… won’t investigate high-ranking government/party thieves cuz … why? Cuz it’s Skeezy Greece! It has a reputation to uphold.

These corruption hotspots have generated a corruption scandal, and the response of the Euro Parliament is “shock.”

We are “shocked.” SHOCKED. We are “reeling.”

Scusi, but UD doubts the EP’s shocked. Do they think that if you name your organization No Peace Without Justice, or No Impunity, that makes you a good person? These organizations (now known as No Justice Without a Piece of the Action, and No Punity) are simply names, and any set of values might in actuality be attached to them.

Do you know of any country that calls itself The Democratic Republic of that isn’t a tyranny? Do we really need to review these notes?

Similarly, we are supposed to be shocked because in this scandal all the greedy mfs are socialists?

I mean, let’s not be naive.

*********************************

While this scandal has rocked Brussels, the allegations have come as no great surprise to those who know the European institutions, especially the Parliament.

“The Parliament has tolerated a culture of impunity for years,” says Nicholas Aiossa, deputy director of Transparency International EU, an anti-corruption organization. “There is virtually no oversight or repercussions for the way that MEPs spend their allowances and we have seen those funds misused so many times.”

Aiossa believes that institutional corruption is only a small part of what would make an MEP such an inviting target for those seeking to influence European politics.

“The Parliament collectively has a lot of power over the direction of policy that provides access to an enormous market of over 400 million citizens. The MEPs themselves, however, often have a very low profile outside of the Brussels bubble, which probably helps avoid scrutiny.”

Now this is impressive. This UD must share with you; and in addition UD must bow to the Greek people.

To be so supremely gangrenous, so suppuratingly pus-ridden, as to face expulsion from arguably the world’s most infected body (FIFA!!); to be so persistently, so top-to-bottom violent — from gun-wielding team owners who rush the pitch and threaten referees, to alcoholic fascists in the stands who beat the shit out of everyone — is truly to have accomplished something grand.

But of course the expulsion will never happen. Did Hitler expel Goering from the party because he was too anti-semitic? In world football, you can’t be too corrupt or too violent.

[T]he Athens Special Affairs Unit carried out an inspection in the Development Grants Account of the National Technical University of Athens and found that during the years 2002-2013, the university submitted false income declarations and as a result it failed to pay 20,796,216 euros in tax returns.

… has gone under.

Hestia Publishers and Booksellers,
known as the Gallimard of Greece,
published the Greek translation
of Don DeLillo’s White Noise

along with many other
great modern novels in
translation. It has
not been able to survive
the Greek economic fiasco.

… reminds us about the continued reality of life at Greek universities.

Blogger Konstantinos Palaskas, a contributor to the liberal Ble Milo (Blue Apple) blog, says that the antics of [Greek] left-wing and anarchist troublemakers during protest marches and university and school occupations over the last 30 years, and the public’s acceptance of them, have significantly influenced the players of the new far-right.

“The left’s violent interventions, its disregard for the law, and the acceptance of its lawbreaking activity by a section of society – combined with the state’s tolerance of all this – were a lesson for people at the other end [of the political spectrum],” said Palaskas.

The habit forms at an early stage. The governing of universities has for years been hijacked by political parties and youth party officials. The country only recently scrapped an asylum law that prevented police from entering university campuses, hence allowing left-leaning activists to rampage through laboratories and lecture theaters.

Despite incidents of rectors being taken hostage, university offices being trashed and labs used for non-academic purposes, many Greeks remain uncomfortable with the idea of police entering university grounds …

… and stubborn as a damn mule about it. The country runs a disgraceful state university system, but won’t give equal rights to private universities because it knows a monopoly when it sees one.

Many of the private schools are better than the state schools.

This is not hard to accomplish.

“The way [the private schools] operate reveals to Greek parents the ills of universities,” [the head of a group of private colleges] said, referring to the crowded classes and lax monitoring of student attendance often complained about in the state sector.

… “No other public sector university environment in the E.U. is as self-centered as Greece’s,” said Jens Bastian, a senior fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

He said lack of competition had hindered innovation and led to many outstanding students and academics continuing their careers abroad.

“When did you last hear of a stand-out Greek research paper?” he said.

The EU has had it. They just sent the Greeks a letter saying they’re going to sic the European Court of Justice on them if they don’t join the rest of the world.

… implodes, University Diaries readers may find her extensive coverage of the Greek university system of interest.

To find my posts about Greece, you can click on Foreign Universities (under Categories) and scroll through for Greek posts; you can also type Greece Universities or some similar phrase into her search engine.

Greek universities are only one of many arenas of outrageous public spending and outrageous corruption in that country. But they’re a very good entry point to the larger Greek economic failure.

Lots of countries have lousy universities, but Greece is a real scandal, given the nation’s history and cultural significance. Lately it’s been trying this and that – it’s even allowed private universities to operate!

It has also, most recently, legislated against “dormant students,” hundreds of thousands of people who’ve remained enrolled for ten, twenty years while doing absolutely nothing. Fully half of Greek university students retained this status until the government finally decided it was kind of stupid.

So they’re inching along. But it’s a fundamentally corrupt, demoralized system, so good luck.

The best of the rest is poetry, which understands that the world worlds (Larkin: ‘Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest/ Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,/ And dark towns heap up on the horizon./None of this cares for us.’) (Stevens: ‘Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail/ Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness…’) — it all goes on without us; and though we crave worlding’s unconscious endless essence, we generate some of our greatest poems out of our failure to satisfy that craving. We are human selves, not berries ripening in isolation – in total wilderness! – to fulfillment. We want of course to ripen, to live in transcendent fulfillment with our nature, but we are bound, human all too human, to the world, to a running commentary with the world. A running battle with it, really:

“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”

Our inescapable battle, observes Henry James, is with what humans have made of the world; there’s absolutely no chance we can abandon the battle in favor of some humongously seductive state of calm autonomous being. Only the world can world.

****************************

Or, I mean, we can do stupid shit like mainline heroin and all the other opiates the Sackler family so famously monetized. UD ain’t gonna stand here and deny the depth of that business … Not so much MAKE THE WORLD GO AWAY… STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF as make me a sweet berry ripening in the oxysphere…

AFTER GREECE

James Merrill 1969

Light into the olive entered
And was oil. Rain made the huge, pale stones
Shine from within. The moon turned his hair white
Who next stepped from between the columns,
Shielding his eyes. All through
The countryside were old ideas
Found lying open to the elements.
Of the gods’ houses, only
A minor presence here and there
Would be balancing the heaven of fixed stars
Upon a Doric capital. The rest
Lay spilled, their fluted drums half sunk in cyclamen

Or deep in water’s biting clarity
Which just barely upheld me
The next week, when I sailed for home.
But where is home – these walls?
These limbs? The very spaniel underfoot
Races in sleep, toward what?
It is autumn. I did not invite
Those guests, windy and brittle, who drink my liquor.
Returning from a walk, I find
The bottles filled with spleen, my room itself
Smeared by reflection onto the far hemlocks.
I some days flee in dream
Back to the exposed porch of the maidens
Only to find my great-great-grandmothers
Erect there, peering
Into a globe of red Bohemian glass.

As it swells and sinks I call up
Graces, Furies, Fates, removed
To my country’s warm, lit halls, with rivets forced
Through drapery, and nothing left to bear.
They seem anxious to know
What holds up heaven nowadays.
I start explaining how in that vast fire
Were other irons – well, Art, Public Spirit,
Ignorance, Economics, Love of Self,
Hatred of Self, a hundred more,
Each burning to be felt, each dedicated
To sparing us the worst; how I distrust them
As I should have done those ladies; how I want
Essentials: salt, wine, olive, the light, the scream–
No! I have scarcely named you,
And look, in a flash you stand full-grown before me,

Row upon row, Essentials,
Dressed like your sister caryatids,
Or tombstone angels jealous of their dead,
With undulant coiffures, lips weathered, cracked by grime,
And faultless eyes gone blank beneath the immense
Zinc-and-gunmetal northern sky.
Stay then. Perhaps the system
Calls for spirits. This first glass I down
To the last time
I ate and drank in that old world. May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

*******************************

Of course the system, such as it is, calls for spirits. You can imagine – you can forgive – Merrill hitting the bottle.

… has names, photos, and details of prior threats and assaults against Przemek Jeziorski, the Berkeley professor shot to death on the streets of Athens by his ex-wife and her boyfriend (the bf has confessed; she has not).

The professor had sought a restraining order in San Francisco against his ex-wife in May, saying he feared for his life, before he was killed, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. 

*******************

A much better source, with photos of the killers being led out of court. They include a sixteen year old.

The NYT has a Greek correspondent following the story in Athens. Przemek Jeziorski’s death – after two weeks – is getting the coverage it deserves.

Keep in mind the complexity here. As Jeziorski’s brother writes, “Przemek’s estate is in the U.S., his children are in Greece, and our family is in Poland.” He plans to adopt the children, but this too might be another expensive fight. The mother’s Greek family might think it should hold on to the kids until their father’s murderer gets out of prison.

One, two, three, four… but where’s wifey-poo?

[Photo: Reuters TV/Reuters]

************************

‘Jeziorski had a win in court hours before the murder.’

************************

Here she is! Does not look happy.

‘Ex-Wife of UC Berkeley Professor Shot in Greece
Arrested on Suspicion of Plotting his Killing‘

***********************

If you followed the shooting death of Professor Dan Markel, you will find virtually all of the details of Przemek Jeziorski’s shooting death familiar. Annoyed that the father of her children wanted to father them, his ex-wife (speculating here, but on pretty solid ground) had some criminal connections, probably through her current boyfriend, and she hired them to blow his brains out right there in the street.

Not everyone has this particular skill – walk up to a stranger, shoot him to death – but both the Adelsons and Nadia Michelidaki seem to have known people who knew people with these abilities.

‘[A]uthorities arrested Michelidaki and accused her of convincing her current partner to kill Jeziorski.

Police also arrested her companion — who has not been identified — and three other men as accomplices.

The three men, two Albanians and a Bulgarian man, were accused of transporting the shooter to the crime scene and giving him the firearm used in the crime.

Another Greek news outlet, iefmerida, reported Michelidaki denied any involvement in the crime when she was arraigned, while her partner and the accused gunman admitted to authorities to shooting Jeziorski, and doing so at Michelidaki’s request.‘

UD, as readers know, likes to follow certain high-profile murders, and she must admit she’s GOBSMACKED by the stupidity of degenerates who think they can contract kill a person they’re known to hate with a passion… and get away with it! In both cases, the conspiracy included gobs of people (I’m counting at least seven in the Markel case, and this one in Greece looks to have involved at least five), and, you know, the more people in on it, the greater your chance of discovery. But beyond that, doesn’t it occur to these idiots that the sudden grotesque gunning down of a perfectly innocent random human being will confidently lead investigators to the only possible people who wanted him dead?

And look what the killers have achieved. They have produced orphans whose mothers killed their fathers. Mothers who will go to prison for life for their crime. Nicely done.

The absolutely disgusting murder of Berkeley professor Przemyslaw Jeziorski, possibly engineered by his Greek ex-wife, echoes the equally disgusting murder of law professor Dan Markel, engineered by his ex-wife’s family.

It took eight years, but three people so far are serving life sentences for Markel’s killing, and a fourth will be in prison for around twenty years. The vindictive ex-wife’s vindictive mother – reported to be the ringleader of the conspiracy – is in prison awaiting her trial, and it’s not yet clear whether the ex-wife will also be tried, but she may well be. All this because the ex-wife didn’t want to share custody of their children.

Perhaps the motive was similar in the case of poor Jeziorski.

************************

UD worries that Greece’s pathetic justice system will find a way to fuck this up and let the guilty parties walk. It took far too long to deal with the Markel murder, yes, but we did get to it and we have been putting the killers away.

*******************

You can donate to help his family with legal and other expenses here.

Background here. Thieving agriculture ministers were found out, and then they were both promoted. This is Greece, after all.

But okay now the government is dumping them, which is the sort of clean hands gesture one doesn’t expect of Greece...

The EU agricultural funds were just sitting there!

All kinds of people tried to shut down this latest EU theft racket, but they either got fired by the ministers who ran the fraud, or

investigators encountered physical resistance from … staff while searching its premises. The government was then forced to fire the [farm] agency’s president for failing to cooperate and to announce it would shut down the organization.

These people fight. Physically.

And now the two ministers who seem to have run the fraud, having been duly promoted, are dealing, or not dealing, with press inquiries.

Makis Voridis, who was agriculture minister from 2021 to 2023 … is now migration minister, and Lefteris Avgenakis, who was agriculture minister from 2023 to 2024 … is now an MP.

***************

EU not happy.