Akritas Macedonian blog: March 2012

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:

Regarding the Greek debt Crisis....

Greece, a peripheral european state was encouraged to join a badly designed single currency by the rich elite of countries that dominated it. Those countries, having set up borrowing rules for the currency union, were the first to break them and did so with impunity.

Through complacency and inept financial regulation, and lacking good investment opportunities in their own stuttering economies, they then encouraged their banks to lend recklessly to the country on the periphery.

When those investments went sour, the elite governments -influence from Germany- with theirs globalizing neoliberal leadeships, rushed to bail out their banks first by loading up the debtor government with yet more loans to pay them back and then by imposing a foreign overlord to extract repayments through legal force.

We need History Lectures based on FACTS not political motives!

In November 5-8 2009 at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City took place the so-called "7th Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies".
Although a number of presenters strictly deal with subjects of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, there are politically motivated lectures that attack and disparage the people of Greece, the Greek Cultural identity and as they twist historical facts through their disturbing presentation.
These motivated lectures are influence under the umbrella of the Slavmacedonism [5], a post-modern ultra nationalist ideology.

Read more here.

Modern Macedonian question - What is it all about?

Ancient Macedonia was a Greek kingdom situated in the north end of Greece. It became the most powerful Greek state during the 4th century bc after the decline of Athina (Athens) and Sparta. Under the leadership of King Philippos II and his son Alexandros III (Alexander the Great) the Macedonian army conquered most of the world and created the world's largest empire ever, including South-East Europe, most of Asia and North Africa.
After the death of Alexandros, Macedonia followed the fate of the rest of Greece. It became a Roman province, later a Byzantine province, it was occupied by the Ottoman empire and finally it became part of the indepented Greek state in 1912.
Today a Slavic nation attempts to adopt the history and culture of Macedonia as their own and present themselves to the world as "ethnic Macedonians" and "descedants of ancient Macedonians"
This is a blatant attack against Greece and its world wide respected history.
The FYROM Slavs who claim to be "Macedonians" have no historical, cultural or linguistic relation with ancient Macedonia. They descended into the region not before the 6th cent. A.D. long after ancient Macedonia was homogenized with the rest of Greece. Their 'Republic of Macedonia' occupies less than 10% of ancient Macedonia.
Therefore their claim on ancient Macedonia's name, history, culture and symbols can not be justified.

Aegean Macedonia.........

is a FYROMacedonian Slav nationalist term used to refer to the region of Macedonia in Greece, in the context of a United Macedonia.
The origins of the term seem to be rooted in the 1940s but its modern usage is widely considered ambiguous and irredentist.
The term has occasionally appeared on maps circulated in the FYROM, which envisioned Greek Macedonia (referred to as "Aegean Macedonia") as part of a "Greater Macedonia", and is regarded as a challenge of of the legitimacy of Greek sovereignity over the area.

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