Following #ThisIsACoup Greek Solidarity Hashtag?
Following #ThisIsACoup Greek Solidarity Hashtag?
Hashtags such as #ThisIsACoup and ‪#CancelGreekDebt‬ are exploding and protests are growing across Europe to end the 'debt' crisis created over time through criminally secretive transactions by some of the same banks now demanding payment.
"Greece is facing a very European Coup. Since before the resounding ‪#OXI‬ in the referendum, the so-called negotiations have been a farce. "Negotiations" have taken place against the background of the Troika suffocating Greek banks and the Greek people. Greece is quickly running out of cash, gas, medicine and several kinds of food. With #OXI the Greek people chose democracy within Europe. European institutions have decided against democracy in Greece and in their own countries, by making their people pay to bail out banks. Join us in denouncing the Troika coup. Join us in denouncing the strangulation of Greek democracy by the financial dictatorship of the Troika. Join us with the hashtag #ThisIsACoup and let's get it trending to let the world know what the Troika is doing to Greece."
European anger bubbled up when a former employer of Goldman Sachs related how the company he worked for helped previous Greek governments mask debt in order to borrow more, helping Goldman Sachs as well as the IMF, Deutshcebank and other international loan sharks suck billions out of Greece's economy.
An anoymous Greek finance ministry official recently by Christian Salmon in an article that appeared in Mediapart show the anti-democratic and completely irresponsible Eurozone leadership is.
"In the beginning of February, Dijsselbloem told Varoufakis: "You either sign the memorandum that the others have signed too, or your economy is going to collapse.” How? “We are going to collapse your banks.” Schäuble said: “How much money do you want [in order] to leave the euro?”
We went to a war thinking we had the same weapons as them. We have underestimated their power. It's a power that enters the very fabric of society, the way people think. It controls and blackmails. We have very few levers. The European edifice is already Kafkaesque."
Varoufakis followed this by calling a referendum on the Austerity measures demanded by the German negotiators.
The answer was no.
The German demands are now even worse. But these insitutions played a role in creating the debt, putting Greece in the position of having to borrow from them, since adjusting to the EU currency was difficult for Greece compared to less socially minded countries in Europe.
As Slavoj Zizek recently wrote in The New Statesman,
"Why were banks pouring money into Greece and collaborating with a clientelist state while knowing very well how things stood? Greece would never have got so heavily indebted without the connivance of the western establishment. What the EU bureaucracy should be blamed for is that, while it criticized Greece for its corruption and inefficiency, it supported the very political force (the New Democracy party) that embodied this corruption and inefficiency."
Some are also asking how a man like Wolfgang Shauble, who was forced to resign as leader of the Christian Democratic Union Party in 2000 after he admitted to accepting 100,000 marks ($50,164 or 51,130 euros) in cash contributions to the party from a German-Canadian arms lobbyist, was allowed to become Germany's Minister Of Finance.
Some question the IMF's role, after a report by Jubillee Debt showed that the IMF was profiting from the Greek crisis while promoting austerity measures in Europe.
The attitude of Shauble, Merkel, and the far-right cult of economic growth, was summed up best by Paul Krugman's NY Times article "Killing The European Project"
"The trending hashtag #thisisacoup is exactly right. This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for."
But the particulars of Greece's situation are largely irrelevent to the larger picture that this situation represents. Because it's not just Greece.
The title of George Monbiot's recent article in the Gaurdian, "Greece is the latest battleground in the financial elite's war on democracy", says it all.
What is happening right now in Greece is happening on some scale in every country on the planet. As the #OccupyWallSt. movement was originally started to call attention to, control over our global financial system has become increasingly centralized, because governments were pressured into allowing privately owned banks to have far too much control over currency and in order to keep the same level of services they had while currency was controlled by an elected government they were forced to borrow from the private banks. The key is not austerity, or higher taxes, it is a return to the financial system that worked, and total, militantly enforced reforms of the economic system to ensure private companies never have this much power again.