Bugle 286 – Greekonomics

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The Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 286 of the world's only and longest running audio newspaper for a visual world with with me andy's ultimate live once again within suspiciously easy divine punishment range of the almighty lord's london hq st paul's cathedral and joining me from the wogan worshiping city of new york it's the mint of mirth who freshens the infernal breath of politics it's john oliver hello andy hello beautiful and it's been something of a mostly fraught week here in New York.

On Monday night, we were promised an historic snowstorm.

A shut-down snowstorm.

Somewhere the projections were saying that 20 inches of snow might fall down on the city in 24 hours, bringing everything to a standstill.

The subway was shut, cars were curfewed off the roads by 11 p.m.

People prepared for a disaster.

However, Andy, waking up the next morning, it turned out the storm merely clicked New York and hit Boston instead.

There were a few inches of snow on the ground and a lot of f ⁇ ing angry New Yorkers looking at it with a disgusted look on their face.

Because if you promise New Yorkers an apocalypse, Andy, you better f ⁇ ing deliver on an apocalypse.

Never has a city been so furious that something terrible did not happen to it.

Not even the fact that Boston was miserable could make New York any happier.

It was just wall-to-wall, people complaining, where is my life-threatening snow?

Where is it?

I should be dead by now.

Why am I here?

I was in Norway last weekend, and

I saw a story on a Norwegian news website.

There was some town, some up in the north of Norway, which is not renowned for its warm and tropical winter weather.

And there had been a lot of complaints about from people about the effect of snow on local transport.

And the local police chief just came out and said, I would encourage everyone to remember that they live in Norway.

I mean, that's a pretty good argument, isn't it?

Did people just kind of look down at their Norwegian boots and say, yeah, he's right.

I mean

it doesn't feel good for him to be right but he is right nonetheless I mean people are calming down here in America Andy because of course America is about to become turbo America for a day this Sunday it is Super Bowl Sunday the day of the year that America perfects itself it's going to be the Seattle Seahawks against the New England Patriots and I for one we'll be rooting for Seattle Andy not so much because I want Seattle to win as because I want Tom Brady the Patriots quarterback to lose I'm actively rooting against one individual player.

And I'll tell you why, Andy.

Because it would be good for him to have something go wrong in his life.

He is ridiculously attractive, frustratingly talented, and seems to be involved in a healthy marriage with a supermodel.

And he's clearly going to age well as well, Andy.

His face is clearly going to age like a French cheese.

It's going to just become more sexually potent and dusty.

I feel like a spectacular defeat would give his life texture, especially if the defeat is all his fault.

So that's what I'm rooting for, Andy.

I'm rooting for that, for him, for his own good.

It'll be a gift for him to be humiliated during that game, look around at the rest of his life, and appreciate his a bit more.

Bad omen for Seattle, though.

I used to have a Seattle Seahawks hat, and I left it on a train.

So you can...

Oh, boy.

That was a damn warm hat.

And I don't know, you can read into that what you want, sports fans.

I've been enjoying the uh a build-up uh from uh Marshawn Lynch um it's brilliant

for those for those people who don't know Marshawn Lynch is an enigmatic uh and very impressive Seattle running back and he has basically been

engaging in a kind of campaign of silence with sports reporters and he's driving them absolutely crazy it's brilliant

he did press conferences where his only replies were I'm just here so I don't get fined.

And then this next one, you know why I'm here.

Which

I mean, that's

I mean, the second one did possibly suggest that he might be the long-awaited Messiah.

That's the thing.

It's so enigmatic that it does really give you food for thought.

It's almost like

I'm sure there are French philosophers looking at Marshall Lynch's press conferences and going,

Why are any of us here?

Why is Martian here?

Why do we speak?

What is their life?

He's posing many questions, which it's important for us to try and answer.

Yeah, that's he's very much the Aristotle of the 21st century, but a faster runner.

I'm recording in that studio near St.

Paul's again on a street called Cock Lane.

I believe the bugle may have found its spiritual home.

And it's quite a fascinating little street.

It was the site of the famous Cock Lane Ghost,

which was an alleged haunting that took place in the 1760s by a ghost named, wait for it, Scratching Fanny.

Now,

I just love the internet.

Sometimes facts are even better than bullshit.

When Scratching Fanny was alive, she had a servant called Carrots.

The story gets better and better.

And her supposed ghostly existence led to seances attended by, amongst others, the Duke of York, who was the brother of of the f ⁇ ing king.

Went to a seance.

That was a proper monarchy.

Not like today's half-assed bullshit.

It turned out that this ghost was in fact a hoax perpetrated by the landlord of the property in Cocklane and his young daughter just scratching on the wall after an investigation featuring none other than the dictionary writing lexicography celebrity Samuel Johnson.

It's a truly extraordinary little piece of history that I'd never come across before.

The Cock Lane ghost ringleader was sentenced to be pilloried.

So basically, put in, he had to put his, you put your head and arms in

a sort of lock device, and people can taunt you and throw fruit at you.

But apparently, the public took pity on him and just gave him money as if he was some odd kind of street artist.

So that's, I hope the vibes of that extraordinary story will inflect this podcast.

As always, the section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, Your Vegetable Problems.

You can write into our vegetable agony aunts with questions such as, I think my lettuce is depressed, how can I cheer it up?

My vegetable patch has been haunted by the ghosts of last year's dead carrots.

But oddly, I wrote that before finding out about the Cock Street story.

It involved both ghosts and carrots.

I think there might be something supernatural at work here.

Also, we teach you some intermediate-level potato massaging techniques.

And if your beetroots won't germinate, we give you some special tips to make them feel a little bit more sexy.

That section in the bin.

Tom story this week.

All we are saying

is give Greece a chance.

Now, Andy, the Greeks may have invented democracy, but clearly over the last decade they've teached us tantalizingly close to destroying it.

The Greek people have been forced to endure crippling austerity measures after watching their economy implode in 2008.

And implode it did, Andy.

It crumbled like a Greek column.

In fact,

Greece's economy, Andy, was very much like the Acropolis.

Once great, but now nearly gone because no one was paying enough attention to it.

But the Acropolis would be standing today, Andy.

That's an important point to make.

The Acropolis would be standing today if the British had had the foresight to steal it before we stole all their marbles.

Sorry, not stole, borrowed their marbles.

Sorry, not borrowed, liberated their marbles.

Sorry, not liberated, stole their marbles.

Yes, no better.

Last week, Greeks went to the polls for an election with the eyes of the world upon them.

And if not the world, then certainly the eyes of the rest of Europe, because the EU was pretty heavily invested in the outcome of this election, and not just emotionally, financially.

Greece is currently in debt to the tune of 270 billion to the EU and the IMF alone.

So Europe literally had a financial stake in whatever the result was.

And the choices were between a new Democratic Party, widely unpopular and held responsible for the austerity measures, some new parties on the block, and of course Greece's terrifying nationalist Golden Dawn Party, a party whose logo looks, to quote one of their members, pretty like a swastika.

If something looks pretty like a swastika, Andy, I think you can say it looks a f of a lot more like a swastika than anyone should be comfortable with.

Yeah, I was wondering if there's a comma in that phrase, pretty like a swastika,

which

would make it worse.

That might have been the problem.

Just to give you a sense of how frustrated the Greek electorate were in the run-up to the vote, this is one of my favourite passages from the news this week.

A journalist went to Greece to interview some people in a cafe and wrote, Amidst the dense cigarette smoke, one 82-year-old man slammed his hands down next to his Nest Cafe and Batgammon board and told me he would never vote again for anyone because he didn't believe in anything anymore.

Wow.

Wow, that's weak, Andy.

I mean, that man may have just lost a game of backgammon, but

I've got to believe it does actually go deeper than that.

Yes, the voters of Greece have given a resounding, oh, f this to the years of austerity.

A f ⁇ this to the ruination of ordinary people's lives and livelihoods.

F ⁇ this to the rampant corruption, tax evasion and asset stripping of their nation.

And a f ⁇ k you to both Fraulein Frugel Angela Merkel and the troika of the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank that have essentially parented the Greek economy in recent years, albeit with the kind of parenting you might have got in a 19th century at the wrong end of a very big stick and an angry dad.

The new government has come in and downgraded those f ⁇ k you's to screw you's as it begins the process of renegotiating

various aspects, including the length of the nail with which the great financial powers of Europe keep Greece's balls firmly attached to their coffee table.

Now it's quite exciting this in a lot of ways.

I've got a real soft spot for Greece John because while I loved organised sport

at which Greece sort of basically started, I like comedy.

I'm partial to the occasional blockbusting war epic.

Thanks again to Greece for those.

It doesn't stop there.

I quite enjoy just lounging around around thinking about stuff preferably with my junk out another tip of the hat to Greece for inventing that as a hobby and I really really love sacrificing herds of oxen to appease the vengeful gods but most of all I just absolutely love voting and so it's um it it is as you say the home of democracy has taken a pounding recently and as soon as this this I guess it was

a hopeful election result from the point of view of the people who've had a tough time recently, then the reactions against it began.

The stock markets sank and there were concerns that really the new government would be putting the eeek into economics.

It was described as a significant risk which could lead to instability and economic disaster, which I guess is roughly equivalent to Captain Scott saying to Oats, what are you doing going outside at this time of year?

You might get a little bit chilly.

Well, it turned out in this marathon of democracy that, oh, that's another thing I invented.

It turned out that in this election, the winner was the relatively new left-wing party sirita uh who won with 36 percent of the vote on a platform of ditching austerity and renegotiating the eu bailout i think it's safe to say andy that that was not what the eu and the imf were particularly looking for in a result so greece's new prime minister is alexis tsipras who gave an impassioned victory speech uh in athens on sunday night he spoke of wanting to restore greece to its former glory although to be fair that's one hell of a restoration project, Andy.

You're not going back a decade in that case, you're going back centuries.

And if that's really what he wanted, he shouldn't have delivered that speech in a suit.

He should have delivered it in a fking toga, Andy, holding a flagon of wine and demanding that everyone in Greece should now be naked for 80% of the day and homosexual for at least half of it.

That was when Greece was truly great, Andy.

Don't claim that you're taking the country back to those days without being specific.

If you want to be great, be great at your best.

John, John, John, John.

Togas.

That's a very much a Roman, Roman item of clothing.

What is the Greek toga, Andy?

John, look, I don't know.

I came out from my four years studying.

What do they call it?

Well, I don't know.

I think a kitone or something.

But all I know is that I came out from four years studying ancient civilization with about three facts.

One of them was that a toga is definitely Roman, not Greek.

And the other is that the ancient Greeks had a punishment for adultery which involved shoving a large-rooted radish up the backside of the guilty man.

That's something.

So naked then, Andy, they were probably just naked to the Greeks.

They hadn't even developed the wrap-around sheet yet.

The Greek sarong.

No, but they had developed a radish at the end.

He should have sat on stage and said what he said, naked, which was our people have a right to join celebration for five years.

they've taken both away from us and the club went wild Andy that was a real drop the mic moment or I guess in Greece a real smash the plate moment he shouldn't have done that he should have got to the end of his speech completely naked smashed the plate on the floor and said everything's gonna be fine before someone whispered in his ear and he said I see there are some massive structural problems in this nation I might have overstated my potential to be fair Spurs does seem to be different from either the breathtakingly corrupt or the mind-numbingly bureaucratic politicians of the last twenty years.

In Greece, he's apparently known for his rhetorical skills, his dislike of neckties and his youthful looks.

And Andy, I think it might be time for politicians to accept that being a political renegade has to be about more than just the absence of a necktie.

It it seems that across the world there is nothing presented as more rebellious by a politician than not wearing a tie and potentially having their sleeves rolled up.

That's as close as they're willing to get to sartorial anarchy.

Again, Andy, if he if he was really a rebel, he'd be naked.

Or in a toga, if he was Roman, as we now know, naked.

I hate to hop on about it here, Andy, but if he was naked, he'd be looking at a genuinely transformational Greek figure right there.

Just a matter of time.

Maybe that's too big a step in his first week in office.

I think give it a month.

He will be oiled up and probably wrestling Angela Merkel live on Greek television.

His new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, said the day after the election, what really matters is that we now sit down and discuss a way in which the haircut to our debt is minimised.

Now

this guy speaks my language but also you have to ask what happens after you cut your hair?

Well for a start it it grows back and for a second start you get mercilessly teased by people who haven't recently had their hair cut.

So either way I cannot see this ending well for Greece.

Spirit

you're biting off a pretty sizable souvlaki of a challenge.

And you only need to look at the general reaction around the EU to see just how sizable that souvlaki is.

In Germany, which is the country uh that holds the most Greek debt, the tabloid newspaper Bills wrote, Greece elects a Euro monster, how many billions is this going to cost us?

Okay,

first things Germany, plump the brakes on the fear of a young charismatic leader posing a threat to Europe.

You're on thin ice there.

Thin, thin ice.

And also give the guy a fing chance to annoy you first.

A At least let him provoke those headlines with some actions, or you're leaving yourself nowhere to go.

Germany's vice-chancellor also reiterated the need for Greece to respect the terms of its bailout, which sounds like a reasonable suggestion until you look at the terms of the bailout and also you hear that suggestion in a German accent.

Respect the terms of the bailout!

Respect them!

Respect the terms!

Beautiful language.

It's just

like soft poetry to the ears.

So, in all of this concern,

not unjustified concern at the result by Germany, the onus was on Prime Minister Tipras to make some early conciliatory gestures, especially to the Germans.

He even went so far as to say to the German government that he was not looking for a fight, which is why it was so noticeable that his first act after being sworn into office was to pay his respects to a monument honoring the communists executed by Nazi occupied forces in 1944.

Oof, Andy, oof, That is not going to pacify the Germans.

That is historical hardball that he's playing.

Tip Pratt has also said, we will not continue a policy of catastrophe, which just goes to show what a naive idealist he is.

A proper, hard-nosed modern politician knows that when you are halfway through a policy of catastrophe, you have to have the courage to see that catastrophe through.

Otherwise, the results could be absolutely catastrophic and you will piss the catastrophe off, making it worse.

You have to appease the catastrophe and let it take its course.

That is a lesson that Europe really should have learnt very well indeed.

Varou Fakis insisted that his country cannot restore its finances until its debt is lessened and described the bailout terms as fiscal waterboarding.

Now, waterboarding, John, as we know, has an at-best checkered record of success.

It worked very well for the Beach Boys as a theme for hit singles in the 1960s, but less well for the USA in getting terror suspects to admitting bits of terror they were or were not planning to do or not do.

And generally, using it creates a significant amount of resentment in the recipients of the waterboarding treatment and a slightly queasy feeling from the neutral, very much like the treatment of the Greek economy in that respect.

Although, to be fair, the Greek central bank did eventually crack last year and admit that it was planning to launch a nuclear attack on a Los Angeles counter-terrorist unit just to stop Angela Merkel from holding the towel over its face again.

Budgetary belt tightening is all very well, but it tends to go down significantly less popularly when someone else is holding your belt and tightening around your neck whilst your trousers fall down and they look right into your face at point blank range while saying, are you feeling better yet?

Maybe this belt needs to be just a little bit tighter.

So he can understand why Greece is trying to throw off these shackles.

Although shackles are not always easy to throw off, which is, I guess, what makes them shackles and not pajamas.

that's always been true never a true word than it ever was that's right a bit of plato there for he quotes fans

just to get a sense of the scale of what this new government in greece is up against it was really distilled by one newspaper report i read this week which said vowing to defend greek dignity mr tsipras said a renegotiation of the greek debts would aim for a viable fair mutually beneficial solution he did not give any details and look he doesn't have to give any details andy but he does have to have some idea of what those details might be because the closest I could find to a plan was that Siritsa is pledging to give 300,000 households in Greece under the poverty line up to 300 kilowatts of free electricity per month and food subsidies for the same number of families who have no income tax on heating fuel is going to be scrapped and then there are also some plans for free medical care for those who are unemployed and do not have medical insurance.

And all of that sounds great if a little expensive so you might reasonably ask where the money is going to come from well the party claims that this plan has all been priced out at a total of 11.3 billion euros and will be paid for by several initiatives including a crackdown on tax evasion and smuggling well hold on andy that's giving away the greek identity if you're cutting down on tax evasion and smuggling you may as well cut down on moustaches and pita bread as well because you're giving the finging house away

well they announced four pillars of a national reconstruction plan.

Those are their words.

Four pillars.

Now, as you suggested earlier on, John, the history of the pillar in Greece is a mixed one.

And there are a lot that aren't in quite such good shape as they used to be.

The four pillars were one, confronting the humanitarian crisis enveloping the country as a result of austerity.

Two, restarting the economy and promoting tax justice.

Three, regaining unemployment.

And four, transforming the political system and deepening democracy.

I'd like to chuck in a pillar number five for them, a new ingredient for your finging food.

You've basically used the same four for finging ages.

I'm going on a holiday to Greece in April.

Bowls of yogurt and weird stuff that came out of goat's tits is not going to cut the mustard for 10 whole days.

Raise the bar, Greece.

Raise the culinary bar.

But you have to, there's a few questions with these pillars of

the recovery.

This term, tax justice, which is the kind of term that sets alarm bells ringing and chief executives going straight onto the internet to check flights to Monaco and the Cayman Islands.

So, best of luck, Greece.

I think you will definitely need it.

But at the same time, with a third of Greece currently living below the poverty line, you have to think if 300 Spartans could hold off the combined might of the Persian Empire and look absolutely buff whilst doing it, then maybe this new anti-austerity party can do something for Greece.

And here's a financial figure that really

puts things into some perspective.

This week, Apple, the celebrity technology giant, announced world record quarterly profits, $18 billion

in three months.

That is the most ever made by a company.

Broke the record held by oil stars ExxonMobil, which suggests that gadgets have now overtaken oil, which does raise the very exciting possibility of major wars being fought over Wi-Fi hotspots in motorway service stations, under the pretext, of course, of overthrowing a naughty deskpot whose passes used by date.

But basically, it's all about the Wi-Fi.

Your emails now, this one came in from Pete, who writes, in response to Sammy's email in Bugle 285, I thought it was important to clarify that when visiting Australia, the Bugle podcast will not, I repeat, will not

protect you from snakes.

I can't believe the science will back you up on that.

There's an old saying here in Australia, and by old saying I mean a Chuck Norris joke that I've shamelessly plagiarized.

If you can see a snake, it can see you.

If you can't see a snake, you may be seconds away from death.

Which I think that's basically the subtext of the Greek election as well.

But he sent a picture of

him holding his phone with a snake.

It looks like an actual snake wrapped around his hand and phone.

So,

if anything, the bugle attracts snakes rather than repelling snakes.

I don't know, I mean, this needs to be,

there must be some bugle listening scientists out there who could do some much-needed research into whether or not the bugle in particular and podcasts in general do or do not attract or repel snakes.

The world is dangerous enough as it is without having that sword of Damocles dangling over our faces.

Looking at the photo, though, it does appear that he is almost at the end of the episode.

So it must have saved, it must have prevented the snake biting him for all of what looks like about 28 minutes already.

Okay, so it's possible that the bugle attracts snakes who assume they're going to hate it, but then actually when they start listening, they quite get into it.

Snakes are a big money market.

That's just a fact of showbiz.

That's why so many of them work in the industry.

Do keep your emails coming in to info at thebuglepodcast.com on the subject of Australia.

I will be going to Australia, as I mentioned last week, and New Zealand for gigs.

I mean, Christchurch on the 20th of February, Auckland on the 24th, then in Australia, Adelaide on the 21st.

That could do with shifting some units.

And Sydney on the 25th and Melbourne on the 28th.

There might be an extra gig in Sydney and Melbourne.

I'll keep you posted and do check check the website.

Also, a quick update on the Bugle appeal.

You have now collectively donated almost £50,000

to help my daughter's friend Michelle get her cancer treatment at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

And

next week, we have a week off the bugle next week, but we will put a show out, hopefully including an interview with Michelle and an update on when the treatment can start.

But thanks once again.

If you do want to contribute, gofundme.com gofundme.com slash this hyphen is hyphen michelle uh don't forget also to check out our soundcloud page soundcloud.com slash the hyphen bugle

a quick sports story there was talk in the um amongst saudi officials of a possible joint olympic bid with bahrain And the reason that they needed to have a joint bid was that they wanted to hold all the women's events in a different country.

I'm sure that's what the Olympics is all about.

Personally, I will be in favour of this on one condition, that they're held at separate times.

So we basically get two Olympics.

I believe that the massively sexist price would be worth paying to get the extra sport on telly.

But I don't know, the Olympics in Saudi Arabia, it would, yeah,

it just doesn't seem quite right.

We've seen the international community bowing down before the late King Abdullah.

The Norwegian Prime Minister, Erna Solberg, she said this: The late king really had some reform programmes that I hope will continue.

I don't think he's right up there in your top 10 all-time greatest reformers.

And I think possibly praising those reforms is a bit like seeing a lion accidentally trip over in its enclosure in a zoo and swallow a tomato and respond by saying, Well, I think he's 50% of the way to becoming a vegetarian.

So, good luck for the Super Bowl to Marshall Lynch.

I do hope if they win and he does post-match press conferences,

he is equally philosophical in them.

Oh, yeah, he has to.

He has to commit to this for the rest of his career now.

Refuse to engage in the premise of any question.

I'm completely behind him.

Who's going to win, John?

Well, I'm hoping Seattle, Andy.

Again, actually, I don't really care who wins as long as Tom Brady loses.

Again, that involves Seattle winning.

So

if he gets injured,

does that mean that throws your calculations out of kilter?

Then you don't mind who wins at all.

Well, I don't want him to get hurt, but I want him to be huge.

So I'd like him to slip and have to leave the field because he's so asshit I can do this

It's a possibility never rule it out So we will have a sub-bugle uh next week um and uh hopefully the week after uh a possible tri-continental bugle with me in uh Melbourne, John in the States, and Chris in

Mogadishu.

Look forward to it.

And hopefully, so we will speak to you indirectly next week, and hopefully, directly the week after that, or possibly the week after that.

Until then, buglers, goodbye.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.