Techdirt: EU Officially Seizes The Public Domain, Retroactively Extends Copyright →

"The cabinet has already approved increasing the average retirement age for public sector workers from 61 to 65. Average public sector wages have been cut 20 percent, and pensions by 10 percent. The value-added tax was raised from 19 percent to 23 percent, and there’s been an excise tax increase of about 30 percent on gas, alcohol and tobacco. The number of municipalities is proposed to shrink from 1,000 to 400 and public-owned companies from 6,000 to 2,000 to save money and red tape. So far, the deficit is down 40 percent from last year."

Op-Ed Columnist - Greece’s Newest Odyssey - NYTimes.com. Last week, I criticized Greeks for acting somewhat oddly, given the bail-out package they were about to receive. Today, I read this op-ed by Thomas Friedman, which narrated Friedman’s talk with Greece’s Prime Minister Panadreou and (more importantly) showed that Greece is trying, hard, to keep up its end of the bargain.

Greeks begrudgingly accept money from IMF and EU →

If Greece doesn’t put into place austerity measures (tax hikes and spending cuts), there is a good chance the country won’t receive loans from EU members, which will result in an inability to pay off sovereign debt, which, in turn, will cause a collapse of the Greek economy.

Yet, a large number of Greeks seem to be violently protesting the measures. In fact, 3 people died yesterday when a bank was destroyed during protests, including a pregnant woman. Some protesters go so far as to claim a “conspiracy to subdue proud, independent nations.” Yeah… the rest of the EU and the IMF are co-conspirators in a large scheme to help Greece climb out of an irresponsibly large debt it built up over the course of the past decade. What a terrible conspiracy.