On the Road to Destruction. Greece in times of financial crisis.

On the road to destruction 
Commentary from eKathimerini

Can a society self-destruct? Yes, it most definitely can and the way Greece is headed right now it is a very real possibility that it will.

Here we have a state and a society that allow a handful of nihilistic hooligans to torch the city and cause the deaths of three citizens.

We have the leadership of the country’s second biggest political party opting for a populist line of rhetoric and failing to answer a simple question on whether or not it will support the government’s economic recovery plan.

We see a society that is mad, and justifiably so, and we see it going down an ill-advised path.

Then we see the government, caught in the grips of panic, contributing to the populist fever and pouring more oil over the fire.

Greece is at the most crucial point of its post-1974 history and whether we destroy ourselves or not, whether we go bankrupt or not, depends not just on our political leadership, but also on every single one of us individually and collectively.

Date : 6/5/10
Copyright: http://www.ekathimerini.com

~Thoughts from Vicki ~
I wanted to share the above commentary from the English language portion of the Greek newspaper, ekathimerini.com (Kathimerini), because of the drama with which it is written as well as some of the cultural points it brings up which we can explore together.
15 hooligans who label themselves anarchists in order to give themselves feelings of justification for their acts of vandalism . . . and now murder. . . were filmed by security cameras attacking a bank.
In the USA, citizens have shown up at talks given by President Obama with guns casually slung over their shoulders. In the streets of Athens during times of protest the unions of public worker unions find themselves next to a few young men and women with kerchief-covered faces and backpacks stuffed with Molotov cocktail ingredients.
A CNN International reporter interviewed different segments of the protesters on the street but avoided the self-proclaimed anarchists. I’m sure they seem quite threatening particularly to Americans. Unfortunately, when questioned, the “anarchists” are not able to speak logically about their “movement” or what they are trying to accomplish by their actions. There seems to be an attitude that protest is the means and the end.
The police are in the same position as others in dealing with the austerity measures yet they are they receive the primary attacks from the anarchists.
ATMs (Automatic Teller Machines) at banks are the second favorite target. I have a personal experience in wanting to pay the mother of one of the vandals of bank ATMs. She was quite anxious to have some money from me, and I would have helped her out . . . but the ATMs at the banks had been destroyed. It was the weekend and I was unable to give her the cash she wanted. Whether it registered to her 20-something son that he was hurting his own family by he and his friends’ actions was not clear. Another of their contradictory acts is to protest that they want jobs yet these hooligans don their kerchiefs and backpacks to protest against private universities that could give them and college graduates of their generation very good jobs at home in Greece.
And the group that was caught by the cameras tossing firebombs into the bank have used this same method before targeting banks.
20,000 to 40,000 citizens on the streets during a demonstration is few for Athens where strikes by labor unions of both working class and professional groups are quite common. A handful of the ragtag vandals following behind the legitimate protesters have been given credit by much of the foreign news media for causing a panic on Wall Street; exactly the wrong kind of social reinforcement needed by this immature group.
PASOK is the name of the party which won the recent elections and inherited all many shocking surprises of a country badly in debt. They won against the second large political party in Greece, the New Democracy Party, and the party which Barnaby Phillips, the AJE Athens correspondent, rightly reported has almost thoroughly discredited itself with the populace.
Although the majority of the citizens understand that the austerity measures are the only choice and support Prime Minister Papandreou and the PASOK party; New Democracy is playing along with the foreign media and voting against the austerity plan. Or is it possibly the speculators who gave loans and have been betting for a Greek default who are being supported?
The commentary from ekathimerini was written after three innocent people died in a bank when a fire bomb came crashing through the office window. They died of asphyxiation.
I don’t agree that the government has been in a panic. The Prime Minister and the Ministers of Economy and Finance have been articulate and soft spoken each time they’ve been questioned on the decisions they have been making.
Will the Greek society self-destruct? An unlikely scenario given the history of Greek survival against all odds.
Will the Greek government go bankrupt? The European Union is young and a mechanism has not been established for members of the European Union to go bankrupt (The Brief, CNNI).
The modern democracy of Greece is young and far more inclusive than the ancient Greek democracy. (Perhaps you recall the USA government/Kissinger-backed dictators who ruled Greece in the early 1970’s?)
I do agree with the last sentence of the commentary which is the reality we face in Greece. “Greece is at the most crucial point of its post-1974 history and whether we destroy ourselves or not, . . . depends not just on our political leadership, but also on every single one of us individually and collectively.”

Politics. Decided. Finally at the nub of the problem.

     With the resignation of Van Jones there’s no mistaking the power struggle that began as soon as the east coast colonies came together in the continental congress and an empire began to organize itself.

      The grasping of the world’s natural resources to the bitter end has become overwhelming powerful by wielding cash and fear; I wonder how we are going to extract ourselves from this tragic dilemma.  If only one nation was battling itself the repercussions wouldn’t be felt throughout the world.  Unfortunately the military superpower of the world has decided to wage the battle starting with the most vulnerable and helpless.

      How can families concerned with daily work, school and home protect themselves from the robotic weapons?

      The occupation of Palestine has been the loudest warning that this is a war against citizens.  The Israeli military used drones years ago in the portion of Palestine that had not yet been occupied by Israelis.  Now a wide swath of murder blankets Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan successfully ridding this portion of the world sometimes of three to four generations of families with one bomb.

        In other places we can watch whole families starve to death in the comfort of our homes.  Groups of people with an ancestry of the indigenous have had to leave areas made unlivable due to a tiny shift in the atmospheric temperature.  The drought and flooding that have ensued for several decades hasn’t been enough time to for modern technology to produce natural disaster warning systems, innovative infrastructure nor even guaranteed shelter for those who own only a few pieces of cloth which covers their body.

     Now the world’s superpower has become so arrogant that its own citizens are being treated as badly as those in the rest of the world.  The throwing down of the gauntlet in the new wave of civil war in the United States was announced with the privatization of prisons.  

       If a business wants to make money managing prisons (to please their shareholders, of course) they have to have plenty of prisoners.  So even though white-skinned people still are in a majority of the population and as logically follow, they are the people committing the most crimes.  But who do we find in the prisons?  Non-white skinned people, the poor, the young (the ‘juvenile delinquents’).

       The elderly and the weak need health care but where is the profit?  Only healthy people can hope for no problems with the corporate health insurance now available.  If the ill are cared for the profit margin narrows and that is not acceptable (to the shareholders, of course).

     But still operating with freedom around the country are the environmentalists.  If they have their way each family will be able to control the consumption and source of the family’s energy.  The whole system will fall apart and the shareholders will be upset.

      Van Jones is considered an enemy of the powerful who do not want to give up that power nor their riches.  He is the example.  Lately Jim Hanson the most famous climatologist in the world was arrested and thrown in prison but that barely rippled through the information dimension.  In another country that would have caused an outrage but all remained quiet on the home front.

        So who better to target than Van Jones?  He possesses all the characteristics many have been trained to hate due to a constant diet of fear and vitriol.  Van Jones is young, smart, healthy, tall, dark-skinned, patriotic, wants to empower those with no jobs by giving the jobs, worst of all he wants the citizens of the U.S.A. to empower themselves, to become strong, to become innovative and he has the dynamism and the brains to help make that happen.

     Here is the crux of the dangerous tensions laid out in a black and white format.

Are you for taking natural resources from the rest of the world or do you want to be able to control your own energy needs with nature’s resources which are available to everyone? 

     Put more succinctly.

     Do you trust the people holding the most money in the world or do trust yourself to do a better job of providing a decent future for your family?
     And put even more simply.
      Do you want to be a part of mass destruction or mass creation?