Solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Greece -

[TBF]

The KKE hung 2 giant banners from the rock of the Acropolis on Saturday morning, the second day of the 48hr general strike. Hundreds of members of the KKE holding red flags and shouting slogans against the barbaric measures of the government-EU-plutocracy called on the people to a general rising up and state of alert.

http://inter.kke.gr/News/news2012/2012-02-11-48ori-2mera



Today in Greece:



Greece's parliament was expected to defy angry protesters on the streets of Athens and endorse a deeply unpopular package of savage austerity measures in order to try to avoid a sovereign default and retain the euro as its currency.

With eurozone leaders declaring it was time for Greece to put up or shut up and that Athens' promises could no longer be believed, Greece's two main political parties and the caretaker prime minister invoked apocalyptic scenarios for the country if the €3.3bn (£2.76bn) of cuts ordained by the eurozone were not supported.

Street battles between police firing rounds of tear gas and demonstrators hurling firebombs and marble slabs left Syntagma Square, the plaza in front of the parliament building, resembling a war zone. Rubbish bins burned as plumes of smoke and asphyxiating clouds of toxic chemicals filled the air...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/12/greece-eurozone-bailout-deal

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[David__77]

2. KKE has more public support than PASOK now.

And rightly so. Greece would be better off under a KKE-led government.

KKE and Syriza poll 12% each, with PASOK at 8%.

[Starry Messenger]

3. +1

[Starry Messenger]

4. Seeing those signs in front of the Parthenon--

It's hard to describe. It has a "history starts here again" feeling. You can read Engels' Origin of the Family, State & Private Property, and the evolution of the modern state from Greece up until the modern era and it all seems a bit abstract. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/

But then we come back to Greece, and we've come full circle.

The further political history of Athens up to the time of Solon is only imperfectly known. The office of basileus fell into disuse; the positions at the head of the state were occupied by archons elected from the nobility. The power of the nobility continuously increased, until about the year 600 B.C. it became insupportable. And the principal means for suppressing the common liberty were – money and usury. The nobility had their chief seat in and around Athens, whose maritime trade, with occasional piracy still thrown in, enriched them and concentrated in their hands the wealth existing in the form of money. From here the growing money economy penetrated like corrosive acid into the old traditional life of the rural communities founded on natural economy. The gentile constitution is absolutely irreconcilable with money economy; the ruin of the Attic small farmers coincided with the loosening of the old gentile bonds which embraced and protected them. The debtor’s bond and the lien on property (for already the Athenians had invented the mortgage also) respected neither gens nor phratry, while the old gentile constitution, for its part, knew neither money nor advances of money nor debts in money. Hence the money rule of the aristocracy now in full flood of expansion also created a new customary law to secure the creditor against the debtor and to sanction the exploitation of the small peasant by the possessor of money. All the fields of Attica were thick with mortgage columns bearing inscriptions stating that the land on which they stood was mortgaged to such and such for so and so much. The fields not so marked had for the most part already been sold on account of unpaid mortgages or interest, and had passed into the ownership of the noble usurer; the peasant could count himself lucky if he was allowed to remain on the land as a tenant and live on one-sixth of the produce of his labor, while he paid five-sixths to his new master as rent. And that was not all. If the sale of the land did not cover the debt, or if the debt had been contracted without any security, the debtor, in order to meet his creditor's claims, had to sell his children into slavery abroad. Children sold by their father – such was the first fruit of father-right and monogamy! And if the blood-sucker was still not satisfied, he could sell the debtor himself as a slave. Thus the pleasant dawn of civilization began for the Athenian people.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch05.htm

[Starry Messenger]

5. Mikis Theodorakis, renowned 88 years old composer & human rights activist, teargassed in Athens

https://twitter.com/stefosis/status/168812959269785602/photo/1

[TBF]

6. Workers rights endangered in Greece

Workers’ Rights Endangered in Greece
Wednesday, 8 February 2012, 2:51 pm
Press Release: ITUC

Brussels, 7 February 2012 (ITUC OnLine): The ITUC has condemned the attacks on workers’ rights in the current demands being made of the Greek government by the European Union and the IMF . The international trade union movement has urged all parties to engage instead in a genuine dialogue that could build a consensus-based economic recovery in Greece.

The IMF and the European Union are pressuring, among other conditions, for deregulation of labour rights in the private sector, enhanced wage flexibility including reductions in the minimum wage, legislative changes to facilitate employment reductions and other forms of interference in freely determined collective bargaining processes...

More - http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1202/S00212/workers-rights-endangered-in-greece.htm

[socialist_n_TN]

7. The Greeks need to go ahead and bite the bullet.......

and overthrow the bankers and institute a TRUE worker's government. Nationalize the fixed assets of the ownership classes and try to find international support. I STILL think that they could get support from a lot of the Latin American countries. And it won't be long before there will be other Euro candidates for worker's governments. This can't last.

[TBF]

8. KKE is ready - Turkey's communist party concurs

Joint statement of Communist Party of Turkey and Communist Party of Greece 2/3/12

SOCIALISM WILL and MUST WIN!

We are optimist! The working class, the popular forces will defeat capitalism! All expectations preaching that a system, which has caused two immense wars, fascism and military dictatorships and numerous regional conflicts within two centuries, left millions under conditions of hunger, poverty and unemployment, can be humanized shall be definitely rejected.

As long as the struggle of laboring people for independence, sovereign rights, peace, justice and social, democratic and trade unions rights do not become part of a political perspective that exceeds the limits of this rotten system, the exploitative classes could manage to utilize the poor to heal its own wounds.

Today, it is evident that a similar trap is being set in the course of the capitalist crisis, which affects the system as a whole, sharpens the inter-imperialist contradictions, the imperialist interventions and wars for the control of raw materials, energy, transport routes, for the market shares. These contradictions pose to the people in a more imperative way the question: socialism or capitalist barbarity, with countless victims, in fact human sacrifices for the profits of capitalists!

For the communists there is no other way in favour of the working class and the popular strata except from the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism that breeds crises, unemployment, poverty, educational and cultural downgrading, interventions and wars...

More: http://inter.kke.gr/News/news2012/2012-02-03-tkp-kke

[TBF]

9. The past 24 hours in Greece in photos

[Starry Messenger]

10. "PAME rallies against the new Memorandum 10-12 2 2012"

[white_wolf]

11. The Greeks invented democracy.

If any people are capable of saving democracy, it's the Greeks. Finally, I feel this quote is an appropriate, “I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world”-Socrates. Solidarity!

[TBF]

12. You know it's funny WW

when I was even in my 20s I thought about the idea of moving to other countries and couldn't fathom it. It's been the last decade that has thoroughly disgusted me - particularly Bush's grab for fascism. It made me re-think everything I had ever been taught.

Despite having family "roots" here since the 1600s I now consider myself a citizen of the world as well - a working-class citizen who is in solidarity with all who are resisting.

[TBF]

13. Update from the KKE - losses for the people of Greece detailed

?he myths concerning the crisis and the response of the KKE and the class-oriented labour movement.

A life of hell for the working class, for all the people who toil is being prepared by the black front of the coalition government-Troika-plutocracy. Their agreement on the measures which have been announced is only the precursor for infinitely worse measures, which they will bring with their “new agreement” by June 2012.

The new memorandum of impoverishment which was voted on 12.2 includes amongst other the following measures:

Salaries

Reduction of basic salaries by 22% (National General Collective Agreement-NGCA, sectoral and professional agreements).
The basic salary for the newly hired workers will be further reduced by 10%, besides the 22% reduction i.e. a reduction of 32%.
Abolition of sectoral bargaining agreements.
Freezing of wages till 2015.
Full time employment will be converted to part-time employment, upon the decision of the employers.
Automatic wage increases based on seniority are suspended till unemployment falls below 10% , in fact they are abolished.
Collective bargaining agreements will last for maximum three years.
All collective bargaining agreements which apply today will expire one year after the adoption of the new memorandum.
Review of the new NGCA by the end of July in order to align with the basic salary in rival countries (Portugal, Turkey, Central and Southeastern Europe).
Abolition of one-sided recourse to arbitration.

<snip>

Additional measures in 2012

Reduction in the sector of healthcare and pharmaceutical spending by 1.1 billion Euros.
Cuts in a series of social benefits, by enacting criteria based on income.
Reduction of benefits for families with more than 3 children.
Reduction of operational and consumption spending of the state by 300 million Euros.
Cuts on several entities supervised by the ministries of Education and Culture by 200 million Euros.
Reduction of expenditure on the overtime of doctors in hospitals by 50 million Euros.
Reduction of Public Investment Programmes by 400 million Euros.
Reduction of expenditure on military equipment for the defense of the country.
A new tax system in June 2012 which will abolish a series of tax breaks which have remained for sections of the workers. Larger tax exemptions for big capital


The myths regarding the crisis must be rejected

This massacre of the working class-popular gains which are being implemented by the memorandum of 12/2/2012 as well as Memorandum 1 (2010) and the so-called Medium-term programme were not discovered now, they were clearly described from the Maastricht Treaty to the “Strategy for the Euro 2020” which were agreed on by all the governments in the EU before the crisis. The crisis is of the capitalist system itself and not of the debt as various bourgeois and opportunist claim. The capitalist crisis is the opportunity and pretext for the imposition of measures now which have been already scheduled and are necessary of the competitiveness and profitability of the European monopolies. These are reactionary measures which have as their urgent goal extremely cheap labour power and the mass eradication of small and medium-sized businesses. Without radical changes at the level of the economy and power, as long as the capitalist monopolies are dominant everywhere within the EU there cannot be a pro-people solution, as the opportunist forces, such as SYN/SYRIZA and the forces of the “European Left Party”(ELP). The various so-called pro-people funds, the utopian humanization of the ECB, the various loans which will again be paid for by the people either through Eurobonds or through renegotiation which is proposed by the ELP or through the separation of the debt into allegedly moral and odious debt which again means that the people will pay.

Such management proposals serve capitalist profitability and incriminate the people, so they must be rejected...

Much more here: http://inter.kke.gr/News/news2012/2012-02-16-metra/

[Starry Messenger]

14. That's insane.

Those reductions are devastating.

[TBF]

15. Wait til they get started in this country ... nt

[Starry Messenger]

16. Did you you see this?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002319864 We're just doing it by the back door.

[TheKentuckian]

17. not to mention clear evidence of the purposes of those behind this shit.

They are going after the incomes of workers, a situation that kills revenue and makes paying government debt even more impossible to repay.

This has nothing at all to do with fiscal responsibility or even cutting spending, they just want poverty and to make the people peasants.

Those behind this should be dealt with beyond harshly, but first those implementing these policies for those behind it should take the brunt and I don't think there is such a thing as "going to far", in these circumstances.