RANT: Athens is Burning

Athens is burning. Protesters are going out into the streets of the capital in their thousands to demontsrate their outright anger at the proposed austerity cuts by the Greek government. Petrol bombs have gone off in the Greek capital and three people have died when a petrol bom was thrown inside a bank in the downtown area. How totally tragic.

The Greek people are showing just how much anger they have at the news that these austerity measures are going to include massive cuts to public worker pay, cuts in health and education spending, and many other public spending cuts. I was stunned yesterday to learn that Greek public school teachers have been told that their monthly salaries will be slashed to just 540 Euros - yes, a month. 540 Euros a month?! Who the hell can live on that in a modern European country?

And who do we to thank for all of this? Three little (ghastly) letters - IMF.

The International Mafia Fund has insisted that the multi-billion euro loan it is giving Greece is absolutely contingent on massive public spending cuts by the Greek government. No surprises there at all - this has been the modus operandi sine qua non for this legal Mafiosi financial cartel run out of Washington D.C. for years now. It's blandly referred to as 'structural adjustment' of a national economy. Typical unthreatening econospeak. It's nothing less than the rape, pillage and eventual evisceration of a nation's social welfare systems, social protections and public spending.

Goodbye public health, public education, the protection of workers' and labour rights. Hello privatization, slashed public spending and the whoring of your economy to the sharks that are international investors and banking. That's what you get when you allow the predator, the financial vampire that is the IMF into your country's finances.

Guatemala has been there. Argentina has been there. Countless other countries, nearly all in the developing world, have been there in one way or another since the 1970s. Now it's the turn of Greece.

The poor Greeks. This is what they get for having the corrupt governments they've had for nearly 30 years now. This is what they get for believing in the EU. This is what they get for becoming a member of the eurozone. This is what they get done to their hard-fought social welfare system and labour protections.

Greece has been sold right down the line. By its own governments, by the EU, by the European Central
Bank, by that greatest villain of all, the IMF. And the Greek people know it. Oh boy, do they know it.

There are reports from some Greek citizens that the riots are being 'overblown' by the media and that the protests are largely 'peaceful'. That may have been the case until today and, who knows, may yet be mainly the case...but I do have my doubts. The images on TV, as 'over-manipulated' as they might be by international news stations are nevertheless very disturbing when one remembers that this is a capital city in the EU that one is seeing before one's eyes. And it looks bad enough.

Can anyone really blame ordinary Greek citizens for their outraged anger and need to vent in the streets of their ancient capital?

And so parts of Athens burn. At least for now. I find it tragic to watch on TV. And it makes me so angry.

Just how much worse this crisis will become for Greece only time will tell. Sometimes time does not heal - sometimes time can be downright frightening.

Do you get my point?