Greece protests over government plans to sell off historic national buildings

[dipsydoodle]

Source: guardian

Greece's cultural gems have become the focus of renewed protest on the streets of Athens following the cash-strapped government's announcement of plans to include prime properties around the Acropolis, and other landmark buildings, in its privatisation programme.

Furious opponents marched through the city centre at the weekend to denounce the "illegal sale" of the country's heritage. More than four years into debt-stricken Greece's prolonged economic crisis, many described the step as the height of humiliation for a nation already hit by excoriating austerity and record levels of poverty and unemployment.

"The government is constantly trying to convey the message that the economy is a success story but in reality that is not the case at all," said prominent leftwing campaigner Petros Constantinou. "The decision to put public buildings up for sale is not just proof that they are nowhere near reaching targets but plain wrong when they could be exploited for public benefit."

Under immense pressure to enact reforms for the release of a long overdue €10.1bn (£8.5bn) aid instalment from international creditors, prime minister Antonis Samaras' fragile two-party coalition handed the real estate to the fund overseeing the sale of state assets (Taiped) last week. Among the properties are refugee tenement blocks built to put up Greeks fleeing the Asia Minor disaster in 1922 and culture ministry offices housed in neo-classical buildings in the picturesque Plaka district at the foot of the Acropolis that were erected shortly after the establishment of the modern Greek state. Both are widely viewed as architectural gems.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/greece-protests-sell-off-historic-buildings

[blkmusclmachine]

1. Pilfering Greece's public goods, just like they're trying in Detroit.

Sieg Heil

[Lodestar]

2. I recall talk of the Bush administration's plans to sell/auction off public park land.

These fat cats sit around drooling over the spoils of the crisis they created, divvying it up.

[JackRiddler]

3. This article persists with the big lie...

a long overdue €10.1bn (£8.5bn) aid instalment from international creditors

This is not aid. It is a payoff to "international creditors" from the governments of said "international creditors." Greece is just the conduit. State debt is higher now than five years ago. Expenditures are far lower. Unemployment is officially just under 30%. The Greek people are being starved out in an aggressive demonstration by the parties of austerity. The "bailout" is punitive in nature and brings nothing to the Greeks except to extend their misery.

[dipsydoodle]

4. If Greece hadn't blagged it into the Euro with outside help

by way of currency exchange swaps which stayed off balance sheet they'd have been left to sink long ago.

As will happen to Ukraine which is not in the Euro and will make Greece look like a picnic.

[JackRiddler]

5. They all "blagged it" into the euro the same way.

Everyone engaged in this, because the Maastricht criteria were always crappy neoliberal wish-theory that the bankers insisted on - precisely with the intent of getting these results, I would argue. This is the payoff: Greece's devalued assets sold off to the vultures. The continuing "failure" of austerity to effect any of the supposed goals of austerity is the actual goal of austerity. The point has always been a debt slavery that breaks the people into very cheap wage slaves (if they're lucky!) and renders the country more penetrable to outside capital. Greece is is the rehearsal of how to do this, with further acts on the rest of the SPIGI, then F, then eventually the big D (again). The popular resistance and populist electoral reactions may have slowed the process down in the rest of Europe, but the Greek endgame is well underway. It's not that the putative goals of the euro (e.g., to integrate as a counterweight to the larger imperialist powers, to lower transaction costs, etc.) were bad. It's that they were never the intent, and that a different design, of imposing neoliberal discipline, was built into Maastricht from the start.

When a policy has predictable results year after year, the excuses wear thin. The present results are the plan. And thus your "left to sink" is nonsense. Default would have been the first step in liberation. The "bailouts" go to the creditors, not to the Greeks, and they do no favor whatsoever to Greece (this cannot be stressed enough). More accurately, the strictures of the euro have been used to drown the people in Greece.