WHAT PRICE SALVATION?

To celebrate the blog's 6th birthday (and its 500,000th pageview) I proposed to take suggestions for fact-checks from the audience on Twitter and Facebook. This is the second of the two winning fact-checks and it deals with the cost to Greek citizens of the Greek Orthodox Church. 

In the beginning there was the press release...

Perhaps the most surprising element of this fact-check is the extent to which it has been pre-empted by an extremely detailed press release from Greece's far-left Government (as it then was) in March 2015. This explained that, contrary to press reports, the Greek Churches (for there are three - the Church of Greece, the Church of Crete and the Holy Metropolises of the Dodecanese) pay taxes; enjoy no undue tax breaks, and have a solid legal claim to the Greek government's payroll. They also do not directly handle public money. Quoting from the release:

"The payroll of Christian Orthodox Clergy as well as the funding of Christian Orthodox Religious Education is an obligation of the State declared in texts of the National Assemblies of the Peoples’ representatives of the Greek revolutionaries (1822, 1829) in exchange for transferring the assets of the Church to the State. The transfer was implemented gradually [by means of the following:]

• establishment of public organizations for exploiting the assets of the Church and for supporting public Education and improvement of the Clergy’s situation on October 13, 1834; 
• expropriation of monasteries’ property to indemnify farmers and refugees following the destruction of Ionia on November 19, 1909 and on May 10, 1930; 
• Concession for transferring ⅘ of fields and meadows property of monasteries on September 18, 1952; 
• Concession for transferring forest, fields and meadows property of monasteries on May 11, 1988." 

Moreover, it should be made clear that salaries are paid from the State directly to Clergy. Public funds are not transferred by the State via the Holy Metropolises nor are any regular grants included in the annual budget of the State to any of the entities of the Church of Greece, the Church of Crete and the Holy Metropolises of the Dodecanese. Therefore, the Holy Metropolises do not manage public money”. 

The numbers of the Beast

The Syriza presser, apart from being politically shrewd to defend the Church in an almost entirely Orthodox Christian country, is also right. Technically the payment of priests' salaries is a legal obligation; an off-balance-sheet liability, if you will, recorded as a current transfer by the Central Government to bodies outside General Government. It has also been relatively easy to track down from 2013 onwards. You can find it is as follows:

1. Go to the Greek ministry of finance website and select Menu - Financial Data -  Budget Execution Bulletins (Οικονομικά στοιχεία - Δελτία εκτέλεσης προϋπολογισμού).
2. Pick the latest monthly General government bulletin (Δελτίο εκτέλεσης προϋπολογισμού) and look for the attached Central Government time series .xls file. Sometimes the English files will be missing but the Greek ones will be there.
3. Navigate to the tab named 'Non State Central Government' (Κεντρική Κυβέρνηση Πλην Κρατικού [Προϋπολογισμού])
4. Look for two rows called B.516.: Current transfers paid - Current transfers to non-governmental units (Τρέχουσες μεταβιβάσεις καταβληθείσες - Προς μονάδες εκτός της γενικής κυβέρνησης). One records just the monthly payments and the other records the cumulative figure over the year. Use the cumulative version where possible.
5. Always use the latest version as statistics get revised regularly and retrospectively. 

You can find the most recent time series (Nov 2015) at the time of writing in Greek here and in English here. This approach only works because the Church's wage bill is the only current transfer from central government to a non-General-Government body. If this were to change, it would become much harder to isolate it. Before 2013, the pay data was a little harder to find, and information on the actual number of clerics was elusive; in fact, the Greek Church(es) had to refine their own data collection from 2011 onwards in order to feed into the census of state employees.

Clerics' pensions are, like those of civil servants, unfunded and paid directly out of the Central Government budget. As unlikely as it sounds, this makes the associated payments much more transparent than their salaries - as long as you can read Greek you can look them up in any Budget post-mortem (eg see 'Κεντρικές Υπηρεσίες' here). You can also, for now, find recent data on Diavgeia, the embattled transparency website on which most spending decisions must be published.

I summarise how much the Greek government has paid priests over the recent years in the graph below.

This expenditure includes the salaries of ca. 10,000 priests and other Church staff, while the pensions bill includes pensions paid to a projected 5,240 priests and Church employees. It doesn't include spending on the education of priests and subsidies to other church institutions, which, in 2014, came up to roughly EUR2.5m - but that is genuinely negligible in the grand scheme of things. Now, priests have never been a 'exotic' category of civil servants; legally they've always been treated in the same way as the rest, even collecting the same spurious pre-crisis productivity bonuses as their colleagues elsewhere.

It's clear from the graph above that the Church has not been immune to austerity, having taken a nominal cut of ca 35% between 2010 and 2015. But it has, perhaps, been somewhat sheltered, presumably because so much of its spending is direct transfers to individuals. If you rank the Church against other categories of spending where comparable data is available, the church's wage bill was cut at about two-thirds of the pace seen in the core civil service, defence spending, sickness and disability benefits, public transport or hospital budgets; or at the same pace as parliamentary functions and legal spending; and faster than, say, the police, agricultural spending or environmental protection. Moreover, even more so than with other Greeks, in the priestly orders pensioners really have screwed everyone else over. The Church's pensions bill has come out of the crisis almost entirely unscathed even though the number of pensioners hasn't risen tremendously. And it's clear that it's not just press releases the Syriza/Anel government had to offer the Church; it also offered it its first real-terms payrise in five years.

As much as it's enjoyable to point to the Church's sheltered pensions, it's also important to put the Church's payroll and other spending on it in perspective. At a total EUR224m in 2015, the cost of the Church is approximately 0.13% of GDP; that's somewhere between the country's entire public housing budget and the amount the state spends on waste water management.

God's Social Workers

It is not surprising that there have been calls for a substantial rethink of the Church's relationship to the public finances throughout the last few decades, and even less surprising that they have grown stronger in the recent depression. In 2012, an ungoogleable report from Greece's Centre for Planning and Economic Research (the Greek Government's economic think-tank) called for a rethink, offering several scenarios for the rebalancing of church and state relations - including levying a tax on the faithful or tapping the Church's own income to pay for some 50% of the Church's payroll. This was swiftly dismissed by the Government of the time on the grounds that it would jeopardise the Church's social work, which the Government claimed was worth more than the EUR100m KEPE aimed to save.

But how much charitable work does the Church actually do? Apparently, EUR121m worth in 2014, down marginally from EUR122m in 2013, but up from 106m in 2012, EUR100m in 2011; EUR96m in 2010, EUR92m in 2009 and EUR93m in 2008.  In any case, the Church claims to feed half a million Greeks over the year in 280 soup kitchens, and another 76 thousand through 150 food banks; it claims to provide 1,300 scholarships and care-at-home for 3,500 persons. Not to mention some 28 nurseries and 75 charitable cramming schools (remember those?). This activity is partly supported by over 3,000 parish welfare funds.

So let's try the maths again. I'm netting off charitable work against wages only, as a kind of 'operating surplus' of the Church's social work. Clearly, wage restraint has eaten very far into this surplus; the Church's work is countercyclical, while its wage bill has been cut.

The source of all estimates of the Church's humanitarian work is the Church's Synodical Commission for Social Welfare and Well-Being, supported by a Census of Church organisations. However, unlike the Church's finances these figures are unaudited. Scrutiny by ELSTAT, for which the Church is apparently preparing, is unlikley to fill that gap. So for now, it's important to exercise some skepticism in both directions; these amounts include operating costs of the Church's foundations, and there may be some double-counting in the figures, but also under-counting of donations in kind and voluntary work. I would not query the order of magnitude.

So the Church's argument goes that if it had to pick up the tab for priests' salaries and pensions it would be unable to devote the same amount it currently does to humanitarian work. I am not entirely convinced - or rather, I'm sure this is true but I'm sure the relationship between the Church's wage bill and its ability to provide humanitarian assistance is more nuanced - and weaker. It has, after all, proven capable of raising substantial funds in these lean times despite a cut in its wage bill - something it had warned would be impossible back in 2012. One reason, among many I'm sure, is that the Church's humanitarian activity is not driven substantially by the work of priests and others on the State payroll but by volunteers. The European Values Study of 2008 tells me that 2.2% of the Greek adult population (some 180,000 people) worked unpaid for a religious organisation - eighteen times the number of actual priests. Pensioners and the unemployed, especially those with lower levels of education, were most likely to do this work - so the Church's supply of unpaid labour has no doubt grown in the crisis. (Bonus: if it really takes 180,000 people to provide ca 120m worth of assistance, that works out to ca EUR666 per person per year - a hilarious but genuine coincidence.

Supernatural monopoly

These figures point to the core of Greece's Church-state problem. The Church's network and infrastructure are, frankly, extremely convenient for the State; and the Church has a longer history of performing both social and administrative functions than the State. In providing services to Greece's mainstream, indigenous population, the Church can, due to its historical endowment, out-compete any NGO or international organisation, and often the State itself. The Church can raise the EUR120m or so it needs for its operations less invasively and more sensitively than the State - I've never once heard of a protest against it. And the Church can mobilise volunteers. The State would have a protest on its hands in no time.

Put it differently, if the Greek state were to put the social protection and administrative functions of the Church out to tender, as a formal outsourced business, the Church would win almost all of them right back, with a profit margin. Its mas access to free labour would be almost impossible to replicate. If the State were instead to take them all in-house as state functions, it would probably perform them less effectively and efficiently and would struggle to make the case for tax rises to fund them. It would have to scale down massively because it would never be able to find the people to perform them.

Either extreme is less preferable than the status quo. In the good times, of course, the Church might have struggled to reach the niche or socially excluded groups that were most in need of some interventions (say, sex workers, migrants, or refugees). But as the crisis reaches ever more of the core of Greek society this argument has become weaker.

The Church, of course, didn't build this unassailable competitive position on its own; it has relied on seventeen centuries of Government endorsement of its administrative and welfare functions, not to mention a massive subsidy to its indoctrination work through the establishment of a state religion. These advantages persisted even during the centuries of Ottoman rule. Clearly, a hypothetical country designed from scratch wouldn't work like this - but what is the point of such thinking?

The answer to this supernatural monopoly on welfare services does not, to me, appear to be a defunding of the Church in one fell swoop, but rather a combination of gradually reducing pension spending (say, by fixing it forever in nominal terms) and ending the enormous investment of the State in maintaining the State Religion through education and the law itself. Given how the latter is written into the Greek constitution, I don't expect much change is immediately possible, but it's worthwhile.

Enough land for all the flock to roam

A key question posed to me when I began this fact-check related to the wealth of the Church. The Church, the narrative goes, is rich; and because it is rich it must contribute to the public coffers in our time of need. I am not sure how asset-rich the Church is, or how cash-rich it is either.

The Church's key source of wealth is supposedly land and real estate. But how much land does the Church own? The Greek blogosphere offers a million answers but there some figures with at least some legitimacy. An Agricultural Bank of Greece study (inaccessible online but cited eg here) dating back to 1987 estimates the Church's rural holdings at 1,300 square kilometers, about 1% of the country's rural land. Of this less than a tenth was arable, and about a quarter was classified as forest by the authorities and largely banned from development. A whole lot of it was pastures. But even that study seems to have been compiled based on 'expert views' - on which I would not necessarily rely on such a difficult issue.

The Church cites the 1987 study widely, not only because it makes its real estate empire look small but also because it deals exclusively with rural land; clearly in terms of actual wealth it is the urban property of the Church that actually matters, of which we anecdotally know there is a good deal. The Church's detractors cite the same study because it names the Church as Greece's no.2 landlord after the State itself; even though it is a very distant second. Either way, the reality is that the Church's rural real estate is likely worth very little, and trying to get to the bottom of how much is a fool's errand. Quite how people presume to put a price on land that hasn't been involved in a transaction or put to regular productive use for hundreds of years is beyond me, but I'm not dumb enough to try.

Ultimately, the best way to value a piece of Church land is to buy it, or exploit it commercially. There is a catch, though. The Church claims that it would love to make more of its real estate but red tape (eg planning and preservation laws) is getting in the way; in fact, it claims it is probably the only landowner and/or develop with actual respect for planning, zoning and conservation laws, and finds itself stranded in 'forest' plots that haven't seen a green shoot in years, while all around them the state tolerates irregular development. To British readers, this may sound a little like Green Belt lobbying with a twist. Whatever the truth of it, it worked for a while. In April, the Greek government was reportedly close to a deal for a deregulation drive that would enable a 50/50 joint venture between the Church and the Greek State to develop Church lands (H/T @_LaScapigliata). The deal stalled and, as of November, was getting started all over again, with a joint commission set up. Given that the new commission was meant to discuss a much broader set of issues ahead of a Constitutional review, it seems the Government had not got what it wanted back in the first half of the year and was aiming for more.

The development JV, by the way, wasn't Syriza's idea; it has existed since 2013 and has mostly sat on its hands since. What is the chance that it has a board that has been paid without fail ever since?

Cadastral projection

If you are strict about the meaning of the word own, of course, the answer is that we don't and can't know what the Church owns at all, since Greece still has no Land Registry or cadastre; a reform one might have expected to see fast-tracked in the memorandum years but which was in fact left to wither on the vine with EUR100m of EU funding and a billion of the Greek people's own money committed since 1994 and by turns clawed back by Europe, squandered in Greece, or left on the table by both sides. With three quarters of the work still pending and much of it expected to be completed only after 2020, this is a crime and a national disgrace for which neither the troika institutions nor any Greek Government so far has felt the need to seek justice.

The result? The Church has, since 2011, gone on a cadastral safari, in an effort to ensure its claims are as tidy as possible - which is hard to do when one's claim on land is a patchwork of often centuries old squatter's rights, edicts of fallen imperial thrones, bequests and donations. After several rounds of expropriation in the past (see above and below!), it has good cause to worry. But it could help speed up the process even more by putting its moral and legal weight behind getting the Land Registry off the ground faster. It has not.

Pearls before swine

Regarding the Church's total property, there are estimates of 7-15bn which appear to be based on pre-crisis property and share values, and other estimates of ca. 1bn which may be more reasonable now - that would make the Church about as rich in real estate as Greek pension funds.

But claims that the value of church land in Greece runs into the trillions of Euros also abound on the internet. Like much of the Greek blogosphere, they are nonsense, based on a misreading (mishearing even) of the 1994 case of Holy Monasteries v Greece, in which the ECHR awarded ca 8m Drachmas to monasteries in respect of legal fees and expenses following an irregular expropriation of land by the state.

Eight monasteries did, in fact, make a claim for pecuniary damages amounting to an outrageous GDR 7.6 trillion for expropriated land (EUR22.3bn in today's exchange rate, actually more after accounting for inflation between 1994 and 2001). In fact, however, when the monasteries tallied up their property, it came up to a lot less than that: GRD3.1bn for 7 out of the 8 monasteries and another GRD43bn for the eighth, inflated by its ownership of the marble quaries of mt Parnis. So the typical monastery ended up with an estimate closer to EUR2.7m in current Greek prices (adjusting for inflation since 1994); a substantial amount no doubt, especially considering we have a good 2,500 monasteries. Leaving the outlier aside, and assuming the rest are representative, gives us ca. EUR6.6bn in today's money for monasteries alone. Yet these monasteries were far from representative; they were some of the richest, as evidenced by the fact that they were targeted for expropriation and could afford a ridiculously lengthy court case like this.

Remember, these are the monasteries' own estimates of real-estate values, which is to say they are almost certainly inflated. Crucially, the ECHR took no view on the actual value of the property of the monasteries - a point lost on most of the people blogging about the case. Instead it urged the monasteries and the State to come to a settlement; which they finally did, with the State simply acknowledging the monasteries' ownership over the disputed land.

Of course, monasteries aren't the whole of the Church in Greece; and it is doubtful that the Church 'owns' their property to such effect that it could order monasteries to sell it, rent it out or put it to any other use. Hence the value of these estimates is points. Yet since the one thing both the Church's detractors and its defenders alike agree on is that it is (a very distant) second only to the State as an individual owner of land and real estate, then its urban property cannot in any way be worth more than EUR100bn in current values - since that's what the State's buildings are worth.

But most important of all is the question of why the value of Church property matters. The State reassures us that the Church pays the right amount of property tax. If so, then the discussion of Church property is simply a warm-up act for further expropriation, or an attempt to proxy undeclared income. But as the ECHR confirmed back in the 90s, monasteries and indeed the Church can own property just as well as individuals - and no one can help themselves to it without a competing claim or an over-riding social purpose coupled with compensation. That argument is what did for PASOK's expropriation drive in the early 90s, which incidentially is responsible for many of the enduring myths we are still having to discuss today.

TO BE CONTINUED

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT GREEK SURVEYS

UPDATE 21/11/15: Join me in protesting the Greek government's attempt to discredit and punish staff at the polling unit of the University of Macedonia; the Independent Greeks' conspiracy theories and personal vendettas have hurt to many people already. Sign the petition here.

The days leading up to the second Greek election of 2015 saw a rash of new polls suggesting Syriza and ND were neck-and-neck ahead of the second election of 2015. No less esteemed an organ than the FT was citing Greek polls to inform its readers that ND's Meimarakis (whose mustache alone should have given him away as a throwback to the party's deep past) had refreshed the party's image and was proving such 'a formidable opponent' for A. Tsipras that ND was in with a chance again.

It was, we now know, bollocks. So were surveys conducted ahead of this summer's referendum, whose errors were made that much more humiliating for pollsters by the fact the actual result fell outside even the envelope of projections published in previous days. No less successful were predictions of the January election result, which again showed a dead heat to the very end, despite a comfortable lead for Syriza in real life. The graph below shows the evolution of polls, with large circles representing the actual election results.

"ElectionMonthlyAverageGraphGreece2015" by Impru20 - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

Now readers know how this blog works. I explore cock-up before conspiracy. And I believe in surveys. I deeply respect those who produce them. They are tools with limitations, but they are good tools nonetheless. When surveys start to malfunction our window into the real world narrows, and we become more dependent on the confirmation bias factories in our heads and in our social circles.

So what can account for the errors we've seen? The following explanations have been put forward.

• non-response (non-contact and refusal): an increasing share of the population mistrust pollsters and this attitude is correlated with particular, non-mainstream political views. More importantly, more and more people reject landlines altogether in favour of mobiles and the internet. Finally, social and economic upheaval makes people's contacts less reliable as households fall apart, people emigrate, and domestic life is disrupted. The people affected by these phenomena are systematically different in their politics from those unaffected, and are under-represented in what should be 'representative' samples. There is certainly enough evidence that these influences are important. See for instance UK results, and US findings on the matter, and some of my own work on emigration. To put it simply, rising non-response is a symptom of social deterioration; reduced fertility rates, reduced neighborhood cohesion, precarious employment and social isolation.
• fluid public opinion/unit non-response: It is possible that individuals are becoming increasingly unwilling to discuss their politics specifically with pollsters, either out of mistrust or out of disillusionment, and that this attitude is correlated with a predisposition to vote for non-mainstream parties. For an empirically founded overview of this argument, in Greek, see here. To this explanation should be added the fact that the context of recent Greek elections and even more so the Greek referendum was extreme; public opinion may have been genuinely fluid to such an extent that late surges can make a difference. For an argument and data in support, see HuffPo's surprisingly good coverage here. Alternatively, pollsters' failure to allocate 'don't know responses' to a likely preference (eg based on their previous voting record, which would usually have favoured Syriza) may have been at fault (an argument to that effect here)
• abstention: with abstention on the rise, Greek survey results are becoming increasingly sensitive to people's propensity to vote and small variations in nationwide voting intention can be magnified in real elections.
• herding: pollsters are worried about being the odd-one-out and weed out or suppress survey results that put them at odds with their peers. Nate Silver makes a good case for this here. Ironically, New Democracy staffers caught on to this theory and spent much of the eve of the last elections briefing opinion formers (of whom I am not one) that ND was indeed ahead in surveys but the pollsters were self-censoring out of fear. They got caught.
• tampering: pollsters are in cahoots with political parties whom they insist on painting in a favourable light. There were multiple accusations of such tampering in the aftermath of the 2015 elections, reviewed in this excellent post on Dateline: Atlantis. My feeling is that this may be true of some, but not nearly enough pollsters to explain the outcomes we've seen (see below on the performance of 'non-establishment' polls)

How to deal with these problems?

• Stick to cross-tabs. The Press Project ran its own crowdfunded survey ahead of the September elections. Despite a stated intention to compare its findings with those of other polls, in the end TPP simply chose to report on cross-tabulations only (full video here and more commentary here). Although this was likely motivated by the relatively small sample size achieved, I would hazard a guess that TPP found themselves faced with the same methodological issues as everyone else. 
• Invite scrutiny. Pollsters ProRata (who came closest of all to the actual September election results) have opened up their survey datasets to researchers. [Or did they? See Comments section!]
• Extrapolate from biased samples. Ironically, the innovators here were populist blogs such as Tromaktiko (see a sample here), who quickly realised how unrepresentative their readership is and developed simple rules of thumb in order to work backwards from this to a more 'normal' population. At least one company (the unknown and ungoogle-able Clear Foundations Institute) has tried to combine a telephone survey with a web survey (see here). These approaches so far seem to have failed as badly as the old-fashioned methods, but that's not to say that there aren't valid ways of extrapolating from biased samples (example here).
• Build the sampling frame or weights matrix around referendum results. Pollsters have repeatedly claimed that their raw data were of the highest quality, but errors crept in as the data were weighted. In particular, weights based on past electoral preferences became unreliable as the Greek electorate became more fluid and deranged. A solution would be to use the recent referendum as the reference for weighting. The sampling frame approach was, for instance, suggested here. ProRata also appear to have used respondents' referendum voting record in weighting responses (as opposed to or in addition to past electoral voting record).

An even bigger problem 

Ultimately, political polls may not matter much; I've yet to see convincing evidence that undecided or tactical voters are swayed by them, although private party funding may be influenced.

More to the point, political polls will always be subject to accusations of tampering. At the back of the Greek people's heads, they are part of politics and thus to be taken with a grain of salt. But what if similar problems were impacting the surveys used to produce national statistics?

National statistics surveys have an advantage over polls in that they are allowed to be much more expensive than political surveys, they have to follow a common methodology, and are, in some cases, compulsory for the poor bastards chosen to provide a response. And while there are potentially incentives to tamper with, say, unemployment rates or poverty rates, tampering with more obscure findings like IT usage statistics is pretty inconceivable.  

It's not difficult to find the non-response rates associated with national statistics surveys. ELSTAT publishes a good deal of this information under each theme's 'methodology' section (see an example for the Labour Force Survey here). Additionally Eurostat summarises the national quality reports for each survey on an annual basis (see an example for EU-SILC here). In the graph below, I've put figures together for some of my favourite national statistics (on employment, household spending, living conditions and IT use). Plotting them all together makes for grim viewing.

First of all, it's plain to see that there is a long-term trend towards rising non-response rates, mirroring the experience of pollsters in Greece and abroad. However, this trend clearly accelerated after 2010, the first memorandum year, which gives credence to a 'social breakdown non-response' theory. Second, the years 2011 and 2012 seem to have been a particularly sharp deviation from this trend - which I believe is due to the fact that this was the period of mass disruption - e.g. Greek's sense of physical safety and food poverty were at their worst. Third, not all surveys have seen non-response develop in the same way. EU-SILC, a survey designed to tease out signs of poverty and its implications, has managed non-response a lot better, and appears to be returning to normal. How is SILC different? I am not sure - bear with me as I try to find out.

The Labour Force Survey provides even more detail on non-response. It shows, for instance, that it's the 'uncontactables' that account for the rise in non-response. They also show that major urban areas have substantially higher non-response rates. Attica, in particular, has a non-response of around 40%, twice its pre-crisis level. This should get ELSTAT worried.

One might recoil in horror from such numbers - we get our unemployment figures from a survey that has 25% non-response? WTF?! It's important to remember, however, that statisticians don't just let non-response be; they contact different households fitting the same general description (e.g. local area, age of reference person) until they fill their quota for each box on their grid. When non-response is random, or displays no systematic pattern that is related to the subject of the survey, it does not bias the resulting figures, even if it's really quite large. Greek election polls had ca. 80% non-response even back when they were accurate (data here).

Ultimately, I'm not even sure that the Syriza surge was correlated to the rise of the uncontactables. Electoral data are available here, and a regional breakdown of non-response is available, at least for LFS. The interesting thing is that the correlation between transience and Syriza vote growth is quite weak

TO BE CONTINUED

STATPORN, STATPIMPS, STAWHORES PART III: EVOLUTION OF THE 2008-9 DEFICIT

This is the third part of my series on the 2008-9 revision of the Greek deficit and the events that led to it; it considers the specific allegations related to the 2008-9 deficit revision. Part 1 of the series is available here, and Part 2 is available here. Part 4 is underway.

The truth is out there

It's hard to overstate just how much of what goes on in the world (even the unsavoury bits) is a matter of record, if not entirely in the public domain. Conspiracy theorists' claims are, as a result, always much more testable than they realise. This is true of Greece's 2008-9 deficit revision.

Here's what you need to make your way through the revisions:

• Eurostat's rules on Government deficit and debt calculation are in the public domain. The ones in place at the time of the 2010 methodological visits are recorded here, while the revised rules of 2012 are available here. The European System of Accounts (ESA95) which was in force at the time is explained in detail here. We've since moved on to ESA2010.
• Eurostat keeps a record of its decisions on how methodological matters should be dealt with, and a record of guidance , visits and advice to member states. 
• All notifications under the Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) are available here. The ones most relevant to the 2008-9 deficit review are April 2008, October 2008, April 2009, October 2009 (the first one, of 2/10), April 2010 and October 2010. 
• It's important to remember that the Oct 2009 Notification was fatally flawed; no one accepts it; not Eurostat, not ELSTAT, not the old ESYE, not the conspiracy theorists. No one.
• Eurostat's report on the 2010 revision of Greek deficit statistics is available here with a very helpful annex here. Their report on the 2004 revision is available here. And here  (pp 31 and 32) is the commission's breakdown of the revisions made back in 2004.
• Eurostat has also published reports on their methodological visits to Greece in 2006 (Spring), 2006 (Autumn)  and 2010.
• The 2010 Greek expert report into the reliability of fiscal statistics is available here (in Greek)

Using the EDP notification tables, it is relatively easy to present a history of our 2008 and 2009 deficit forecasts and estimates, by vintage. All timings refer to the EDP notifications in which each estimate was made, but, since EDP notifications don't go back more than four years , I've also added the figures currently cited by Eurostat. For comparability, these are all ESA95 stats.

 

 

As you can see, the flawed Oct 2009 notifications conducted by ESYE, ELSTAT's non-independent predecessor, revised our 2008 and 2009 deficits enormously. Yet, while the Oct 2009 notifications were both severely wrong on many levels, their estimates of the 2008 and 2009 deficits weren't overly high - the figures Eurostat and ELSTAT agree on today, and which I think are methodologically sound, are in both cases significantly worse than what came out of the Oct 2009 notification. This means that, unless one rejects all subsequent revisions, the Oct 2009 notification did not inflate the deficit. Conspiracy theorists can only, perhaps, claim that it drew attention to the deficit at the wrong time. Which is true enough, but not treason.

 

To help you assess the timing of notifications, I've put together a simple timeline, with help from Wikipedia:

• 2 October 2009: The first October 2009 EDP notification is submitted, revising Greece's 2009 deficit forecast from EUR9.3bn (3.7% of GDP) to EUR30.1bn (12.5% of GDP).
• 4 October 2009: PASOK wins the 2009 legislative elections
• 21 October 2009: A second October 2009 EDP notification is submitted.
• 22 October 2009: Fitch downgrades Greece from A to A-
• 8 December 2009: Fitch downgrades Greece from A- to BBB+
• 16 December 2009: S&P downgrades Greece from A- to BBB+
• 22 December 2009: Moody's downgrades Greece from A1 to A2
• 2 January 2010: An expert report into the reliability of Greek fiscal statistics is published
• 8 January 2010: Eurostat publishes its report on Greek fiscal statistics
• 9 March 2010: Greece's new statistical law comes into force, establishing ELSTAT as an independent entity.
• 29-31 March 2010: Eurostat methodological visit.
• 1 April 2010: The April 2010 EDP Notification is submitted, revising Greece's 2009 deficit from EUR30.1bn (12.5% of GDP) to EUR32.3bn (13.6% of GDP).
• 9 April 2010: Fitch downgrades Greece from BBB+ to BBB-
• 21 April 2010: Bailout talks begin
• 22 April 2010: Moody's downgrades Greece from A2 to A3.
• 23 April 2010: Greece formally requests a bailout from the IMF, EU and ECB.
• 27 April 2010: S&P downgrades Greece from A to BB
• 2 May 2010: The first bailout is signed
• 21-22 June: Eurostat methodological visit
• 26 July 2010: Regulation no 697/2010 comes into force, giving Eurostat auditing powers
• 2 August 2010: A. Georgiou takes over as president of ELSTAT.
• 27-29 September 2010: Eurostat methodological visit
• 11 October-9 November 2010: Eurostat methodological visit
• 15 November 2010: Eurostat publishes Greek fiscal data from 2004-2009 without reservations for the first time.

The origins of a revision target - accounting for issuance

As readers know, I do not deal in 'insider' accounts. I am not privy to what went on within ESYE or ELSTAT except through what accounts there are in the public domain. However, I'm willing to bet that, come October 2009, the old ESYE's leadership knew that producing a deficit figure below ca. EUR30bn for 2009 and EUR20bn for 2008 would lose them the last of the international community's remaining goodwill, and I'm willing to bet they were under orders to reach those levels while still allowing their bosses (first ND, then PASOK ministers) to look reasonably good. The reason was simple, and it was not treachery; foreign analysts could see for themselves how much debt Greece was issuing, and it was way out of line with our deficit projections.

It is not impossible to manipulate deficit statistics in order to exaggerate government deficits; however, it is impossible to manipulate the numbers on bond issuance. Bond issues are, after all, probably the most public financial transactions in the world. Eurostat estimates net issuance (all securities issued minus all securities repaid) of EUR23bn in 2008 and EUR38bn in 2009. It would be hard to believe that our deficits (in cash terms, at least) were orders of magnitude smaller than this.

If you're a conspiracy theorist, you may not trust Eurostat on this matter; but bond-watching analysts' estimates at the time might convince you. By Nov 2009, gross issuance for the year was estimated at EUR59bn by Barclays Capital and later at EUR61.3bn by Danske Bank; and since EUR25.9bn of Greek bonds matured or were repaid over the year, that leads us back to a net issuance of EUR35.4bn for 2009. Similarly, as of Dec 2008, gross issuance for the year was estimated at EUR44bn; suggesting net issuance was way ahead of the projected deficit.

It is, of course, possible for a country to net issue more bonds than it needs to, if it is tactically overborrowing to take advantage of low interest rates. But Greece was raising funds in the teeth of literally the biggest bond sale in human history. It was common knowledge that the debt we were raising at the time would cost us dearly. It is also possible, in a conspiracy theorist's mind, for a government to intentionally overborrow in order to bring about a fiscal crisis, but then the bulk of the 2009 issuance was not carried out by the new PASOK government at all. It was carried out by the outgoing ND government which protested the new estimates and started the 2009 deficit myth in the first place!

In any case, it's worth comparing the EUR35.4bn of net bond issuance for 2009 to the conspiracy theorists' own upper-bound estimate for the 2009 deficit: 7.9% of GDP (based on the Oct 2010 notification) before accounting for what they allege was a major GDP underestimate. This produces an utterly impossible net borrowing requirement of EUR18.5bn - these people truly believe the Greek government had issued some EUR17bn worth of bonds just for fun in 2009.

The timing and impact of revisions

Timing is key to the inflated deficit myth: it is, after all, alleged that Greece's 'falsified' deficit figures triggered our debt crisis, hastened the involvement of the IMF in our bailout, or were used to build support for austerity policies domestically. The goalposts keep shifting, so one needs to be careful.

The first EDP notification to significantly review the 2008-9 deficits was the Oct 2009 notification, which came in two parts - the original notification of 2 October, and a follow-up notification on 21 October. Not only was this not prepared by ELSTAT (which did not exist at the time) - the first shocking set of figures was submitted ahead of PASOK winning the 2009 legislative elections. While the timing doesn't tie in well with conspiracy theories, it does tie in with the narrative of the crsis. As you can see here, our October 2009 notification, combined with Dubai's unfolding sovereign debt crisis, was the signal for foreign banks to up sticks and get out of Greek bonds. Greece had put up its hand to ask for a loo break just as investors were wondering who would be the next sovereign to go bust. This is tactically awful, of course, and had I been a PASOK minister I might have tried to stall as long as possible. But the massive deficit and international scrutiny were both already there; a budget would be drawn up in early 2010 no matter what. Greece could not put this off forever.



While foreign banks were individually heading for the exits post October 2009, in other ways the market was slow to catch on. Greece CDS premia were only beginning to diverge from the rest of the periphery in Q4 2009, and it took credit rating agencies, on average, until Q1 2010 to take Greece below investment grade (graph taken from here). Similarly, Google search trends for the Greek deficit only start to really pick up in March 2010. Throughout all of this, the revision of the 2008 deficit hardly made it into the international financial press at all; it was the dramatic revision of the 2009 deficit that was cited most.

THE GREECE VS. ICELAND COMPARISON YOU HAVEN'T HEARD ABOUT

Source is this paper from the Paris School of Economics, which is well worth reading in its own right.

Summary: Between 2007 and 2011, Greek deposits in tax havens nearly tripled. Icelandic deposits in tax havens fell to almost zero. And that's really all I need to say here.

UPDATE:  Turns out I do need to add something.

THE REAL TRAGEDY OF GREECE'S PUBLIC BROADCASTER (SUBSTANTIALLY UPDATED)

This is of course old news to Greek readers and most foreign ones too - the Greek Government has shut down ERT, the public broadcaster, in what they claim was a drive to eliminate waste. In the last week of its life, Greek public TV got about 13% of total viewership, broken up between three stations. None managed more than 7%.

As officials openly admit, the decision was motivated not simply by cost-cutting concerns but also (primarily, I would add) by the Government's inability to get an early-retirement and voluntary redundancy deal out of the ERT unions. Essentially the Government decided that it was easier to reboot the organisation and pay everyone's compensation than try to clear the obstacles to restructuring - which was in any case true, but a poor basis on which to act.

Perhaps Samaras sees this as some kind of Thatcher moment, a Mother of All Battles against entrenched interests. Whatever the financial or ideological case for binning the public broadcaster (and I am entirely sympathetic to getting rid of compulsory funding for ERT and freeing it from political interference, indeed even shutting it down for good), he is wrong on this matter. This is not his Thatcher moment. It is his one more stepping stone to the loss of all legitimacy as Prime Minister.

The decision was, by all accounts, taken with significant disregard for checks and balances, although, as it turns out, within the letter of the law. The Greek Government failed to consult Parliament prior to acting (not a legal obligation but surely an indication of good governance, as you'll see below), and has yet to appoint a professional administrator. The major coalition party, New Democracy, apparently even made a point of sneaking it in behind the backs of its junior coalition partners, who are now playing the only card they have by threatening to withdraw their support from the coalition, triggering a new election that all three coalition partners have sought to avoid. I doubt they will follow up on their threats.

NOTE: I have amended the following section significantly on 15/6/13 thanks to a very helpful note by a commentator. See below, and his blog, for details.

The decision to shut ERT down was enacted through a Joint Ministerial Decision (full text in Greek here) on 11 June, a treatment that was made possible back in 2011, when the 2005 law on the management of public enterprises was amended to allow for the closure of loss-making public enterprises. The Joint Ministerial Decision, however, was preceded through a novel legislative instrument (a Legislative Act) established a single day before the ERT intervention (full text in Greek here, although only temporarily), which grants the Government the power to effectively act as the administrator of the failed body through provisions in the original JMD shutting it down. This amendment is meant to ensure that public sector bodies can be 'rebooted', spending a little time in administrative purgatory in the care of government, as opposed to a professional administrator.

The use of a Legislative Act has caused a great deal of controversy: such instruments are explicitly reserved by our Constitution for use in "extraordinary cases of urgent and unforeseen need" because, while they still require approval from Parliament within 40 days, they do provide the Government with a licence to act on them in the meantime. Hence their use in compliance with medium term plans is a contradiction in terms, unless perhaps one argues that it is the unions' unwillingness to compromise that is so 'extraordinary and unforeseen' as to justify such measures. Even this bit of mental gymnastics is hard to defend (who could fail to foresee turkeys voting down Christmas?) and will probably not be upheld by the Council of State in the inevitable referral to come.

18/06/13 UPDATE: As expected, the Council of State ruled against the Government and struck down the 11/6 Legislative Act, although it did uphold the JMD mandating the closure of ERT.

In any case, I am told that such instruments have been used 19 times in the current crisis. Others (here) claim that the figure is much lower, i.e. 4 in the last eighteen months. Some, such as the act establishing our original bailout agreement, could justifiably be said to address unforeseen and urgent circumstances. But such proliferation (even if the latter figure is correct) is unjustified.

To clarify, the Legislative Act (as my reader correctly points out) does not authorise the closure of ERT. It does something else entirely.

You see, the Government has indicated (both in the original JMD and via a self-leaked non-paper) that it will re-establish the national broadcaster under a new identity and on a more rational basis as soon as possible. This is essentially the purpose of the Legislative Act - it allows the government to oversee the process of administration though a Joint Ministerial decision. In this case the JMD went out of its way to ensure that, while all other obligations of the now-defunct public sector body are taken on by the State, the employment contracts of all of its staff (including those seconded to other bodies) are automatically ended, and it will have to cease broadcasting.

As I mentioned earlier, the Legislative Act regulating administration could be overturned by Parliament. If this happens, the Greek Government's decision to close ERT will not be overturned. What will happen, is that the legal framework for its administration, the employment status of ERT's laid-off staff and its right to broadcast will come into question, in a pretty costly and time-consuming way. It's also to some extent a political ploy or poison pill on behalf of the Government, as those protesting the closure of ERT will now stand accused of interfering in the establishment of the new ERT, and the handover of the defunct ERT's assets.

What motivated this fairly authoritarian treatment? Well the obvious driver is the fact that Government and the unions were unlikely to ever reach an agreement, and public consultation would have prompted a new wave of protests in early summer (a volatile time) that would pile pressure on the governing coalition. However, people are also suggesting that this is a matter of:

1. bolstering the Government's reformist credentials in the aftermath of the failed sale of DEPA, our state natural gas company (said sale having failed after the Russians were unable to extract a guarantee that we would suspend European Competition rules to ensure rent-seeking potential should their bid succeed 
2. ceding valuable intellectual property (such as, I would expect, the ERT video archive) to favoured private interests in a non-transparent manner, or
3. dumping the disaffected old Party Faithful who make up some of ERT's current staff and replacing them with grateful new captive voters.

I really can't comment much on these scenarios, except to say that 1) is out of the question - even the dystopian inbreds running ND must realise that this move would create tons of bad publicity, not to mention saving much less money than the DEPA sale was intended to bring in. 2) is testable - a lot hinges on how soon an administrator will be appointed and who this will be; note that the JMD gives the administrator the right to establish contracts on behalf of the State - I'm not sure why; 3) is less testable in practice but the way in which new ERT jobs are advertised in future could give us some hints.

Would ND be willing to risk an election? Recent polls suggest that a barrage of slightly fishy-sounding good news coming out of Greece had given New Democracy some breathing room in early June, making it possible to risk a new round of elections, but I doubt any of the three coalition partners would consciously take such a risk - losing the elections would, after all, spell the end of the political careers of an entire generation of politicians, while winning would only buy them more time to (possibly) capitalise on an extremely weak recovery.

Update: A good and balanced roundup by Nick Malkoutsis of the reactions to the ERT closure can be found here. I am not too concerned with the ensuing protests because they have flattened a complex issue into a very simple one; they would be useless as a guide to future policy, as indeed most protests tend to be.

A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND

ERT (key financial figures here) was Greece's public broadcaster, and first went live in February 1966, barely a year before the junta took over, entrenching within ERT a dirigiste legacy for years to come. State broadcasters generally tend to thrive in wartime or martial-law environments. Similarly, Greek public radio was actually first set up in 1938, under the fascist regime of I. Metaxas (more history here). For a brief overview of the broadcaster's checkered record up to the 90s, see this paper. A killer fact is that in the 80s the average tenure of an ERT director was 8 months (source).

Arguably the first breath of fresh air came in 1998 when the company's first-ever medium term strategy was set in motion and its first early-retirement plan was put into place, freeing up resources for (gasp!) programming. The culprit behind this evil neoliberal scheme to make ERT into a serious broadcaster were none other than one of Satan's Big Four imps, KPMG (see here for a detailed history of their involvement). For once, their consulting really seemed to pay off - unless perhaps ERT's emancipation was a fruit ripe for the picking.

One clue as to why the state's stranglehold on ERT was loosened in this way had to do with its falling share of the voters' attention. More importantly, in the parties' minds, private television was now a much better medium for political promotion, judging from the huge leap in political advertising spend between 1990 and 1993.

The parties' reliance on TV for influence was to prove their undoing - as documented here, the change of channels resulted in a loss of grassroots rapport, creating a vicious circle where the population was becoming increasingly alienated and parties  in turn had to rely more on television to reach them. Meanwhile, trust in politicians, TV and the press went into synchronised diving mode, as the Eurobarometer figures below demonstrate (note the lines indicate % of Greeks mistrusting):

This shift probably contributed, along with shifting public spending priorities, to the change in Greek voters' attitudes towards the political process in general, as documented here. In fact, the frustrated longing for an unmediated engagement with political parties could be fuelling part of the mafia-style growth of parties such as Golden Dawn, as well as the personality cult silliness of the Independent Greeks.

Despite what ERT's early history might suggest, ERT advocates argue that a state broadcaster is necessary if the people are to have access to objective information - the kind that is crucial to informed political decisions and action. Clearly, and, assuming de facto independence is possible for a state broadcaster, their argument has some merit in Greece, if not elsewhere. I have briefly examined that claim here, and found it to be missing the point slights (it's independence, not state subsidy, that makes public broadcasters good for democracy).

That aside, it's fair to say Greek private television is for the most part not in the business of producing television programming. Rather the stations (which are unreasonably numerous, and even the largest of which are unlicenced and unprofitable) are fronts for a much less wholesome machine of political influence and are cross-subsidised from rents extracted from the State through other arms of their owners' business empires. Such rent-seeking is in turn made possible through the influence of the media on voters' perceptions, hence ensuring that the TV stations do, in fact, earn their keep.

This is partly the outcome of a botched liberalisation of TV stations back in the 80s and 90s, of which a good summary is available here and here (pg. 252 onwards). Note that I am always in favour of liberalising broadcasting, indeed all services, and even today's ERT advocates would have struggled to argue against it in principle. But in the absence of reliable institutions, liberalisation doesn't always deliver what one might have hoped for, and it is hard to distinguish a bona fide liberalisation initiative from a plan for tailored de-regulation that enshrines rent-seeking opportunities. This is, in fact, Greece's problem in a nutshell: reforms are needed to drive growth now, but are predicated on institution-building that could take a generation; and a bad reform is occasionally worse than no reform.

To summarise, my take on the ERT affair is this: Samaras has taken a huge gamble, risking self-immolation via the ballot box in order (I guess) to rebuild some of ND's lost clientelist network. Motivations aside, his crime lies not in wanting to do away with ERT, or even in using an unorthodox means for doing so (the reboot method), but in his cavalier attitude towards the Constitution and for Parliament, which feeds into a disturbing pre-existing pattern. Regardless of how cost-effective ERT's successor turns out to be, this precedent is shameful and risks discrediting any decisive future reform as an institutional coup.

ΟΤΑΝ ΤΟ ΕΣΡ ΑΝΑΚΑΛΥΨΕ ΤΟ POVERTY PORN

Δεν συνηθίζω να γράφω στα Ελληνικά, πόσο μάλλον δε επί μη τεχνικών θεμάτων. Οι παλιοί αναγνώστες θα ξέρετε ότι για να το κάνω ένας είναι ο πιθανότερος λόγος - οι Τρομακτικάριοι έχουν ξεμυτίσει πάλι από τα γεφύρια τους.

Τους δελέασε καθώς φαίνεται μια πρόσφατη υπόδειξη εκ μέρους του Εθνικού Συμβουλίου Ραδιοτηλεόρασης (ΕΣΡ), η οποία λέγεται ότι απαγορεύει στα κανάλια να προβάλλουν εικόνες από 'φτωχούς και άστεγους'.

Τα περισσότερα σχόλια που πρόλαβα να δω (δείτε πχ. εδώ, εδώ,  εδώ αλλά και μια άλλη epic fail οπτική εδώ) υποθέτουν ότι η υπόδειξη υποκινήθηκε από πολιτικές σκοπιμότητες - συγκεκριμένα την ανάγκη της κυβέρνησης να κρύψει από τον κόσμο το μεγάλο πλήθος των εξαθλιωμένων συνανθρώπων του στις μεγάλες πόλεις (δείτε π.χ. εδώ). Απώτερος σκοπός, φαντάζομαι, υποτίθεται ότι είναι η συγκράτηση της δίκαιης λαϊκής οργής.

Ας δούμε τώρα τα στοιχεία, τα οποία παραδόξως αναπαρήγαγαν σχεδόν όλα τα τρομακτικάρια blog χωρίς να αντιληφθούν τις αντιφάσεις τους.

Το ΕΣΡ έχει ιστοσελίδα και στην ιστοσελίδα του αναγράφονται όλες οι υποδείξεις του προς τα ΜΜΕ. Συγκεκριμένα μας ενδιαφέρει μία μόνο από αυτές, η υπόδειξη της 22ης Ιανουαρίου 2013 με τίτλο

Μη προβολή εικόνας α) προσώπων ευρισκομένων σε κατάσταση κοινωνικής εξαθλίωσης ή ενδείας άνευ ρητής ή σιωπηράς συναινέσεώς αυτών,και β) προσώπων οδηγουμένων ενώπιον των δικαστικών ή εισαγγελικών ή αστυνομικών και λοιπών αρχών άνευ ρητής ή σιωπηράς συναινέσεώς αυτών

την οποία μπορείτε να διαβάσετε και να κατεβάσετε παρακάτω:

Υπόδειξη ΕΣΡ 12-01-13

Τι λέει η υπόδειξη;

"[Τ]ο Εθνικό Συμβούλιο Ραδιοτηλεόρασης [...] [υ]ποδεικνύει προς όλους τους τηλεοπτικούς και σταθμούς [sic] της χώρας όπως [μ]η προβάλουν [sic] την εικόνα α) προσώπων ευρισκομένων σε κατάσταση κοινωνικής εξαθλίωσης ή ενδείας άνευ ρητής ή σιωπηράς συναινέσεώς [sic] αυτών, και β) προσώπων οδηγουμένων ενώπιον των δικαστικών ή εισαγγελικών ή αστυνομικών και λοιπώναρχών άνευ ρητής ή σιωπηράς συναινέσεώς αυτών."

Μεταφράζω τα επίμαχα σημεία από την άτσαλη και περιττή καθαρεύουσα, η οποία όπως μαρτυρά ο τονισμός του 'άνευ συνενέσεώς αυτών' πειράχτηκε για να γίνει ακόμη πιο αρχαιοπρεπής.

Δεν μπορείτε να προβάλλετε κόσμο σε κατάσταση εξαθλίωσης αν δεν σας το έχουν επιτρέψει οι ίδιοι είτε ρητά ('ναι να τραβήξεις, δεν έχω πρόβλημα') είτε σιωπηρά (σας βλέπουν να τραβάτε, γνωρίζουν ότι γνωρίζετε ότι σας βλέπουν και εντούτοις δεν σας δίνουν καμμία ένδειξη ότι ενοχλούνται). Η διάκριση αυτή είναι σημαντική και γι' αυτό την τονίζω παραπάνω - δεν είναι τονισμένη στο πρωτότυπο.

Τι λοιπόν θα πρέπει να κάνει ένας καλόκαρδος ρεπόρτερ για να παραβεί αυτή την οδηγία που χαρακτηρίζεται ως

Χούντα του ΕΣΡ (εδώ)

παραβίαση του Συντάγματος [...] ωμή και χειρότερη καταστολή από τις στρατιωτικές δικτατορίες (εδώ)

ΥΠΟΠΤΗ ΑΠΟΦΑΣΗ ΤΩΝ ΜΑΝΔΑΡΙΝΩΝ ΚΡΑΤΙΚΟΔΙΑΙΤΩΝ ΔΟΤΩΝ ΤΟΥ ΕΣΡ [...] διαποτισμένη με άρωμα απριλιανής λογοκριτικής διάθεσης (εδώ);

Ένα από τα εξής τρία:

1. Βρίσκεις έναν άστεγο, ή οποιονδήποτε άλλο συνάνθρωπό μας που φανερά ζει υπό συνθήκες εξευτελιστικής φτώχειας. Αρχίζεις να βιντεοσκοπείς. Ο δυστυχής σου ζητά ρητά να σταματήσεις να βιντεοσκοπείς ή φαίνεται φανερά ενοχλημένος από το γεγονός ότι τον βιντεοσκοπείς ή τον τρόπο με τον οποίο τον βιντεοσκοπείς. Εσύ συνεχίζεις. 

2. Βρίσκεις έναν άστεγο, ή οποιονδήποτε άλλο συνάνθρωπό μας που φανερά ζει υπό συνθήκες εξευτελιστικής φτώχειας. Ο δυστυχής δεν αντιλαμβάνεται ότι τον βιντεοσκοπείς. Ξέρεις ότι υπάρχει περίπτωση να μην εγκρίνει τις εικόνες που καταγράφεις και τον τρόπος με τον οποίο σκοπεύεις να τις παρουσιάσεις. Εντούτοις δεν μπαίνεις στη διαδικασία να τον ρωτήσεις αν τον πειράζει, ούτε να αποκρύψεις την ταυτότητά του στο τελικό σου προϊόν. 

3. Μπαίνεις στον υπολογιστή της δουλειάς και κατεβάζεις πλάνα αρχείου από άστεγους και εξαθλιωμένους στο Κέντρο τα οποία τραβήχτηκαν χωρίς τη συγκατάθεσή τους. Τις παρουσιάζεις χωρίς να αποκρύψεις την ταυτότητά τους. Έξω έχει κρύο και πού να τρέχεις. 

Αυτές οι τρεις παρατυπίες δεν είναι μέρος της καλώς νοούμενης δημοσιογραφικής πρακτικής για να σκίζουν τα καλσόν τους οι τρομακτικάριοι (οίτινες βέβαια δεν έχουν γενικά καλές σχέσεις με τη δημοσιογραφική δεοντολογία). Το 1 είναι παλιανθρωπιά. Το 3 δεν είναι ρεπορτάζ, για να πει κανείς ότι υπόκειται σε λογοκρισία - δεν παράγει νέο υλικό, ούτε περιέχει κάποια χρήσιμη πληροφορία πέρα από το 'ορίστε πώς είναι ένας άστεγος.' 

Το πιο ενδιαφέρον όμως είναι το 2, αυτό που ορισμένοι Αγγλοσάξονες ονομάζουν 'poverty porn' - 'πορνογραφία της φτώχειας'  είναι η προφανής μετάφραση, αλλά μεταξύ μας ακόμη καλύτερη θεωρώ τη μετάφραση 'εκπόρνευση της φτώχειας.'  Μεταφράζοντας από το κείμενο στο οποίο παρέπεμψα μόλις παραπάνω:

"[Στην εκπόρνευση της φτώχειας συντελεί] κάθε είδος μέσου, γραπτού, φωτογραφικού ή κινηματογραφικού, που εκμεταλλεύεται την κατάσταση στην οποία βρίσκονται οι φτωχοί για να εξασφαλίσει την συμπόνοια που απαιτείται ώστε να πουληθούν εφημερίδες, να αυξηθούν οι φιλανθρωπικές δωρεές, ή να αυξηθεί η υποστήριξη του κόσμου για έναν κοινό αγώνα. [...] Τα αντικείμενά της είναι στη μεγάλη πλειοψηφία τους παιδιά,  με το υλικό να χαρακτηρίζεται από εικόνες ή περιγραφές ανθρώπων που υποφέρουν, πάσχουν από υποσιτισμό ή είναι καθ' οιονδήποτε άλλο τρόπο ανήμποροι. Το στερεότυπο της εκπόρνευσης της φτώχειας είναι το παιδάκι από την Αφρική με την πρησμένη κοιλιά, που κοιτά με άδειο βλέμμα προς την κάμερα, προσμένωντας τη σωτηρία."

Όπως σημειώνει ο συγγραφέας, αυτό που πραγματικά διακρίνει την εκπόρνευση της φτώχειας από την ενημέρωση για τον πόνο του συνανθρώπου είναι η αποσιώπηση της προσωπικότητας αυτού που υποφέρει και η παρουσίασή του ως απόλυτα εξαρτημένου από τη γενναιοδωρία κάποιου τρίτου, τον οποίον πρέπει να βοηθήσει ή να επηρεάσει ο θεατής. 

Τι απαγόρευσε τελικά το ΕΣΡ; Το να εκμεταλλεύεσαι ένα βασανισμένο άνθρωπο για να πουλήσεις διαφημίσεις ή επαναστατηλίκι, χωρίς να του δίνεις λογαρισμό, ή οποιονδήποτε έλεγχο πάνω στο τελικό προϊόν. Το να λες, σαν κράχτης κάποιου Βικτωριανού freak show, 'και τώρα, κυρίες και κύριοι, ένας άστεγος! Δείτε πόσο εξαθλιωμένος είναι!', όντως απαγορεύτηκε. 

Από την άλλη, το να απεικονίζεις και να σχολιάζεις την έκταση της φτώχειας σε μια συνοικία συνεχίζει να επιτρέπεται. Το να μεταφέρεις τις προσωπικές μαρτυρίες των εξαθλιωμένων συνεχίζει να επιτρέπεται. Το να κριτικάρεις την κυβερνητική πολιτική ως υπαίτιο των δεινών τους συνεχίζει να επιτρέπεται. 

Η 'εντολή της κυβέρνησης' την οποία επικαλούνται οι επαναστάτες-πουαρώ-κρεμλινολόγοι των πορτοκαλί blog είναι το υπό αριθμό πρωτοκόλλου 157/10.01.2013 έγγραφο της Γενικής Γραμματείας Ισότητας των Φύλων που υπάγεται στο Υπουργείο Εσωτερικών. Εκεί, υποθέτω, γίνεται έκκληση για την προστασία όσων βρίσκονται σε κατάσταση εξαθλίωσης από τυχόν ανεπιθύμητη δημοσιότητα. Ομολογώ ότι δεν κατανοώ γιατί η ένσταση προήλθε από ένα κρατικό όργανο που σκοπό του έχει την προώθηση της ισότητας μεταξύ των φύλων. Εδώ και η ΓΓ Ισότητας μας τα χαλάει και το ΕΣΡ - αν είχαν αναρτήσει κάπου το κείμενο της επιστολής ή την είχαν επισυνάψει στην υπόδειξη θα είχαμε κάποια επιπλέον πληροφορία.

Να ξεκαθαρίσω ότι δεν είμαι σε καμμία περίπτωση πεπεισμένος για την πραγματική ανεξαρτησία ή αντικειμενικότητα του ΕΣΡ, το οποίο, όντως έχει αμαρτίες στο ιστορικό του. Από την άλλη καλό είναι όταν από τη μια αμφισβητούμε τους θεσμούς και από την άλλη μιλάμε για χούντα, να ξέρουμε για τι μιλάμε. Ειδάλλως είμαστε απλά τρολ.

Η όλη υπόθεση είναι, στην τελική, αστεία: άνθρωποι που δεν ενδιαφέρονται για την πραγματική είδηση και δεν έχουν διαβάσει ούτε την υπόδειξη του ΕΣΡ αλλά ούτε καν το πρωτότυπο κείμενο που αντέγραψαν, λένε ό,τι τους κατέβει γιατί ξέρουν ότι κανείς δεν πρόκειται να ελέγξει τα λεγόμενά τους - όλοι συμφωνούν ότι η απαγόρευση ακούγεται σαν κάτι που κάλλιστα θα μπορούσε να είχε κάνει η κακή κυβέρνηση και όλα τα υπόλοιπα τους είναι αδιάφορα. Η όλη λογική μου θυμίζει λίγο αυτό.

Εντούτοις, αξίζει να δούμε σε πόσα επίπεδα κάνουν λάθος οι Τρομακτικάριοι: γιατί αυτή η συζήτηση αποκαλύπτει εν μέρει και τι σόι μυαλά κουβαλάνε ορισμένοι και εκ δεξιών και εξ αριστερών. Ας πούμε λοιπόν ότι η είδηση ισχύει όπως μεταδόθηκε: απαγορεύτηκαν οι εικόνες από φτωχούς και άστεγους.

Βασική υπόθεση σε ολόκληρη αυτή τη φιλολογία είναι ότι η κυβέρνηση έβαλε το ΕΣΡ να απαγορεύσει τις απεικονίσεις της φτώχειας για να αποκρύψει την έκτασή της. Εντούτοις, τρία χρόνια μετά το μνημόνιο ίσως να είναι κάπως αργά για να το επιτύχει αυτό. Η μεγάλη αύξηση της φτώχειας έχει ήδη συντελεστεί και ο κόσμος το γνωρίζει από τις καθημερινές μετακινήσεις του, από ιστορίες που ακούει, από blogs, ακόμη κι από επίσημα στοιχεία. Κι όμως, με διορθώνει ο συνομιλητής: υπάρχουν παππούδες και γιαγιάδες που δεν κατεβαίνουν Κέντρο και μαθαίνουν γι αυτά τα πράγματα μόνο από τα ελεγχόμενα κανάλια. Αυτούς θέλουν να επηρεάσουν.

Αλήθεια; Γιατί; Αυτοί οι γηραλέοι τηλεθεατές - ψάρια είναι που φοβούνται οι κυβερνώντες ότι θα μπουκάρουν στη Βουλή και θα συντρίψουν τον καπιταλισμό; Τι ακριβώς προσπαθούν να αποφύγουν; Ίσως το θέμα είναι ψηφοθηρικό. Έλα όμως που εκλογές για άλλα τριάμιση χρόνια δεν θα έχουμε, κι ως τότε πραγματικά παίζει να έχει σταθεροποιηθεί η κατάσταση. Γιατί μια τόσο ωμή (δήθεν) επέμβαση όταν δεν υπάρχει ανάγκη; Απλά δεν υπάρχει λόγος.

Το άλλο που άκουσα και εκ δεξιών και εξ αριστερών είναι: 'Ντάξει κανείς δεν θέλει να τον τραβάνε ενώ τρώει από τα σκουπίδια ή κοιμάται στο δρόμο, αλλά αυτό είναι ρε συ το πρόβλημα των άστεγων; Μην τυχόν τους τραβήξει η κάμερα χωρίς την άδειά τους λες κι είναι ο Justin Bieber; Δεν είναι η ίδια η εξαθλίωση το πρόβλημα, και καθήκον μας να την προβάλλουμε;'

Το μόνο που μπορώ να πω είναι ότι μπορεί π.χ. ο εξαρτημένος συμπολίτης μας να έχει μεγαλύτερες έγνοιες από το αν θα τον πάρουν από το καλό του προφίλ ενώ βαράει ένεση στο πέος του, αλλά την αξιολόγηση αυτή πρέπει να την κάνει ο ίδιος κι όχι κάποιος άλλος. Ειδάλλως καταλήγουμε σε αυτό.