Greeks Are Rummaging Through Garbage Bins to Live - Is This Our Future?

We all know, at least those of us who read the alternative media, that the US is headed for economic collapse. But what we don’t know is what it’s going to look like on the other side. 

Being that we have borrowed levels of money like never in history, the banks have bet quadrillions of your money on risky thins, we are indeed in uncharted waters. 

Many economists say that when this baby goes down, it’s going to be far worse than the Great Depression. But how worse?

Let’s look at Greece. They have just defaulted on their debt. They are at a 25% unemployment rate. We are now at a 23% unemployment rate, according to the economist John Williams of Shadowstats.

But we also have Food Stamps, which is why we are not currently rummaging through trash for food. But during the next crash, which is agreed will be the “Mother of all crashes”, food stamps will likely be cut off, leaving us in a situation similar to what many Greeks now experience.

Greeks are scavenging through trash bins at night, and in different neighborhoods, so their neighbors won’t see them.

“Mr Polonos, a quietly spoken man of 55, is typical of the new class of respectably destitute. He lost his job as a construction worker three years ago, when Greece’s building boom dried up, and in the current climate, cannot see himself finding paid work in the foreseeable future.

Yet he dresses as smartly as he can in second-hand trousers and shirt, and does not see himself as any kind of vagrant. ”I don’t want to ever look like him,” he said, gesturing to a tousle-haired drug addict slumped in a doorway near the soup kitchen. 

“I never believed I would end up like this, but as long as Greece is in this terrible situation, my construction skills are not in demand. A lot of my friends are doing what I do now, and some people I know are even worse off. They have turned to drugs and have no hope at all,” ‘reports the Telegraph. 

“The exact numbers of people who now scrape a living by rummaging through Athens’ bins is hard to estimate, since many only operate at night when their friends and neighbors will not see them. But according to Panos Karamanlikis, a volunteer at the soup kitchen, the numbers have increased by two or three times since 2011 alone.
 

Stephen Graham, an anti-austerity campaigner from England who has spent the last three months travelling through Greece to study its economic problems, said that well-to-do scavengers were a common sight in the Athens suburb where he lived.

“These are people who still have trappings of their old way of life, who still have clothes for work and smartphone contracts they can’t get out of,” he said. “They go to different neighbourhoods to scavenge so that people they know don’t see them. Seeing them is something I’ll never forget.”

Many of the new underclass bring the same disciplined routine to scraping a living as they did to the world of work.

A bundle of discarded copper wire will earn him 50 cents (35p) a kilo from a scrap merchant, for example, while 70 aluminium cans can fetch €1.5.

“On an average day I can maybe make five or ten euros,” he said. Bread can be often found dumped at dustbins near supermarkets and bakeries, he added, although he said he only ate food that had been left deliberately by well-wishers.

Many others, however, eat whatever they can, despite the health risks. Outside her jewellery store near Syntagma Square, Michaela Evag, 55, said she regularly saw an elderly woman looking through the dustbin for food for her family. 

“I gave her some money and told her not to eat the food in the bins as it might have been poisoned by rats,” she said. “She told me not to worry, as she always cleaned it in vinegar once she took it home.”

Indeed, for Mr Polonos, one problem these days is the sheer competition from other bin scavengers. “I would say someone like me probably rummages in this particular bin every 15 minutes,” he said, as he wandered off empty-handed from R21. “It can be quite hard to find anything.”

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