The Battle for Syntagma [ASB] Jelle Bruinsma - 03.07.2011 09:31
This is a personal report from an outsider in Greek society who was inside the protests over the past week. It is hoped that this report, which is a mix of general reporting and personal experience and which must surely be flawed at some points due to lack of information or confusion, will provide some inside information to people across the world about what has been happening in Greece. Read the full article at: http://anarcho-syndicalisme.nl/wp/?p=964 Dire circumstances Plenty has been written about the economic attack on the Greek people by the banks and states of the West. This article is meant as a report from within the resistance against this attack. But in short, the Greek people are being made to pay for the financial crisis that was caused by international banks, states and corporations. It is said Greece is in debt. But two questions have to be asked: 1) Who is “Greece”? 2) To whom are they in debt? The answer to the first question is that when corporate media talk about Greece being in debt, they talk about the Greek people, but in reality it is the Greek state. A state that is everything but democratic, and does not work in the interest of its citizens. Still, the measures that are forced through will be hurting the Greek people, who hardly benefited from the money that the Greek state borrowed. The answer to the second question is international financial corporations, the same ones that should be held responsible for the current crisis. They have willingly and knowingly pushed through loans to Greece and others, often through their good connections with the state managers. Now that new loans have to be initiated, it’s the same banks that are “helping” the state managers achieve this. Especially the advisers of Goldman Sachs play a prominent role behind the scenes. What they are helping with is selling of the public property of Greece to speculators, rich people elsewhere, and so on. They are helping to increase unemployment, lower the wages, and privatize public services. It is self-evident that such acts will be highly profitable for the corporations that are involved, and will cause a lowering of the life standards of the average Greek people. And all Greeks can attest to this; everyone I talked to seemed to have either a personal story or of people they knew that lost their jobs, whose wages were cut in one way or the other, PhD’s who had to take up jobs in supermarkets to survive, or people who were just jobless for endless amounts of time, depending on family and friends for survival. Read the full article on: http://anarcho-syndicalisme.nl/wp/?p=964 [Later today also on ZNet.] |