To: Retort
From: LY
[Lia sends us this dispatch from Thessaloniki on the critical situation in Greece. IB]
I'm sending a quick elementary sketch that might help count some of the apples. It does not take into account the usual suspects - neither the original gouging debt from EU funding (the debt today is incomparably higher), nor the exceptionally high Greek defense expenditure (a standard practice, given Greco-Turkish relations within the NATO balance of terror).
State loans for "development" have been growing and growing since the 1990s (and boosted national pride rates with the 2004 Olympics). Why has the debt been growing too? Actual wealth in the private sector in Greece is either being produced through a large, versatile and unofficial (black) market economy, or through big business (e.g. public works, shipping, Balkan investments)
which is conducted by companies which do not keep their profits within the country, so they cannot respond to so-called national debts. This also explains why the huge debt does not offer international reporters the spectacle of soup kitchens or of the white-collar workforce searching through rubbish bins - those are still the privilege of refugees.
With the crisis, interest rates are rising, and the debt is too. The Greek state is held ineligible for further loans and instead is being put in a position to guarantee the sellout of the whole of its public sector. This process of wild privatization has started already with energy and transport and will slowly eat up whatever's left of education and health.
People do realize that banks and moguls should be paying. Friends have had articles published in widely read daily newspapers
suggesting that Greece should officially declare bankruptcy and stop feeding the financiers. Yet it feels safer for most to trust the new government which blames it all on foreign and former politicians (EU, the "Germans", Karamanlis, etc.), and to subscribe to the soothing propaganda of 'it would be nice to tax the CEOs and the bankers, but it is simply impossible'. At the same time, as the dire conditions are getting even worse, no one seems to find it notable that, in a mass demo against the new austerity measures in Athens a few days ago, the president of the General Confederation of Labor was attacked by workers calling him a traitor. Or that the traditionally-clad honor Guard of tsoliades had to be protected by riot police [see photo below].
In the meanwhile in Thessaloniki, Egyptian fishermen (a skilled workforce that is necessary to the national fishing economy at the moment) have been on strike for two months in nearby Michaniona, demanding, among other things, a pay rise. In the last year, their monthly income has dropped from over a 1000 to less than 300 euros, because of the same crisis that makes banks and investors richer. Things came to a head when bosses and their thugs entered Egyptians' homes and beat them up, revealing their fear of a real solidarity movement uniting immigrants and workers - this strike is the first ever migrants' strike to last so long and receive this much support. Yesterday, a day after the economic measures were announced, during a solidarity demo for the Egyptian fishermen in Thessaloniki, passers-by were cheering to our slogan [slightly adjusted here so that it rhymes as it does in Greek]:
"Listen to the measures, you are not alone
Get off your couch and pick up a stone"
Lia
