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I will try to keep it very simple because I am interested in everyone understanding it, regardless of specialty, profession, educational level, etc.

THE MAIN CAUSES THAT LEFT US INTO BANKRUPTCY AND THE MEMORANDUMS ARE THE FOLLOWING

1. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE VALUE SYSTEM AND OUR DISCONNECTION FROM ANCIENT GREEK CULTURE.
The most important generative cause is the collapse of values. Values ​​such as homeland, religion, family, honor, bravery, etc. have collapsed and become devalued.
Also our disconnection from and ignorance of ancient Greek civilization.
But all this, the value system, the traditions, the taboos, the history, the ancient Greek civilization, etc. are invaluable knowledge and experiences of thousands of years and constitute the manual or more correctly the handbook of life. We have come to have manuals or handbooks for a pressure cooker, a mobile phone, etc. and we have thrown the manual of life in the trash. I inform you that it is not at all smart on our part.
I quote below what Kissinger is attributed to have said years ago. Regardless of whether he really said it because he himself denied it, but denying statements is a standard practice of politicians. The following has been happening in recent decades, that is, our language, our religion and our spiritual and historical reserves are being harmed.

You must understand that the war continues and is being waged, it is simply being waged in other fields such as the noosphere, the economy, population change, history, culture, etc. The new spheres are words, dollars (euros) …….etc. You are unprotected in the field of the noosphere because of television and the internet. Any ideas, opinions, false news that are very difficult to control can easily reach you. In the name of the free movement of ideas, there are no filters or protective walls in the field of the noosphere. The goal is to capture your mind. Insiders operate on the internet who are paid 0,60 euros per comment by parties, governments, secret services, criminal organizations, etc. Anyone can enter your home through television or the internet. You must also understand that there is also this pollution, the pollution of the psycho-ethical-pneumatic environment, which is much worse and kills you psycho-ethically and psychologically. And do not forget our great poet, the Nobel Prize winner Odysseas Elytis, who said << Dressed friends came, Countless times our enemies!!!>>
And something about language, I hope to write an article about its value. Language is the most important tool for a person's spiritual growth, every word you know its real meaning, and not saying 10 words and meaning the same thing,
It is a stepping stone to spiritual ascent. The more words you know, the further you will go spiritually.
For this reason, it must be the basic lesson and be protected as the apple of the eye and not destroyed.

Milan Kundera, a Czech writer whom I have mentioned in my previous articles about "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," said the following about the extermination of a nation.

You see the above happening in Skopje. Within 50 years, they created a pseudo-nation, this one of Macedonia.
I was a student when, in a conversation at home, listening to my sisters about the changes being made to history books, I said that we should preserve the old history books.

Our great poet, Nobel laureate and diplomat Giorgos Seferis said.

They kill us in small doses
Very regularly
Very quietly
Very wisely
G. Seferis

2. THE LACK OF VISION FROM POLITICAL LEADERSHIP.
Those of us who follow the country's progress had already noticed this, but confirmation came during the last visit to Greece of former US President Bill Clinton, who, when asked by reporters, said, "He found that there is no vision."

3. LACK OF STRATEGIC PLANNING.
Those of us who know the power factors of a nation know that they include strategic mindset and strategic planning, which are recorded as two separate power factors that act multiplicatively in the power equation of a nation.
Of course, a prerequisite for the existence of strategic planning is the existence of a strategic mindset. In my life, I was lucky enough to experience some situations and therefore I was present and no one else told me about them. One day I was at the house of an executive of the government's leadership team (several years ago, I don't want to mention the exact year in order to stay out of party disputes) with whom I knew before he took up this position. We were sitting and chatting over coffee and he had just returned from a trip with the leadership team of the then government to a foreign country. So I asked him, Kostas (the name is random) is there any plan and his answer was << no Evdokime, we exist by chance!!>> he told me, shaking his head.
However, we also have the confirmation of the American ambassador, who in his statements stated that "there is no strategic planning in our country."

4. EXCESSIVE INTENSITY ON THE POLITICAL SCENE.
We all experience the tension that exists in the political scene every day. We constantly see our politicians arguing and insulting each other on television. Personally, I can't stand hearing them constantly arguing. But here too there is the confirmation of an English diplomat who said <<that with such tension in the political scene the country cannot be governed>>. This happened if I remember correctly around 1840. Which tension makes any cooperation between political parties impossible and of course spreads to the people whom it divides and thus we arrive at <<the civil war of political parties>> that Aristotle said.
In other words, parties divide society and destroy its cohesion.
I remind you that the word "community" comes from the verb "kopto". In other words, parties cut society into pieces, that is, they divide it.
Of course, those of you who are older remember that in the villages, people were divided into two cafes depending on the party they voted for.

5. THE 400 YEARS OF OTTOMAN OCCUPATION
The 400 years of Ottoman occupation without our own state, where the state was identified with the conqueror, created a wrong attitude of the Greeks towards our now own state and consequently a wrong mentality. For example, illegality, tax evasion and the bribery of officials were necessary elements of survival during Turkish rule. My father told me that my grandfather, in order not to be sent by the Turks to forced labor camps in the depths of Turkey with poor living conditions, where most of them died, was forced to bribe Turkish officials each time with an amount that a Turkish family lived luxuriously for a year. Even today, the Greeks have not realized that this state is ours, it is the state of the Greeks. The behavior of public servants towards citizens is similar. In other words, the way the state treats the citizen is reminiscent of the behavior of the Ottoman conquerors towards the enslaved Greeks. This reason is also confirmed by a German director of the Greek-German Chamber of Commerce who said that <<the Germans do not know what the relationship of Greek citizens with their state is>>.

THE RESULT OF THE CAUSES IS THE BELOW.

1. THE LACK OF A NATIONAL PLAN.
The above reasons did not and still do not allow the political parties to cooperate and draw up a national plan, that is, a plan for all Greeks so that there is continuity in its implementation, that is, if another party becomes government, it can continue implementing the same plan with minor deviations. In other words, to know which sectors we will rely on for the development of the economy, which educational system we will have, which foreign policy, etc. Thus, depending on which party came to power, the plans and the course of the country changed. In simple words, it is like wanting to build an apartment building for all Greeks and a party that was in government at that time started to do the studies and plans, get the required permits, open foundations, pour concrete, etc. and after 4 years, another party became government and the new prime minister would say what stupid things the previous one did and those in charge would ask him what we are going to do and he would answer, tear it down, we will build another one. Of course, we the people paid for the previous studies, plans, permits, betas, etc. through taxes. Then the government changed again and we had the same thing again, with the result that we had to pay and could never have an apartment building for the Greek people. As the people say, the parties alternating in power sewed it up and tore it down.
Without a national plan accepted by all parties so that there is continuity, that is, if one starts and the other continues, the country is not going and will not go anywhere. The national plan is the basic prerequisite for the successful course of our homeland, which requires vision, strategic planning and cooperation of political parties for the good of the citizens and the country.
Unfortunately, our political leaderships pretend not to understand what a national plan means and each party has its own national (party) plan. In reality, however, they do not even have a party plan because depending on who is the minister, the policy of each ministry changes.

2. THE WRONG ECONOMIC GROWTH MODEL

We all wanted to work in an office, we considered manual labor as something bad and demeaning. The consequence of this was that our parents would tell us to get a piece of paper, a high school diploma, a degree from a technical institute, university, vocational school, etc., after all, a piece of paper and Uncle Kostas knows a certain member of parliament and we will go to find you somewhere. The somewhere was the broader public sector. This was the first option. The second option was to open a store for the child. But the public sector does not produce anything, and the store also does not produce anything because it is a point of sale for products. But who will produce the products that each store wants to put on its shelves? If we ask for them from abroad, we must give them Greek products of equal value, as I explained in my previous articles.
It's like building a factory that consists of offices and the manufacturing plant where production will take place, and we all go to the offices, i.e. sales and administration, and no one goes to the manufacturing plant, so there will be no production and we who went to the offices and sales will have no products to sell.
This was and is quite simply the economic development model of Greece in recent decades.
All parents told their children, "Get a degree, my child, and find a job." But who will create the jobs? No parent told their child, "Get a degree," but to create a productive business and jobs and give work to other citizens.
The consequence of this was the wrong distribution of the active population, that is, those who can work. The vast majority went into the public sector as civil servants and into sales as shopkeepers. This is how we ended up having about a million civil servants with the municipalities and the DEKOs and seven times the number of shops than we needed.
I'm not blaming anyone, I'm just describing what we did and what we're doing to this day to understand our mistakes and correct them.
The responsibility, of course, lies with the political leaderships, who should have explained and properly educated the citizens in order to lead them in the right direction.

3. THE DEMONIZATION OF BUSINESSES AND BUSINESSMEN

As if all this were not enough, we also had the demonization of businesses, i.e. that businesses and entrepreneurs are something very bad. Therefore, when young children aged 14 to 19 heard that entrepreneurs are bad people, it was natural that they would not want to become entrepreneurs and bad people. What would happen then? They would become civil servants. But if we all go to the public sector and send each other a paper, what will we eat at the end of the year? The certificates? In other countries, there is an entrepreneurship course that is taught from primary school, that is, how someone will start a business and become an entrepreneur. In France, since the 1970s, they have had a show on television and put the best entrepreneur on to teach how to start a business and attract young people to start businesses. Here, the TV shows are only about how our young men and women will become singers and models.

4. THE ABANDONMENT OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION AND LIVESTOCK FARMING

Since physical labor was considered something bad and demeaning as I already mentioned and everyone wanted to work in offices and taking into account the difficulties of agricultural production in those years in combination with the wrong agricultural policy in the wrong crops but also the mentality that all farmers should acquire their own agricultural machinery regardless of the size of their flock led farmers to over-indebtedness and urbanism. Thus our young people abandoned the fields and agricultural production as well as livestock farming.

5. THE DISCUSSION ABOUT THE ECONOMY WAS AND IS BEING HELD ON A FALSE BASIS.

Since the economy overtook politics as citizens became more interested in financial gains and less in other issues, the competition between parties to win elections was focused on economic benefits, that is, which party would provide the greatest economic benefits regardless of whether the state of the economy allowed it. But citizens do not have the necessary knowledge to know whether the state of the economy allows these benefits. In very simple words, they said we are the good ones and if you vote for us and we become the government we will give you raises and all these nice things they promise while the others are bad and if you vote for them and they become the government they will not give you anything to eat.
Because if it were that easy, we would elect the party that promises the greatest benefits and we would solve the problem.
However, this is not the case, as the citizens have discovered after so many election promises made by the parties, which when they formed a government did the opposite. In other words, they mocked and deceived the citizens, relying on their ignorance.
Because in order for citizens to truly participate and understand what politicians are telling them in order to judge them correctly, they must be given a minimum level of knowledge that you are not giving them.
In other advanced countries, the differences between parties in financial benefits cannot be greater than half a percent because otherwise they are asked where they will find the money to make larger benefits, e.g. 3% or 5%.
Because if I come to your family, for example, which has an income of 2000 euros per month and tell you, give me the fund and I will buy you all Mercedes, send you on vacation to the Bahamas, etc., you will immediately understand that I am making fun of you and ask me how I will achieve this since your monthly income is only 2000 euros and you have to pay specific obligations every month. You will understand because you know the numbers while you do not know the numbers when we talk about our homeland, in other words you do not know how much the state's income is, how much its expenses are, how much its debt is, etc.

6. THE LACK OF DEMOCRACY

Unfortunately, only the name remained from the democratic regime and as Rousseau said, democracy we only have one day when we vote. The words “elections” and “democracy” have become synonymous. In other words, democracy only means elections. Therefore, we have a lack of citizen participation in what is happening because in the 4 years between elections, citizens have no participation in what is happening, they are simple spectators without being able to do anything.

7. THE LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY AND VALID INFORMATION FOR CITIZENS.
There is no accountability and valid information for citizens. So one day we suddenly learned that we are in debt while governments, before sending us tax returns, should have sent us a report of the previous year in 3-4 pages written simply without codes and terms like we all do in our businesses and in our families and our prime minister should have made the report of the year in a way that is understandable to all citizens. This way we would have known that every year the state spent more than its income and in order to be able to make its payments it borrowed on our behalf. We would also have known what debt we have and we could have asked if we had a real contribution because the expenses are more and asked for this decline to stop, etc. But none of this was done.

8. POLYNOMY AND THE LACK OF INDEPENDENT JUSTICE

There are so many laws with so many loopholes to serve party cronies that a chaotic situation is created, and adjudicating cases takes many years and costs so much that it makes it impossible to administer justice.
Not to mention that a simple citizen, even if he has the right, cannot confront the state or a bank in court due to the cost, time, and effort required.
Added to this is the lack of an independent judiciary because parliamentarians exercise two powers instead of one: legislative and executive, and they also control the judiciary, with ministers appointing the highest judges.

9. MISTAKES AND CORRUPTION

What should I say first about these issues?
You all know and understand what was happening and what is happening.
THE MISTAKE
They appointed party friends as presidents of large organizations, state-owned companies, prefectures, hospitals, etc., regardless of whether they had the necessary qualifications or not.
Would you make someone your friend's pilot? Of course not, because you're afraid of getting killed.
Unfortunately, when you appoint someone who does not have the necessary qualifications as president of a state-owned company, you endanger the lives of thousands of citizens who work in this state-owned company. Because if this company fails and goes bankrupt, thousands of our fellow citizens and their families will be left without work and without the necessities to live.
This is how we got the OLYMPIC AIRLINES of the 5 continents to go bankrupt with a debt of 550 billion drachmas, the same as the cost of the new ELEFTHERIOS VENIZELOS airport. In other words, if the Olympic had not had losses for a number of years, we could have built the new ELEFTHERIOS VENIZELOS airport without loans and subsidies from the European Union and had it be ours.
CORRUPTION
I have personally experienced situations and no one else told me about them.
Mitsubishi has 10 sectors in which it is active in business, one of which is the chemical sector and a part of this is the glass sector in which it was the most important player with billions of dollars in investments in Europe, the USA and Asia. (I had worked for 12 years for the glass production factories in the USA). At one point, Mitsubishi wanted to build a glass production factory with the new technology in Greece and specifically in Kavala. It had submitted an application to the ministry for the investment of approximately 130 million euros and was waiting for the answer to start. At that time, I was president of the Greek Federation of Glass Merchants and Craftsmen and they called me from the ministry to ask me various questions and the opinion of the federation. Of course my answer was that Mitsubishi knows what it is doing having more than 30 glass production plants around the world and they don't need to worry. In the end the factory was not built in Greece and Mitsubishi tried to build it in Bulgaria. A Bulgarian former diplomat associate whom the Mitsubishi executive used in Bulgaria for his contacts there told me that the factory was not built in Greece because the responsible minister asked for a bribe as the Mitsubishi executive confided in him.
Ultimately, the factory was built in Bulgaria in the city of Targovishte, where the Muslim element dominates, by Turkey because the mayor is Muslim and notified the Turkish government of Mitsubishi's interest, which moved faster than Mitsubishi. I have been to this city several times and they told me that only Muslims work in the factory, but that is another topic, maybe in another related article I will tell you how Turkey is moving.

10.THE VERY POOR OPERATIONAL SYSTEM OF THE COUNTRY.

I called the country's operating system the way the state machine and the country's infrastructure operate.
The operating system of our country is bureaucratic, inefficient, unreliable with constant changes of laws that create a chaotic polytheism and make the administration of justice time-consuming and costly. If we add the lack of meritocracy and corruption (fast signal) we understand why this operating system blocks, stops and ostracizes every productive effort by driving away investors.

11.THE TURKEY PROBLEM

Having Turkey as our neighbor has created the most serious problems. Since Turkey does not recognize international law and the current borders, it forces us to maintain an army and invest huge amounts for decades in armament programs that have reached 5% of GDP instead of the 2% that we are obligated to by NATO. Today, after the economic crisis, we invest only 2%, that is, approximately 3,6 billion euros. If we invest 5% or more, which we must due to the problems we have with neighboring countries, the amount would reach approximately 9 billion euros, or 5,4 billion more than what we spend today.

In addition to the huge amounts that we are obliged to pay for armaments programs, we were and are losing another 5% of GDP, at least 9 billion or so every year, because due to the problems with Turkey, we did not drill to produce oil and gas.

If you ask my opinion, if there were no problem with Turkey and we were not losing these huge sums of money the way our country's political system operated and operates, I fear that we would be in a similar economic situation again.

12. THE TWIN DEFICIT AND THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF OUR POLICIES

All of the above causes we mentioned created the famous twin deficit of our homeland.

First of all, we say that there is a deficit when expenses are more than revenues.

We have a twin deficit when we have a deficit in two accounts, the public sector (government) and the current account.
The first deficit means that the public sector (government) was spending more than it was earning. Since it was spending more to be able to pay its obligations, it was borrowing what it lacked, mainly through the issuance of bonds.
The second deficit means that we exported fewer products and services abroad and imported more. How did we import more products since we did not have to export the same value of products and services, of course with borrowed funds?
Those who govern our country or a state should make sure they have a surplus and not a deficit, or at least bring them SAME boat, SAME sails.
Unfortunately, those who ruled our country for decades ignored this simple but fundamental principle that applies to all of us and our families and created deficits to cover those who borrowed with such unbearable lightness that if the Czech writer Milan Kundera had known, he would have written his book <<The Unbearable Lightness of Being>> differently.
But we, the citizens, must realize that when our governments borrow, they borrow for us, the citizens, for us, the people, and that we will repay these loans through the taxes we pay, i.e. that the bill will eventually come to us and not to those in power.

Therefore, if a country has a deficit in these two accounts, it is forced to resort to borrowing in order to pay its obligations, and if this happens for many years, then it risks being led to bankruptcy.
This is what makes these two accounts very important.

The twin deficits created the Greek state's €380 billion debt. We must understand that the debt that led us to bankruptcy and the current miserable economic situation is the public sector debt that Greek governments created through mismanagement and corruption.

And so we arrived at the bankruptcy of the Greek government with a debt of approximately 380 billion euros. Because the borrowing was mainly done by issuing bonds and the main buyers were the Greek banks, which with the debt haircut also lost huge amounts of approximately 38 billion euros and in reality went bankrupt, being saved by the recapitalizations that followed.
In addition to the banks, the insurance funds also suffered losses because they held Greek government bonds worth 24 billion euros, the value of which after the 54% haircut decreased to 11 billion euros. Consequently, the insurance funds lost 13 billion euros, which was covered by the Greek government.