with devaluation earn huge amounts of money due to the difference between the purchase and selling values not only of goods but also of exchange and interest stocks. The state pays its Citizens with money of lesser value while it asks them to do more and the politicians (precisely as K.Mitsotakis said, consume People’s money in tandem without been understood). In other words, every time the state deficit becomes too big (due to the unceasing robbing of People’s money collected from all the dues paid for by the People), devaluation, in other words, an increase of the sums of money demanded of People, covers it temporarily up until the deficit reaches again or surpasses the same limits.
A true master in this kind of robbery was indeed professor-wonder of economics Andreas Papandreou, who, precisely because he was so good in economics (so much so that he taught at the best US universities a large proportion of those who later followed in his footsteps) fooled a whole People using precisely this trick: He increased pensions and salaries as the People demanded when they brought him to power, so that he would bring about allagi (the change), and then with consecutive devaluations of the drachma, not only did he take back what he initially had given but also ate into the original levels of People’s salaries and pensions
Of course Mr Papandreou knew other tricks which he played on the People and which we will analyze in another article specially devoted to him, since the way he offered service to his social class and his friends and to himself was monumental and we are obliged to analyze it for the sake of the future protection of the Citizens and of the People.
We now come to the most pervasive of all devaluations during our post-junta history: our introduction to the euro zone. Euro managed to do what society would never have allowed to happen in any other way or under any other name, that is a sweeping devaluation of the drachma at least by 200% and the triggering of an aggressive inflation, that in any other time and place would have caused a social uprising not just a riot. Euro shot all prices upwards by 300% and the more our day-to-day existence distanced itself from having to calculate converting drachmas to euros (that for the duration it lasted was a form of price control), the more prices in euros shot upwards so that we soon needed 1 euro (343 drachmas) to pay for the same loaf of bread that a few months previously only paid for 100-200 drachmas. The price of bread now has climbed to 1.5 – 2 euro if it is not the standard-issue loaf. And we are talking about bread, the staple good of nutrition, because if we compare prices in greens and vegetables, milk, cheese, etc, prices have hit the ceiling. For an average apartment (2 ½ to 3 ½ ) in a middle-income area during the last drachma era (around year 2000), rent was around 80,000 and that was considered a bit dear, after all devaluations slide offs and inflation of the drachma. The same apartment today, already older by 10 years, is let at about 250,000 drachma (that is, 600-700 euro) and is considered a bargain. In other words, ¼ of a million drachma a month is considered a good price, while during the time of the drachma inflation, it would have gone down as day-time robbery and would be legally persecuted for illicit profiteering.
In other words, with the euro in our lives, we pay everything times three and in certain sectors the multiples come much higher.
What made the People put up with this kind of robbery were two factors, again served by PASOK’s propaganda and with the support of NPD, precisely as it now happens: First that the name of the currency changed and so camouflaged by the absence of any exchange calculation, made it difficult for the average Greek to immediately feel the effects of devaluation that was communicatively manipulated, but second because, and equally criminal, the stupendous and much illusion-provoking, ‘magic’ benefits promised by the euro-zone, on how every single one of us would become rich, with status and strong currency. All these convinced the People to concede to investing in euro for a better future and economic prowess promised to come in a year or two.
At that time, all of us analysts who said that the People were being misled and falling victims of a great speculation and profiteering game of the world hegemonic class, were labeled by the mass media propaganda and the snitches of the neighborhood, catastrophe mongers and extreme nationalists. In deed some even accused us of being insecure xenophobes acting against the interest of our Country.
It took 10 years of ever-mounting financial harassment of our People, with impoverishment, inflation, counter-popular and counter-economic rules of the euro-zone with ever increasing pro-hegemonic politics applied always under the pretext of keeping in line with the euro-zone mandates, so that we came to be seen as the only true and ardent supporters wishing to truly protect our States and our fellow Citizens and Fellow Humans, inside and outside of state borders.
We now find ourselves in the maelstrom of a speculation game, players and organizers of which are the governments (along with the groups of their MPs) who after serving the interests of their hegemonic class of large-scale capitalists, and super-rich (you will also find them under ‘pro-development investors’, making all Peoples poorer, more destitute and more hopeless. And they try to keep all these People in a state of terror and agony so that they will not be able to feel and appreciate and estimate what exactly is going on their backs, and where the solution to their problems lies.
Any solution to this problem involves the immediate neutralizing and removal of all those who control the governments and our businesses (i.e, in the structure and organization of the state apparatus and the public benefit organizations that are responsible for the supply of services to the Citizens, such as Public Benefit Organizations (DEKO) , Transport and the rest), applying the law on all their speculation games, and freeing the economy from its ‘casino’-like organization a (where the governments/MPs/friends of the hegemonic class are the House and all the rest of the Citizens – the People, are the players who are called to bet on the rigged games) so that by following the law of nature, if not the laws of state protection, to invite health back into the economy.
As soon as we the Citizens making up the People realize it as a reflex that: each time we open our wallets to pay, that we flush our toilets, we order some coffee or buy milk for our children, in comes the invisible hand of the super-rich capitalist mafiosos and steals our cash so that we won’t buy a cookie along with coffee, won’t wash our hands after flushing, won’t buy bread along with milk, and that: if we dare spend anyway, this hand will punish us harshly as we described above, then we will enforce the solution to the problem just as the People know how to.
Translation provided by Michael T.