Skip to content

Greece

Irish Burn Water Bills, Fly Greek Flag In Solidarity At Mass Dublin Protest

A LARGE CROWD has marched to the GPO in Dublin today as water charge protests return to the capital. Having taken a backseat to campaigning for the same-sex marriage referendum, is once again at the forefront of the political agenda. Today in Dublin, thousands marched to the GPO, where they heard a speech from independent TD Catherine Murphy and proceeded to burn their Irish Water bills. There were a number of Greek flags on display, as protesters used the event to show solidarity with the country, which is teetering on the edge of default. Union officials and leaders from the Right2Water campaign also addressed the crowds. While there was a small Garda presence, no incidents have been reported.

Athens Protesters Call For Greece To Defy Troika & Leave Euro

By Ruadhán Mac Cormaic in Irish Times - From the steps of the imposing parliament building, Katherina Sergidou gestures at the swelling crowd that stretches out across Syntagma Square, filling the night sky with defiant chants. “We’re here to show there are a lot of us,” she says proudly. “A big window has opened – a window of change.” On the eve of an emergency EU summit aimed at striking an 11th-hour deal to end the stand-off between Greece and its lenders, thousands took to the streets of Athens last night to keep up the pressure on Greece’s government, led by the left-radical Syriza, and to show defiance in the face of pressure from the EU and the IMF. The protest, organised by left-wing parties and trade unions, was also designed as a response to a right-wing protest held in the city at the weekend.

Greeks Will Default As Central Bank Turns On Government

By Mehreen Khan in Telegraph - The Greek government has admitted it will become the first developed country in history to default on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) if its creditor powers fail to strike a deal with the Leftist government over its eurozone future in the coming days. With just 13 days before the country’s bail-out programme officially expires, finance ministers will gather in Luxembourg on Thursday to discuss whether to finally give their assent to release bail-out cash and stave off an unprecedented default. Before the 11th hour attempt to secure a deal, Athens’ chief negotiator said his government had run out of cash to make a €1.6bn payment to the IMF, also on June 30. "At the moment we haven’t got the money," said Oxford-educated minister Euclid Tsakalotos.

Protesters Occupy Greek Finance Ministry

By Adam Justice For IBTimes. Greek Communist party labour union supporters occupied the finance ministry on Thursday (11 June) and prevented staff from entering over fears that the government will agree to further concessions in order to come to a cash-for-reform deal with lenders. As ratings agency Standard & Poor's downgraded Greek bonds further into junk status, questioning whether Athens can pay its debts, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras held a new round of late-night talks on Wednesday (10 June) with the leaders of Germany and France and expressed confidence that a solution was at hand. "The prime minister's statement about the (upcoming) deal and how it is going well, is like a declaration of war on the working classes," said protester Effie Malliou. "There is no way we can endure any more under austerity, the working class's income has already suffered a lot," added Malliou.

Greek Leader: Cannot Consent To ‘Irrational’ Proposals

Greece cannot accept the "irrational" proposal made this week by its bailout creditors, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told an emergency Parliament session Friday, adding that any deal must also include some lightening of the country's crushing debt load. "There is no question of our accepting an agreement that does not contain the prospect of debt restructuring" that would help Greece regain the market access lost five years ago, Tsipras said. Despite a significant writedown in 2012, Greece's debt remains huge, at nearly 180 percent of annual output. Bailout creditors had initially promised further respite, but details on their latest proposal leaked by Athens made no mention of debt lightening. Tsipras' speech came the morning after a surprise announcement that Greece would defer an IMF payment due Friday, and would instead bundle all four installments due in June — a total of 1.6 billion euros — into one payment at the end of the month.

Newsletter – Overcome Fear With Love

Instead of taking action to prevent or mitigate the next crisis, politicians are causing more harm as they work hand in hand with the wealthy elites who are trying to grab even greater power and extract even greater riches. Maryland's governor was quick to bring in the National Guard and militarized police, but just cut Baltimore education funding by $11.6 million to fund pensions, while last week the state approved funding for a youth jail the people in Baltimore don't want. This article provides five key facts about Baltimore and a graphic that shows how the United States built its wealth on slavery, Jim Crow and racially-based economic injustice and kept African Americans from benefiting the economy. Also, as a special addition to recognize BB King, he sings "Why I Sing the Blues" describing the history of African Americans from slavery until today.

Greek Anti-Austerity Protesters Occupy Siemens Office In Athens

A small group of demonstrators occupied the Athens headquarters of German industrial group Siemens on Monday, police and company officials said, in a protest against the austerity policies imposed on Greece by its lenders. About 30 people entered the building in a northern Athens suburb, occupying the Siemens offices and hanging a banner outside the main entrance ahead of a scheduled rally to the German embassy planned for later this month. "We are not negotiating with domestic and foreign capitalists," read the banner. The protesters also threw flyers saying: "We won't become a colony of Germany or any other Imperialist power". Many Greeks blame Germany for the harsh austerity policies that the country's international lenders have demanded in exchange for 240 billion euros ($268 billion) of bailout funds since 2010.

Greece’s Tsipras Threatens Referendum On EU If No Deal Reached

In a three-hour appearance on private TV channel Star TV on April 27, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras spoke extensively about the challenges confronting the anti-austerity government led by the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA). The program began with a grilling of Tsipras by interviewer Niko Katsinikolao and ended with questions from a 50-strong audience. A lot of questions reflected growing concern that talks with the country’s creditors — mainly the “Troika” of the European Union (EU), European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) — were stalled. A recent Greek poll showed 45.5% agreed with the government's negotiating strategy (down from 72% in February), but 39.5% say the strategy is wrong (up from 28% in February). Tsipras’s appearance came after an April 24 meeting of eurozone finance ministers (the “Eurogroup”) in the Latvian capital Riga. The talks failed to make headway in negotiating an agreement over terms for releasing some of the €7.2 billion earmarked for Greece under the second Troika “bail-out” package.

Piven On Syriza & Greece’s Prospects For Fighting Austerity

Anybody who is running for an election wants to win enough votes to take the seat for which she or he is campaigning. To do that, they tend to be conciliatory; they don’t want to make any enemies. They want to win just enough to get over the electoral barrier. They tend to be consensual, they tend to not want to make trouble. They want to keep everyone that voted for them last time and add the few more that they need to get over the hump. Movements are very different. They are dynamic. How they grow, how they succeed is very different. Protest movements in particular do two things. They identify issues that politicians want to ignore, because the politicians want to paste together a coalition that can win. Movement leaders, on the other hand, want to identify the issues that can mobilize people.

German Couple Pay Greece £630 ‘War Reparations’

A German couple visiting Greece walked into a town hall and handed over €875 (£630, approximately $1,000) in what they said were second world war reparations. Dimitris Kotsouros, the mayor of Nafplio, a seaport in the Peloponnese, said: “They came to my office yesterday morning, saying they wanted to make up for their government’s attitude. They made their calculations and said each German owed €875 for what Greece had to pay during world war two.” The mayor of the historic town where the tourists deposited their cheque said the money had since been donated to a local charity. The couple chose his town “because it was the first capital of Greece in the 19th century”, he added. Greek media reports named the pair as Ludwig Zacaro and Nina Lahge. They say Zacaro is retired and Lahge works a 30-hour week. They did not have enough money to pay for two, one paper said.

Greece: Memory & Debt

Memory is selective and therein lays an explanation for some of the deep animosity between Berlin and Athens in the current debt crisis that has shaken the European Union (EU) to its foundations. For German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble, “memory” goes back to 2007 when Greece was caught up in the worldwide financial conflagration touched off by American and European speculators. Berlin was a major donor in the 240 billion Euro “bailout”—89 percent of which went to pay off the gambling debts of German, French, Dutch and British banks. Schauble wants that debt repaid. Millions of Greeks are concerned about unpaid debts as well, although their memories stretch back a little further. In July, 1943 Wehrmacht General Hubert Lanz, commander of the First Mountain Division, was annoyed because two of his officers had been threatened by civilians in the Western Greek town of Kommeno.

Protesters Occupy Athens Law School

A group of 150 anarchists has occupied the main School of Law building in downtown Athens demanding the release of convicted Greek leftists and the repeal of anti-terror laws. According to Greek media, individuals stormed the building at around 8 a.m. local time, forcing students and others present to flee the premises. Protestors are demanding the release of jailed leftist bomber Savvas Xiros along with the abolition of high-security “Type C” prisons (Type C) and Greek counter-terrorism legislation. Similar occupations are also underway at the offices of the ruling Syriza party on the island of Crete and at the offices of left-wing Thessaloniki newspaper “Avgi.” A similar occupation took place earlier this week at the headquarters the Syriza party in Athens in a protest over the construction of Type C prisons and laws concerning terrorism.

Greece Sours German Relations With Demand For War Reparations

Greece’s strained relations with Germany took a turn for the worse on Wednesday when Athens’ leftist-led government raised the spectre of seizing German assets for war reparations that it claimed Berlin has stubbornly refused to honour. In an address before the Greek parliament, Alexis Tspiras, the Greek prime minister, said Germany had “a moral obligation” to make amends for the atrocities wrought during three devastating years of Nazi occupation. Berlin, he said, had deliberately flouted its duty employing “legal tricks and delay”. “Germany has never properly paid reparations for the damage done to Greece by the Nazi occupation,” the premier told the house as deputies debated establishing a committee to seek war reparations, repayment of a forced loan and the return of plundered antiquities.

What Europe’s Hopeful Left Can Learn From Latin America

Hope is not just the ability to wish or fantasise. It is a tool for taking alternative realities seriously so that they might actually become possible. With hope, people can make mental space and concrete preparations for alternative ways of organising their societies – alternatives that are already lurking in the present, but which are simply not thought possible yet. Austerity is unrealistic because it demands that we abandon hope, which is an essential component of our humanity. Our inherent capacity to dream and aspire collectively is our only way to make a truly better world, and a political “reality” that does not accept the possibility of alternatives is not a reality at all, but a demented fiction. In Latin America, the eruption of hope in the face of austerity began with a real sense of injustice and frustration across different sectors of the population, quickly reaching beyond the dedicated activist to the ordinary citizen.

Anarchists Storm Greek Ruling Party HQ

Anarchists occupied Greece's ruling party headquarters on Sunday in support of hunger strikers protesting against conditions in the country's maximum-security jails. A group of 50 anarchists burst into the offices of the radical left-wing Syriza party in downtown Athens on Sunday, forcing staff to leave the building, party officials said. "I was inside my office giving my first official interview to a radio station," the party's new spokeswoman Rania Svigou told AFP. "I had locked the door so I wouldn't be disturbed. Then I heard banging and shouting." she said. "I finished the interview and went out to see what was happening and they told us to get out," she added. Svigou said party workers did not call the police. Syriza has often criticised heavy-handed policing of anti-austerity protests in the past.
assetto corsa mods

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.