Starving them into the black

After months and months of austerity the prospects for Greece are as bleak as ever.

The Greek government is urging its departments to speed up the process of laying off staff, in a bid to meet the targets set by its lenders.

Administrative reform minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the man tasked with slashing 15,000 civil servants from the payroll by the end of 2014, has written to ministries to tell them to accelerate disciplinary processes to get errant staff out of the door.

 Yes, fire more people, because things are going so well otherwise.

"I had no idea and was shocked to learn that people in this neighbourhood, on these streets, in all the buildings that I pass every day, were suffering so," said Panaghiota Mourtidou, 54, the organisation's co-founder, busily packing food boxes. "After all, we're talking about the middle class, people who for a long time were too ashamed to admit they had such problems."

Malnourished children eventually gave the secret away amid reports nationwide of pupils fainting in schools. "Teachers were reporting cases of kids who had turned up at school with nothing more than rice or stale rusks for months," Mourtidou recalled.

I'm sure they'll be no long-term implications in this.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]