Thursday, March 22, 2012

Annual Greek Parade in Boston!

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Save the Greeks from their Saviors!

February 22, 2012
by Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Étienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell

At a time when one Greek youth out of two is unemployed. Where 25,000 homeless wander the streets of Athens. Where 30% of the population has fallen under the poverty line and where millions of families are forced to place their children in the care of someone else in order for them not to die of hunger or cold, where refugees and the new poor compete for trashcans at the public dump, the “saviors” of Greece, under the pretext that “Greece is not trying hard enough”, impose a new aid plan that doubles the lethal administered dose. A plan that abolishes the right to work and reduces the poor to the most extreme misery, at the same time as it makes the middle class disappear.

The goal is not about “saving” Greece. All economists worthy of this name agree on this point. It’s about gaining time in order to save the creditors at the same time it leads the country into deferred collapse. Above all it’s about making a...
 

Friday, March 09, 2012

Social and Human Costs from the Troika program


One of the biggest and worst social costs of the current program is the enormous loss of jobs. As noted above, unemployment hit a record 20.9 percent in November.[At the present the record is 21%] By 2016 it is still projected to be at 17 percent, far above the 7.7 percent pre-crisis level, and a level that is generally seen as a national tragedy.[10]

Another way to see these losses is to look at employment. Figure 3 [see the picture on the left]  shows employment as a percentage of the working age population. By 2011 it had fallen to below its level of 1994, almost six percentage points below its 2008 peak.

The government has committed to cut 150,000 jobs from public employment for 2010-2015, about 22 percent of public employment. The IMF notes that: