Posts Tagged ‘ Greece ’

Greece and the Future of Europe

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0
3 December 2012
Direct Democracy, Syntagma Square

In the summer of 1918, Constantin Cavafy met E. M. Forster in Alexandria. Cavafy compared the Greeks with the English. The two peoples are alike, quick-witted, resourceful, adventurous. ‘But there is one unfortunate difference. We Greeks have gone bankrupt. Pray, my dear Forster, oh pray, that you never lose your capital.’ Giorgio Agamben, commenting on Cavafy’s mysterious statement, writes: ‘The only certainty is that since , all the peoples of Europe and perhaps the whole world have gone bankrupt'. Greece was declared bankrupt in 2010 albeit in ‘orderly fashion’ and only temporarily. Temporary default is a little like temporary death. It lasts forever. What if Greece, and perhaps Europe, have been bankrupted not economically but morally, culturally, politically? What ...
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Another Greek Myth: Freedom of the Press

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0
30 October 2012
Kostas Vaxevanis 28 Oct 2012

A war­rant for Greek journ­al­ist Kos­tas Vaxevanis’ arrest was issued today  for the alleged crime of “viol­at­ing pri­vacy legis­la­tion” related to his bi-​weekly magazine HOT DOC which pub­lished a list of 2,059 names and asso­ci­ated pro­fes­sions of Greek nation­als from the cli­ent data­base of HSBC in Switzer­land. So, what does the Greek gov­ern­ment do? Arrest the tax evaders? No chance. Since the list of the tax evaders was given to the Greek gov­ern­ment over two years ago by French Fin­ance Min­is­ter Lagarde, suc­cess­ive Greek gov­ern­ments under Pasok and the New Demo­cracy led coali­tion have failed to arrest a single known tax evader, not one! Yet today , the Greek gov­ern­ment arres­ted journ­al­ist Kos­tas Vaxevanis for pub­lish­ing ...
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Ask not what you can do for your country but what we can do for each other

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0
4 April 2012
Athens Mourning

I am thinking of the 77 year old Greek pensioner who took his life earlier today in Syntagma square, Athens. I am thinking of JFK's 20th of January 1961 inaugural address speech where he uttered these well cited words: “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” The Greeks are not Americans. J.F. Kennedy in this inaugural speech was talking about a new world, where poverty, disease and injustice could be obliterated globally and where, “a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved”. And of course such a world could not be motivated into existence through this speech, nor ...
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Austerity is Murder – Demo Thursday 5 April, 6pm @ Greek Embassy, London.

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0
4 April 2012
Note

Today in Greece a 77 year old pen­sioner shot him­self in Syn­tagma Square. In his let­ter he explained that the gov­ern­ment was rob­bing him of his dig­nity and that he had no choice but to com­mit sui­cide or start liv­ing out of bins. He didn’t want to leave his chil­dren with debt and called for the youth to rise up. In Greece, demon­stra­tions have been called
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The Muppet Show

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0
15 March 2012
A Goldman Sachs client (apparently)

Greg Smith's resignation letter in the New York Times yesterday, announcing a bridge-burning departure from his position as Executive Director of Goldman Sachs' Equity Derivatives Division (Europe, Asia, Africa) certainly brought Wall St. to a relative halt. GS cancelled conference calls and the Goldman Flacks (PR goons) were rounded up to pour scorn on Mr. Smiths allegations as "unrecognisable". The importance of the letter was not so much it's revelation of a eat-what-you-kill culture in which clients are the main course, not even the contention that somehow GS had changed culture - it hadn't any more than any other investment bank since the Big Bang. The letter was important because it effectively took GS clients' faces and slammed them against ...
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The Abaclat legacy: Investment Arbitration as an Obstacle to Greek Recovery

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7
27 February 2012
A Bank of Greece sign outside the institution.

The agreement reached between the Eurogroup and the Greek government in the night between last February 20th and 21st has been considered by the former as 'a comprehensive blueprint for putting the public finances and the economy of Greece on a sustainable footing and hence for safeguarding financial stability in Greece and in the Euro area as a whole'. Unfortunately, the recent Abaclat award (2011), that affirmed the jurisdiction of an ad hoc panel of the World Bank’s arbitration arm the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (“ICSID”) over a claim filed by over 160,000 Italian bondholders against Argentina for breach of the Italy-Argentina Bilateral Investment Treaty (“BIT”), might represent an obstacle toward the achievement of the goals ...
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Rescue the Greek People from their Rescuers!

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1
24 February 2012
Greek Protestors dressed as Prisoners before Parliament

At a time when one in two young Greeks is unem­ployed, when 25,000 home­less people won­der the streets of Athens, when 30% of the pop­u­la­tion has fallen below the poverty line, when thou­sands of fam­il­ies are forced to give up their chil­dren to save them from dying of hun­ger and cold, when refugees and the newly impov­er­ished fight over bins in pub­lic dumps, the “res­cuers” of Greece, under the pre­text that Greeks “aren’t doing enough”, are impos­ing a new aid pack­age that doubles the admin­istered lethal dose. This is a pack­age that abol­ishes the right to work and reduces the poor to extreme poverty, while mak­ing the middle class disappear. The goal can­not be the “res­cuing” of Greece: on this point, all ...
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The EU & Greece: A capitalism that has persuaded the world that capitalism is the world

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13
13 February 2012
shapeimage_2

The beha­viour of the EU states towards Greece is inex­plic­able in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and fore­most, a fail­ure of solidarity. The ‘aus­ter­ity pack­age’, as the news­pa­pers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. Even now the schools are run­ning out of books. There were 40% cuts in the pub­lic health budget in 2010 — I can’t find the present fig­ure. Greece’s EU ‘part­ners’ are demand­ing a 32% cut in the min­imum wage for those under 25, a 22% cut for the over 25s – the min­imum wage in Greece is around €500 per month, well below a liv­ing wage in that eco­nomy. Already unem­ploy­ment for 15 – 24 year olds was 43.1% last April — it ...
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Fiscal Crisis or the Neo-​liberal Assault on Democracy

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3
14 November 2011
Making Money – Andy Warhol

Of course, it is always pos­sible, and very often the case, that the dom­in­ant media claims that a “fiscal crisis” has pre­cip­it­ated mass demon­stra­tions, strikes, and new forms of polit­ical mobil­iz­a­tion in Greece. Although it is true that there is fiscal crisis, it should not be under­stood as a peri­odic dif­fi­culty that a coun­try or a region peri­od­ic­ally passes through only then to re-​enjoy the eco­nomic status quo. What is emer­ging in fast and furi­ous form is a con­stel­la­tion of neo-​liberal eco­nomic prac­tices that are estab­lish­ing a new paradigm for think­ing about the rela­tion between eco­nomic and social forms as well as modes of ration­al­ity, mor­al­ity, and sub­ject form­a­tion. And the prob­lem, that which pushes tens of thou­sands of people onto the street, is ...
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The Final Blackmail of Baron Papandreou

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2
1 November 2011
Greek Prime Minister Papandreou

The unex­pec­ted announce­ment by Greek PM Papandreou yes­ter­day that he is to call a ref­er­en­dum and ask people to vote about the Octo­ber 24 agree­ment is the open­ing salvo in the endgame of the Greek tragedy. Is this extraordin­ary gam­bit a genu­ine request for a pop­u­lar man­date or a des­per­ate bluff of a gam­bler down on his chips? In one obvi­ous way, involving the people in one of the most import­ant decisions of Greek his­tory sounds pos­it­ive. But as con­sti­tu­tional law­yers and polit­ical the­or­ists have explained the use of ref­er­enda is not neces­sar­ily demo­cratic. Unlike ref­er­enda called by a pop­u­lar ini­ti­at­ive, like the recent Italian which reversed the privat­isa­tion of water, ref­er­enda have been used often to bol­ster fail­ing gov­ern­ments rather than to give an ...
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The Indictment

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0
21 October 2011
Demonstratos in Athens

The work­ers of a small bakery and corner shop in cent­ral Athens announced yes­ter­day (Weds) that while they would not close because they are serving many vul­ner­able people they are join­ing the 2-​day gen­eral strike by char­ging all products at cost. It must have been an unex­pec­ted sur­prise in these hard times for their cus­tom­ers who bought their milk and bread at half price. This is an ordin­ary story of the life of res­ist­ance and kind­ness in Athens. At the same time, no gov­ern­ment min­is­ter or MP can appear in pub­lic without being heckled or ‘yoghur­ted’ (the Greek style ‘pie­ing’). Greece is split in two. On the one side, politi­cians and bankers, rich tax evaders and media bar­ons. Des­pite party ...
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Anger and Indignation in Ireland, Greece & Tunisia

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1
28 June 2011
Grim ECB IMF

Polit­ics is back on the streets of Europe, that much is clear. The PIGS are strik­ing back. Por­tugal, Ire­land Greece and Spain. Except that’s not quite right. I will address the fail­ure of Irish rad­ic­al­ism and con­trast that with Greece and Tunisia, in order to begin to pull out a num­ber of import­ant les­sons of the cur­rent wave of indig­na­tion and fury. I will sug­gest that when the media focus on anger and indig­na­tion they miss some of the most sig­ni­fic­ant factors involved. I want to sug­gest that anger is only the beginning. For the last twenty years, in Ire­land, there has been a con­cer­ted effort to render polit­ics as that which hap­pens after and in the wake of the eco­nomy. Ire­land fit­ted itself ...
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Greek Politics from Below

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0
21 June 2011
Youths clash with riot police, Greece

Few people would want to be in the shoes of Greek Prime Min­is­ter George Papandreou these days. Faced with an ostens­ible mutiny in the rul­ing social-​democrat PASOK party, his wor­ries have been exacer­bated by the appear­ance of an unpre­ced­en­ted, con­tinu­ous wave of protests in the streets of Athens by thou­sands of people — who had never demon­strated until a few weeks ago. Since May 25, 2011, Greece has entered a period of spec­tac­u­lar tur­moil, with thou­sands of people tak­ing over the cent­ral squares of its major cit­ies. What happened? The €110 bil­lion ($157 bil­lion) Memor­andum of Agree­ment signed between the Greek gov­ern­ment and the troika of the IMF, the EU and the ECB in May 2010 was met by much weaker dis­sent than ...
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In Greece, we see democracy in action

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0
16 June 2011
Syntagma Square

When Stéphane Hes­sel wrote in Time for Out­rage! that indig­na­tion with injustice should turn to “a peace­ful insur­rec­tion” per­haps he did not expect that the move­ment of indig­na­dos in Spain and agana­kt­is­menoi (out­raged) in Greece would take his advice to heart so soon and so spectacularly. The Greek res­ist­ance to the cata­strophic eco­nomic meas­ures was expec­ted. Through­out mod­ern his­tory the Greeks have res­isted for­eign occu­pa­tion and domestic dic­tat­or­ship with determ­in­a­tion and sac­ri­fice. The meas­ures imposed by the IMF, EU and European Cent­ral Bank with the full accord, if not invit­a­tion, of the Greek gov­ern­ment, have led to 11 one-​day gen­eral strikes, numer­ous regional strikes and ima­gin­at­ive acts of res­ist­ance. Domestic and for­eign media avidly repor­ted the con­front­a­tions between youths ...
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Debtocracy

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0
19 May 2011


For the first time in Greece a doc­u­ment­ary pro­duced by Read more »