Right now, the political and the financial situation in Greece are not promising a bright future for Greece. Here is a collection of what the world is thinking of the situation in Greece at the moment.

German Chancellor Mrs. Angela Merkel told Greece yesterday to fix its fiscal problems and added that due to the Greek crisis the common Euro currency was facing its worst test ever.

Greek Prime Minister Giorgos Papandreou is due in Berlin this Friday to meet with Merkel. She spoke after days of friction, played out between the Greek and German media, over whose responsibility it is to act.

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Like in ancient times, Greece has once more become an example for the world today.

Editorial writer and columnist Anne Appelbaum, of the Washington Post analyzes the situation:

“I have seen America’s future, and it is Greece. By this I do not mean that the Midwest will soon be covered with ancient ruins or that Texans will swap hamburgers for feta cheese. I mean that the ongoing Greek financial crisis is the kind of crisis the United States might face in a few years, if we continue to make the kinds of mistakes that the Greeks have made over the past decade.” And she goes on: “Some of Greece’s economic problems are highly specific. The country has an unusually old-fashioned legal system, a bureaucracy straight out of a Kafka novel and a byzantine system of regulation”

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Takis Michas from the Wall Street Journal describes the financial situation in a nutshell:

“In Greece, as elsewhere, if the management of a company reports misleading figures about the company’s financial situation in order to boost the price of the shares or to support the sale of securities, it risks criminal charges. Around the world, including in Greece, this is securities fraud. But in Greece, unlike elsewhere, if those responsible for the deception are members of a (previous) government and if the victims are “foreigners” (“xenoi,” in Greek) they run no such risk. The most they can expect is slap on the wrist and a mild – Please don’t do it again!”

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Gevin Hewitt of BBC states on his blog:

“Key advisers in Athens believe that you can’t buck the markets, and that Greece needs to show it is backed up by a pool of money.

The markets are already factoring in that there will be a bail-out or rescue. Intense discussions are going on involving European officials. They include Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the Euro Group and Jean-Claude Trichet, the President of the European Central Bank. European finance ministers were holding emergency talks.”

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It’s scary what is going on at the moment and there have already been rumors that Greece will have Drachmas again…

By Maria Margaronis:

It all begun with the death of a 15 year old child, a school-boy with a chubby face, long brown curly hair and a black punk-rock T-shirt, an ordinary teenager trying to be cool. Though he was privately educated in a wealthy Athens suburb, Alexis Grigoropoulos didn’t hang out at the mall. On Saturday night he was downtown in ungentrified Exarcheia, a neighborhood where the indy crowd collects in cafes, leftists and anarchists and music lovers, potheads and addicts and professors, dissenters and the young, and the object in recent years of an intensive cleanup operation. The police account of the events that led to Alexis’s death had the patrol car set upon by a crowd of stone-throwing youths and the boy himself wielding a petrol bomb. But eyewitness reports and videos shot on mobile phones tell a quite different story.

Alexis and his friends were out to celebrate a name-day. Some unknown people passed and threw small objects at the car; the officers stopped, walked back to Alexis’s group and began to curse and threaten them. According to one of the boys, Alexis tossed an empty plastic bottle. The officer aimed and fired three shots, two in the air and one that pierced his chest.

Since then, the country has gone up in flames. There’s scarcely a town or city that hasn’t seen angry protests, many organized spontaneously by the very young. Four days after the killing of Alexis, Athens is still a war zone, with broken glass and upturned cars and flaming buildings everywhere; the New Democracy government, clinging to a one-seat majority, is utterly at a loss. Scandals, indifference and incompetence robbed it long ago of any moral authority; to declare a state of emergency would exacerbate the violence and bring dark echoes of the military dictatorship that fell in 1974, the last time Greece’s cities witnessed scenes like these. George Papandreou, the leader of the socialist opposition party, has demanded an election; even the conservative daily Kathimerini has hinted broadly that the prime minister should resign. But Kostas Karamanlis has given no acknowledgment of the deeper crisis; nor has he accepted his interior minister’s resignation or promised an inquiry into law enforcement, long infiltrated by extreme right-wing elements. The officer who fired the bullet has been charged with murder, but Alexis is not the first young man to die in recent years at the hands of the police. Other victims include immigrants and Roma.

The New Democracy government is no dictatorship. It is something far more ordinary, amorphous and insidious: a corrupt, incompetent administration with nothing left to offer its demoralized citizens. The summer before last it spectacularly failed to stop an inferno of forest fires; eighteen months later, little progress has been made with the rebuilding and reforestation. The government’s only vision for an economically viable future is to sell what’s left of the Greek landscape to developers. Ministers line their pockets with bribes and property deals–the latest involving major illegal land swaps for the Mount Athos Vatopedi Monastery.

The rioters’ first targets were banks and corporate headquarters. One in five Greeks already live below the poverty line; as the recession hits, the simmering resentment has taken on an edge of panic. Young people in low-wage, dead-end jobs–the “700 euros generation“–fear losing even those. Thirtysomethings live with their parents; parents work in shifts to earn enough to support their families. After four decades of rapid modernization, the social fabric has worn paper-thin. Discontent is policed with zero tolerance. Methods honed on the refugees who crowd Greek shores and have to be kept from seeking asylum in Europe’s wealthier north can also be applied to permanent residents.

Even Athenians are amazed at the intensity of this week’s violence. The riots began with bands of anarchists but were soon joined by many who had never taken to the streets. No one imagined there would be so many hooded men bent on destruction, high on the crackle of flames and the sound of shattering glass. But no one seems surprised at New Democracy’s failure to contain the rioting; everyone feels something of the protesters’ rage. It is the blind rage of people who feel betrayed by those who were meant to care for them, who can see no road ahead.