It’s been a busy day at the market in downtown Volos. Angeliki Ioanitou has sold a decent quantity of olive oil and soap, while her friend Maria has done good business with her fresh pies.
But not a single euro has changed hands – none of the customers on this drizzly Saturday morning has bothered carrying money at all. For many, browsing through the racks of second-hand clothes, electrical appliances and homemade jams, the need to survive means money has been usurped.
“It’s all about exchange and solidarity, helping one another out in these very hard times,” enthused Ioanitou, her hair tucked under a floppy felt cap. “You could say a lot of us have dreams of a utopia without the euro.”
In this bustling port city at the foot of Mount Pelion, in the heart of Greece‘s most fertile plain, locals have come up with a novel way of dealing with austerity – adopting their own alternative currency, known as the Tem. As the country struggles with its worst crisis in modern times, with Greeks losing up to 40% of their disposable income as a result of policies imposed in exchange for international aid, the system has been a huge success. Organisers say some 1,300 people have signed up to the informal bartering network.
For users such as Ioanitou, the currency – a form of community banking monitored exclusively online – is not only an effective antidote to wage cuts and soaring taxes but the “best kind of shopping therapy”. “One Tem is the equivalent of one euro. My oil and soap came to 70 Tem and with that I bought oranges, pies, napkins, cleaning products and Christmas decorations,” said the mother-of-five. “I’ve got 30 Tem left over. For women, who are worst affected by unemployment, and don’t have kafeneia [coffeehouses] to go to like men, it’s like belonging to a hugely supportive association.”
Greece’s deepening economic crisis has brought new users. With ever more families plunging into poverty and despair, shops, cafes, factories and businesses have also resorted to the system under which goods and services – everything from yoga sessions to healthcare, babysitting to computer support – are traded in lieu of credits.
“For many it plays a double role of supplementing lost income and creating a protective web at this particularly difficult moment in their lives,” says Yiannis Grigoriou, a UK-educated sociologist among the network’s founders. “The older generation in this country can still remember when bartering was commonplace. In villages you’d exchange milk and goat’s cheese for meat and flour.”
Other grassroots initiatives have appeared across Greece. Increasingly bereft of social support, or a welfare state able to meet the needs of a growing number of destitute and hungry, locals have set up similar trading networks in the suburbs of Athens, the island of Corfu, the town of Patras and northern Katerini.
But Volos, the first to be established, is by far the biggest. Until recently the city, 200 miles north of Athens, was a thriving industrial hub with a port whose ferries not only connected the mainland to nearby islands but before Syria’s descent into civil war was a trading route between Greece and the Middle East. Once famous for its tobacco, Volos was home to flour mills and cement factories, steel and metal works.
But, today, it is joblessness that it has come to be known for in a country whose unemployment rate recently hit a European record of 26%, surpassing even that of Spain.
“Frankly the Tem has been a life-saver,” said Christina Koutsieri, clutching DVDs and a bag of food as she emerged from the marketplace. “In March I had to close the grocery store I had kept going for 27 years because I just couldn’t afford all the new taxes and bills. Everyone I know has lost their jobs. It’s tragic.”
Last year, the Greek government stepped in with a law that supported finding creative ways to cope with the crisis. For the first time, alternative forms of entrepreneurship and local development were actively encouraged.
Although locals insist the Tem, which is also available in voucher form, will never replace banknotes – and has not been dreamed up to dodge taxes – they say it is a viable alternative.
For local officials such as Panos Skotiniotis, the mayor of Volos, the alternative currency has proved to be an excellent way of supplementing the euro. “We are all for supporting alternatives that help alleviate the crisis’s economic and social consequences,” he said. “It won’t ever replace the euro but it is really helping weaker members of our society. In all the social and cultural activities of the municipality, we are encouraging the Tem to be used.”
Arthur on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 1:33 am
The government hates barter as it is nearly impossible to tax these incomes, as government interference – cash – is excluded from the economic transactions.
Something similar happened btw in Russia after the 1991 crash. The result was that the state receded from the 100% drain on society it had been under communism, down to ca. 10% now, as Gerard Depardieu can confirm, who became a Russian citizen, after he fled a potential tax rate of 75% in his native semi-communist France. Brigitte Bardot already threatened to follow the example of Depardieu and Putin is smiling because of all these PR coups.
After the crash of the Bretton Woods IMS, expect society to be build from the ground up and Greece shows how it is done.
Ham on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 2:36 am
Yes, I agree Arthur. Second-hand clothes and home made jams. This is a World made by Hand.
BillT on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 2:40 am
Barter is coming back. Eventually, it will return to the Us, but it will be foreign to most who have always had dollars to facilitate trade. It does four things:
1. Makes existence possible for the citizens..
2. Cuts the government out of the money loop.
3. Shrinks imports as there is no government system cash to pay for them.
4. Will cause the eventual collapse of the government and all national debt owed because they will not be able to function without taxes.
If anyone doubts the eventual collapse of the Euro, and probably the EU, this is an obvious sign of it’s coming.
noobtube on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 4:38 am
Why is it when Europeans discovers something that the rest of the world has never stopped doing… suddenly it is some great discovery?
Europe (with the United States) have been leeching off the rest of the world for a LOOOOONNNNGGGGG time.
It’s just that now they cannot afford the LUXURY of their ignorance and must step back into the resource reality that has typified mankind’s existence.
autonomous on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 5:12 am
Fantastic! Let us barter and abandon the crooks on wall street and greedy oil companies. The dollar is doomed.
Arthur on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 10:34 am
Fantastic? The old society was far more comfortable than the new one will ever be. The future will be one of constraints. Forget about the American dream where a nobody could become millionair. I am not really looking forward to that world.
What is happening now in Greece has little if anything to do with peakoil, but everything with years of irresponsible lending practices of the Greeks, to the same level as the US has done, but the latter can do this because of the reserve currency status of the dollar (for how much longer?). In fact many have suggested that Greece should return to their funny Drachme money, so they can inflate and become competetive again… but guess what! The Greeks in great majority refuse to abandon the euro, because they want to be part of Europe and not fall back to their former shabby Zorba the Greek status. Rating agencies have upgraded Greece recently and then there are these huge oil and gas finds in the Aegean. Abandoning the euro would not solve anything and instead would bring back the dollar as means of international trade payment vehicle and nobody except a few British Tories want that to happen. Today Europe is too united and too strong to get the Saddam and Khadaffi treatment and the euro is a direct competitor of the dollar and accepted by other major trading partners, who are all keen to see an alternative to the dollar, so the euro is here to stay. Without antagonizing the US too much the EU is busy expanding its economic ties with Eurasia, first and foremost energy trade. And at some point the transatlantic alliance, a leftover from WW2, will lose its meaning, certainly when the US descends further into third world status with continued mass immigration.
BillT on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 1:19 pm
Sorry Arthur, the Euro is dying. The EU will follow and Europe will go back to a bunch of tribes fighting each other.
When the dollar goes, and it will, the Euro will be pulled down with it. They are Siamese twins joined at the central bank. Inseparable.
The NAU will be born and Fortress America will pull in it’s military to the North American continent. Globalism will be dead.
China will drain all it can from it’s client countries. Then abandon them to their own resources. If China holds together that long. We shall see. The world will end up 3rd world everywhere by 2050. There is no miracle that will save Europe. Dream on.
Arthur on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 2:54 pm
The emergence of a NAU and the demise of the dollar do not go together, you have to make up your mind which one is going to happen. The dollar might very well crash, but only as a globalist reserve currency. The NAU might happen and with it will come some currency, the Amero or dollar 2.0 or whatever, exchange rate for Americans 1:1 and 1:10 for foreigners, notably Chinese and Japanese. America will go broke but at the same time it will get rid of its debts in one stroke and nobody will be able to collect its debt. The US/NAU will be able to start all over again. How the NAU will look like is an open question… either as a confederation of relatively independent states a la Switzerland or continue to morph into a zionist led brutal dictatorship a la the USSR, a permanent threat to the rest of the world. The fact that American citizens are massively arming themselves as we speak is a good sign, as there can be no doubt who they are arming themselves against: Washington. That puts the Euro-Americans in a much better position than the Russians of 1917, when it took the red army commander and jew Trotzky still 3-4 years to beat the Russians and could systematically murder the entire upper layer of society. The Americans so far failed to clear up 9/11, a frontal zionist attack against the American constitution and civil society and brought back torture, indefinate imprisonment without trial and endless wars abroad. If they additionally let themselves disarm by the Bloombergs and Feinsteins of this world, then civil society will be history on American soil and Americans will be like kulaks, transfered from labour camp to labour camp after the crash.
About Europe… that was unified for centuries under an emperor and catholic Christianity until that judeophile Protestantism came along that defined Anglosphere until this day. If you subtract that judeo-masonic /Rothschildt revolution in France as well as the actions of Britain in WW1 and WW2 from European history, then the picture is not so bad. And there is an inconsistency between postulating the rise of a NAU and at the same time the demise of European unity, that already exists since 1950. Even in a post-globalist world there will be large political/military competing blocks, NAU, EU, Russia, China, India, Japan, some form of unified Islam, possibly lead by Turkey. This new reality will provide enough rationale for the EU to stay together as a survival unit.
Arthur on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 3:16 pm
http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/piers-morgan-vs-alex-jones-the-gun-debate/30457/
Here Alex Jones bringing it exactly to the point against Piers Morgan. ZOG is risking another 1776 if they press through with gun control.
LT on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 5:14 pm
quote: 1. “the Euro is dying. The EU will follow and Europe will go back to a bunch of tribes fighting each other.”
2. “The world will end up 3rd world everywhere by 2050.”
>> I do not take side, but this is a fair /reasonable assessment. I agree w/ Mr. Bill T
And I want to add this: What we are seeing is the recipe leading to very likely WW 3 -the final war on this planet.
Arthur on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 5:53 pm
The socalled ‘third world’ are those people who are unable to elevate themselves from stone age level (Africa) or the kashba (ME) and these people will fall back to that level once the western world will recede or even collapse. But Europeans will not fall back to these levels once the oil runs out. They had Chartres, Newton, Rembrandt, Mozart and Galileo before the advent of the carbon age. I absolutely disagree that Europe or America will fall back to 3rd world status by 2050 (save nuclear annihilation).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a09_wVSBkyw
(Amsterdam 1918)
LT on Wed, 9th Jan 2013 1:54 am
Take California as an example of “wonderful transformation”:
In 1982:
– minimum wage = $3.75 an hour
– A gallon of shell gasoline = 69 cents.
– A pack of Marlboro cigarette = 90 cents.
– A McDonald’s big Mac = $1.10
– A standard calculus textbook = $33.0
– Junior college tuition = Zero!, only $5 registration fee required. That’s all it took for each semester.
In 2012 (30 years later):
– minimum wage = $7.50
– a gallon of shell gasoline = $3.60
– a pack of Marlboro = $5.0
– a McDonald’s Big Mac = $4.0 (big Mac today are smaller than big mac in the past!)
– a standard calculus text book = $175.0
– Junior college tuition = $25 per credit hour or more.
See the difference? Quality of life: up? down?