Winter has come early for our pockets

Headlines announced the bad news in early August in a tone that unsuccessfully tried to banish panic with sarcasm: Greece had the highest electricity rates in Europe. It was the 3rd of the month and the price per kilowatt hour had shot up to 154 euros, putting the country ahead of its peers. It’s a price that seems almost desirable now that August draws to a close and rates have shot up and up and up, to reach €697/kWh. We’d love to go back to that, even though it was a herald of what’s to come, but we cannot. There is no going no back in the free, greedy market. Even when the war in blood-soaked Ukraine comes to an end, some excuse will probably be concocted to keep rates at such lofty levels.

At €697/kWh, Greece dropped from first place in Europe. The good news does not end there, though, because thanks to sage government policy, Greece is still among the top three countries paying the most for electric energy. Myriad households struggling to pay enormous bills know this only too well. They also know that the subsidies being shelled out would hardly merit being defined as succor for the ill. Because the fact is that given the continued reluctance to tax the excessive profits reported by the producers and sellers of electric energy, it is nothing more than a transfer of money – from one pocket that shells out for taxes to another that stands empty and forlorn. 

But perhaps there is something that households growing increasingly poor because of the cost of energy and others do not know and that’s the following national secret: something like that the National Intelligence Agency, which is under the nepotistic supervision of the prime minister himself, bugged the telephone of European lawmaker and socialist leader Nikos Androulakis with the express purpose of getting ahead of talks he was having with fellow socialists in Spain and Portugal on ways to get the European Union to delink the cost of electricity to the rate of natural gas and to secure a more affordable price of around €180/kWh, which would have ultimately benefited consumers.

Unfortunately for us, revelations concerning the phone-tapping affair may have prevented such a great plan to move forward, so winter has come way too early for our pockets because of an elitist privilege of confidentiality. Let those going on and on about the need for secrecy think about that.