In another thread I posted a link to a movie that I hoped people would watch and get some commentary on but it seems it didn't take, no matter, I'll post it again and see if anyone is interested; Debtocracy
Anyway to some of The Guardian articles;
The highlighted bit had me laughing genuinely out loud when I read it. It's so typical of the complete state of flux that living in Greece is like right now. I remember last year when the story broke and Greeks were rioting on the streets not a few posters on this board were wondering 'why are they protesting for? Why can't they take their medicine like good little automatons?' It was something that had my blood boiling.[i]The Guardian[/i] wrote:Young, educated Greeks angry at being locked out of their lives
A popular comedy about young, jobless Greeks is a big hit – but it was based on a much more serious reality
By Aditya Chakrabortty Wednesday 3 August 2011 21.06 BST
You're a young European failing to get a job in a country buffeted by the worst economic turbulence in decades. After a hard day of rejections and no-replies, how do you switch off? Well, in Greece the chances are that you settle down to watch a sitcom about other young Greeks failing to get a job.
To non-Greek speakers, The 592-euro Generation looks like any other slick, glossy TV comedy: quick editing, smooth-skinned cast, and a rock soundtrack of commercially-acceptable spikiness. Yet the gags aren't quite Chandler and Joey material. There's the title for a start: a reference to the monthly minimum wage of €592 (£516) earned by those under 25.
"How do you know you're part of the €592 generation?" runs a trailer.
"When you go to the unemployment office and you know all the staff by their first name," says one character. Another, an American-trained lawyer, replies: "When you've studied at Harvard; and back in Greece your job is to serve tea to the people who serve coffee."
The genre marked "situation comedies about economic indicators" is hardly a bulging one, and plenty of other topics get the one-liner treatment. But the lack of a steady income is a constant theme: when the characters go to a bar it's clear they can only afford one drink; a meter stays on-screen in one episode, ticking away as the account balances dwindle to nothing.
Even romantic mishaps – that staple of sitcoms – do not escape the lack-of-cash nexus. "Job-hunting is like searching for a boyfriend," sighs a young woman. "You show them your best side and they still don't call you back."
When the show launched in October on Greece's answer to ITV, it ran at primetime and was chalked up as a hit, especially for a cast of unknowns. But it was among the target group of 14- to 24-year-olds that the series hit a bullseye: up to 60% of them tuned in.
This being his first TV job, scriptwriter Lambros Fisfis clung to the safety of a subject he knew well. "I wanted to write about our generation," says the 28-year-old. "And this was the closest I could get to reality without making a drama or a tragedy."
But didn't he ever question the likely success of a comedy about life on the minimum wage? Fisfis tells a funny story. The original title for the show was Generation €700 – because that was then the official bottom rate. Then, "about three to four weeks before we went on air", the government cut the going rate for young workers, ostensibly to give them a fighting chance of employment in an economy sinking further into the recessionary quicksand. Cue hurried changes in title sequences and scripts. "It was the running gag on set: 'Maybe next month we'll be called the €300 Generation.'"
The series finished not with a happy ending but an uncertain one: the entire cast left Greece, either for England or Cyprus or just taking off on a round-the-world trip. "I didn't want to write that, but the biggest export of Greece right now is its people," says Fisfis.
The media often amplifies real life, but Fisfis insists he did the opposite: manicuring the reality of being young in a country where nearly 40% of people between 16 and 24 are out of work (the equivalent in the UK is 20%).
Visiting Exarchia, Athens' more agreeable version of London's Camden Town, it becomes clear that he is right.
Upstairs in a bar on the main square are four young middle-class men, all with degrees from top universities, all fluent in English – and all struggling to get their lives out of first gear.
Worst off is Dimitris: 27 years old, with a master's in management, and an instinctive politeness. He finished studying in 2009 – Year Zero of the Greek crisis – and after two years has just begun his first proper job. For the past three months he has worked six hours a day in a call centre, cold-calling mobile phone users and trying to persuade them to switch providers.
He says the job has three main problems: it's a three-hour round trip from his home; the take-home pay is only €30 a day, and he's on a monthly contract ("Every month I have to sign a new piece of paper and say, 'Thank you for letting me work in this magnificent place!'").
There's a fourth problem: he's way over-qualified. Then again, Dimitris reckons about a third of his colleagues have at least a bachelor's degree.
"Back when we were undergraduates we used to joke: 'It'll be okay, we can become bank clerks. It's not ideal, but we'll get €20,000 a year." So what happened? His brother Andreas replies: "In 2009 all those jobs went away."
Having just landed an auditing job at the accounting firm PWC, Andreas is the luckiest of the bunch – and he knows it: "There were 2,800 applicants for 28 places." But even his fortune is limited: after taxes, his salary comes in at €14,000 which leaves a monthly budget of €150 for going out. That amounts to "two coffees with friends; two cafes with the girlfriend; and cigarettes". And certainly no chance of getting his own place. In their late 20s, Dimitris and Andreas share a bedroom at home.
Then there's Marios, who is a trained economist but is about to head back to college for a master's in accountancy. "At 27, I don't want to study any more; I want to start my life," he says. Even when these graduates do get work, they often don't get paid: Marios worked for seven months at an accountant's, and the firm didn't pay him a euro.
The argument ended with the employers telling Marios to go and work elsewhere. "They said, 'Another company might have money to pay you."
As they sit sipping their iced coffees and tugging on roll-ups ("they're cheaper than real cigarettes"), they list all the places they have thought of going instead. Marios mentions the offers he got from universities in Leicester, Surrey and Cardiff.
Panos is off to Sweden. "It doesn't make for a happy culture, all this migration," says Andreas. "Families are split up." Then Dimitris, his brother from the call centre, rebuts him: "I would love to leave."
Lois Labrianidis does not seem surprised by the scene. An economic geographer at the University of Macedonia, he says Greece turns out a higher proportion of graduates than the European average. And in some disciplines the record is even stronger: put against the size of its population, Greece produces the second-highest number of doctors in the world.
"You have a high number of graduates produced for a useless private sector," he says. "The majority of businesses and entrepreneurs behave as if they're in a developing country and can hire relatively cheap labour."
Greece has long sent its economically-active overseas – just ask the American producers of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But where in the 1960s and 1970s it was largely uneducated manual labour going abroad, now it is the graduates. In other words, Greece used to export its hands, now in a trend exacerbated by the crisis, it is exporting its brains.
What Labrianidis is analysing is a social contract – you get the grades, we give you the jobs – that has broken. One response by young Greeks is to leave; another is to protest.
What marked out this summer's demonstrations in Athens' Syntagma Square and across the country was the high-proportion of young people: hyper-educated, under-employed and radicalised.
In Britain, some of them go by the name of UK Uncut; in Spain as the Indignados; and in Greece as the Aganaktismenoi, or Frustrated. In each case, it's this class – the young, with a sense of being cheated out of a decent future – combined with public-sector workers facing job losses and drops in salaries and pensions, who combine into the most interesting political force.
Go to Syntagma Square now, and the main human activity is immigrants selling knock-off handbags. But the protesters of summer already have a date they'll be back en masse (on 3 September) and are working on propaganda.
Over souvlaki near the Athenian market in Monistiraki, George, Dimitris and Foula tell me what they want.
Quoting the Aganaktismenoi slogan of "we don't want decisions to be made for us without us", they lay into the mainstream politicians.
They are more earnestly leftwing than the would-be leavers: they quote Bakunin and argue about Naomi Klein. What unites them is a sense of being locked out of their own lives.
Pointing at the other young Greeks, Dimitris says: "These are the finest minds of our generation, and they are filling cars with gas and serving coffees." And he swears that he will fight to change things. A few minutes later, he asks where would be better to study: Preston or Sheffield.
Further, The Guardian gives the following figures; The unemployment rate in April for 15-24 year olds reached a high of 43.1%, compared to the national rate at 15.8%.!
The country is ready to explode. Greek young adults need very little to protest, these figures are just unbelievable!The thing that struck me about this article were that they were both fucked and yet one was 'doing that right think' in regards to his welfare insurance and the other was 'doing the common thing'. It just underlines the complete structural basket case Greece is.[i]The Guardian[/i] wrote:Greek rise in homelessness creates a new poor
Debt crisis forces many on to the streets through bankruptcy and job loss
By Peter Beaumont Wednesday 3 August 2011 22.00 BST
A young man is sitting in the corner of the Klimaka hostel, rocking himself against his knees in a slow repetitive rhythm. In the hostel's office a woman resident is being treated, having just been assaulted by him.
A vine grows above the yellow painted walls and green woodwork where men and women gather. They are the homeless people of Athens. Sitting among them are Petros Papadopolous and Leonidas Samios, but the stories of these two men are very different from many of the other residents. Rough sleepers who have found a bed, they are neither habitual drug users nor suffering from mental illness, unlike most of those who use the hostel.
Papadopolous and Samios are ordinary working men who have been undone by Greece's financial crisis in a country where, according to official data, unemployment is expected to climb to between 17% and 18% by the end of 2011, a figure that in reality could be as much as 5% higher. And in a country with some of the weakest social provision in Europe, whose government is pushing through a stringent austerity programme, the consequence has been the creation of a new poor, some of whom have been forced on to the streets. While the two men are happy to be photographed, the names they supply are not their own. Both are too ashamed to let their families know they are homeless.
They represent what social workers in Greece have described as an "unprecedented" surge in homelessness.
Small business owners have been made bankrupt, and entire families put on the streets. New graduates have been documented among those sleeping rough. And according to workers at the hostel, each week it welcomes two new people, amid fears that the phenomenon of the new homeless could take on "explosive proportions" if the financial crisis continues.
Indeed, according to figures compiled earlier this year by both Klimaka and the Red Cross, some 20,000 people are now living on Greece's streets, including destitute immigrants and native Greeks. Papadopolous, aged 39, is a chef. He bought a flat and – unlike so many in Greece – was fully paid up on his welfare insurance.
But in Greece today that can be a curse as much as a blessing. Because of his age, how long he has worked, and his amount of contributions, anyone seeking to employ him now would have to pay a minimum of €1,300 a month. In the current climate no one wants to do that.
"I bought my place with a loan from bank in February 2010. Then I lost my job. I worked in hotels and restaurants. But in the last restaurant I worked they told me to my face that they wanted younger, cheaper people. They told me because of the crisis they could not keep the restaurant going paying me what I was getting." So he lost his job.
"I had insurance so I managed to pay the mortgage for two months. The bank gave me six more and then they repossessed it with all my possessions except what they said I could carry out of the door, which was a bag of clothes.
"I stayed with friends for a couple of months, then it was on the streets."
Not knowing what to do, Petros Papadopolous began walking. "I wanted to kill myself at first. But then I found an empty building and I cleaned up a room.
"I found a mattress on the street to sleep on. I slept from midnight to six. The rest of the time I spent walking, looking for food."
His troubles are not over. Because the bank sold the flat for €40,000 less than it was worth, he owes them.
Even if he can find work he has been told the bank will take half his salary. And he is not optimistic about finding employment in a city where many smaller restaurants have laid off staff, and use family members to keep them running. Samios had worked all his life as a house painter and builder when the crisis came. "I've worked since I was 16 years old. It was the first time that I had ever not worked."
That was three years ago, when his problems began. And unlike Papadopolous, who had paid his insurance, Samios had asked to be given the money that should have been contributed by the companies that employed him as cash in hand because he earned so little. "It wasn't really legal," he admits ruefully, but it was common. When trouble came it meant he was entitled to no benefits at all.
"I was renting and I had enough money to pay rent for a year after I lost my job. After that I ended up sleeping in the streets." With some other men he made his home in a covered alleyway.
He is a proud man. "I lost my parents. I do have a brother who lives on one of the islands who could help me," he admits, "but I don't want to tell him that I am homeless."
So Samios, like Papadopolous, survived by eating at government foodlines, some of which provided weekly showers, until he heard of Klimaka and found a bed at the hostel.
"There are other men from the alley who are coming here [he points to a man with a plastic shopping bag]. They are just like me."
Manolis Glezos also appears in the movie I linked at the start of my post Debtocracy and he makes one interesting point; "From the time of the Revolution of 1821, our country (Greece) started borrowing. And it's been borrowing ever since. With one exception. During an extraordinary "happy" period (he says with irony), Greece managed to become a lender. During the German Occupation, Greece lent to Germany."[i]The Guardian[/i] wrote:Greek protester who resisted Nazi rule turns fire on EU
Manolis Glezos, renowned for his act of defiance 70 years ago, is now a force in Greece's civil disobedience movement
By Helena Smith Tuesday 2 August 2011 19.45 BST
Seventy years ago Manolis Glezos scaled the walls of the Acropolis to tear down the swastika, hoisted over the monument that Hitler had triumphantly described as a symbol of "human culture". This single act of defiance – the first direct action against Nazi rule in Greece – would go on to cast the headstrong young man as one of the country's greatest defenders of democracy.
Today the enemy may have changed, but at nearly 89, Glezos is still fighting. For many Greeks he has become a symbol of resistance in another, very different sort of war: one that has pitted the near-bankrupt country against the forces of world capitalism and thrown it into an unprecedented struggle for its economic survival.
In the midst of Athens' worst crisis in modern times, Glezos says he never thought he would see Greece come to this. "Not since the German occupation have we been in such a difficult and dangerous situation," he laments, with an angry thump of his hand.
"Economically, democratically, the Greek people are seeing hard-won rights being wiped away. Unemployment is growing, shops are closing daily and decisions that are totally unconstitutional are being made."
Popular icon, protester par excellence, Glezos does not require much to goad him into action. The veteran leftwinger is a force in the civil disobedience movement shaking Greece.
As a proponent of direct democracy, the campaign that has propelled thousands of Greeks to protest against the austerity measures meted out to rein in the country's runaway debt, demand for Glezos to be on the frontline at demonstrations is at an all-time high.
"People are not going to back down. They are very conscious of what they want," he says, seated before a desk in the book-lined study of his Athenian home. "The summer may be here but I've been very busy attending neighbourhood assemblies to discuss what our future tactics might be."
In March last year pictures of the wiry, white-haired activist being teargassed by a riot policeman outside the Greek parliament sent a tremor through Europe's nascent anti-austerity movement. But, though appalled by the harshness with which rallies have often been crushed, Glezos reserves his greatest criticism for the attitude of Germany and Britain towards Greece. Both countries, he insists, stand guilty of "enormous ingratitude".
"Germany today lives not under Nazi rule but in a state of freedom and that it owes in great part to the struggle of the Greek people," he said, referring to Hitler's disastrous decision to postpone the invasion of the Soviet Union as a result of the unexpected resistance encountered in Greece. "Then there is the issue of food. If German people are alive it is because Greek people died."
Glezos has not forgotten the howls of the starving or the images of municipal carts carrying the corpses of those who, during the Nazi occupation, collapsed begging for food in the streets of Athens.
He knows not only because he was there; he counted them.
"I worked in the statistics office of the International Red Cross and every day I would note the deaths of around 400 people as a result of famine. We lost 13.5% of our population, more than any other occupied country, because all of our foodstuffs, our crops, were requisitioned [by the Wehrmacht]. For those two reasons alone Germany should help Greece."
Throughout the war "little Greece" had stood alongside the Allied forces. "Who came to England's help? Who was behind the first victory against the Axis [powers]?" he asked, conjuring the Greeks' defeat of Mussolini's forces on the Albanian front in 1940. "Who did Churchill so famously say fought like heroes? Britain should have tried and helped Greece at this difficult moment. Its behaviour should have been different."
Glezos, who would subsequently spend nearly two decades in prison – often in solitary confinement — as Greece slipped into civil war and then years of authoritarian rightwing rule, backs up his argument with figures.
It wasn't just the famine and the thousands killed in reprisals as a result of mass resistance, or the eradication of virtually all of Greece's once vibrant Jewish community or the destruction of the countryside. It was, he says, the other indignities suffered by Greece under Hitler. The pillaging of archaeological treasures, the plundering of factories and homes, the looting of national resources, the crippling of the Greek economy – following the Nazis' deliberate circulation of counterfeit Deutschmarks – offences that were all part of what Churchill would go on to call the "long night of barbarism" and from which it has yet to recover.
"To this day, Greece remains the only country in Europe that never received reparations from Germany," added the former MP, who has long headed the National Council for the Reclamation of German Debt. "We never got back any of the antiquities that they took, or the buildings that they seized, or the tons of silver and nickel that they stole.
"If you take into account the enforced occupation loan, I estimate that they owe us around €162bn, plus interest."
Glezos, who has proposed that Berlin fund companies in Greece and scholarships for students bound for Germany by way of compensation, insists he is neither motivated by hatred nor revenge. He has many German friends and every year, he says, they descend on Athens to "try and right the wrong" by demonstrating outside the German embassy. But he is infuriated that Greeks are invariably typecast by the German media as lazy laggards when studies show them working the longest hours in Europe. "The latest agreement to save Greece is all about saving banks and financial capital, not people," he says. "After the war, we won our freedom but we emerged as vassals, first of the English and then the Americans. Being indebted in this way keeps us in that subordinate role. Our new masters are the troika [the EU, IMF and ECB] and they have to go. Mark my words, the Greeks will play a pivotal role in resisting the policies they want to impose."
Further, the highlighted part, that 'meme' (and I use that euphemism very lightly because what it actually is, is plain old racism) that found it's way on this board at times during this whole scenario completely sends me over the edge.
