‘We Won't Pay’: Greek activists reconnect power to poverty-stricken homes
With a Eurozone record of 27 percent of Greeks unemployed, people are taking a pro-active approach to the crisis. Activists from the ‘We Won't Pay’ movement, which boasts 10,000 members, are illegally reconnecting power to hundreds of homes.
Tough austerity measures have left many people in Greece unable to pay their electricity bills. The ‘We Don't Pay’ movement which has over 10,000 members helps many of those by illegally reconnecting power to their homes, despite legal action against them.
The movement has been gaining new support, despite being targeted by over a hundred law suits. The government warns refusal to pay fees and taxes will only starve Greece of money it needs to get out of debt.
Members of the ‘We Don't Pay’ movement demand alternatives to the austerity measures that, as many argue, have deepened the recession and made unemployment unbearable.
“The vast majority of the public is sunk into poverty, and a few families across the world have 99 percent of the wealth. That's not something we want to bear, that's something we want to overthrow here in Greece and across the world,” Ilias Papadopoulos from the ‘We Don't Pay’ movement told RT in Athens.
Members the group, that began in a village of 3,000 people, reconnect electricity to homes and disconnect power from road tolls, making them free for motorists. Sometimes they also target the Athens metro system.
In 2011 the supporters refused to pay highway tolls and rode buses and the metro in Athens without tickets in protest against an “unfair” 40 per cent increase in fares.
Many in the country are unable to pay for Greece’s state-run electricity. With one in four Greeks currently unemployed, Christina is not the only person to have their electricity cut off two years ago.
“As the bills began piling up, I had to make my priorities - and this is where food comes first. I want to pay the bills and I want to be ok with the state, but the state hasn't been ok with us,” she told RT’s Egor Piskunov.
Greek incomes have been severely squeezed, cut by about 30 percent on average since the crisis started in 2009.
Greece's unemployment rate has tripled since 2009, as hundreds of thousands lost their jobs or businesses. Up to a thousand Greeks have been laid off daily, according to the ELSTAT statistics service.
Unemployment rose to nearly 27 percent in April, the highest reading since ELSTAT began publishing jobless data in 2006. It’s more than twice the average rate in the euro zone, which hit 12.2 percent in May.
In July Greece unlocked 5.8 billion euros ($7.7 billion) of bailout funds in European aid by putting 25,000 public sector workers on reduced wages by the end of the year. The move sparked a new wave of anti-austerity protests in Athens.
Many say the ‘We Won't Pay’ movement is likely to go on, because it has a strong legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
“We must violate or not respect a law which says thousands of people will have no electricity to cook, no electricity to see water, to see TV, no electricity, to switch on AC,” an economist from Varna Free University of Cyprus, Leonidas Vatikiotis, told RT.
Bailout money for Greece, which has already received about 90 percent of the 240 billion euros earmarked to protect it from default and possible exit from the euro zone, will run out at the end of next year. According to experts, the country is likely to need further relief to make its debt sustainable.
Friday, August 09, 2013 11:18 AM
When Will Spanish Banking System Collapse?
The question on my mind today is "When will the Spanish banking system collapse?" Spain's exposure to Portuguese sovereign debt and unrealized losses on real estate loans are two reasons a collapse in inevitable.
The Spanish banking system passed a so-called "stress test" in 2012, but sovereign government bonds are are not included in the evaluation.
We saw how well that worked with Greece (over and over again), and with Cyprus as well. It was Cypriot exposure to Greek bonds that collapsed the Cypriot banking system.
With that backdrop, please consider Will Portugal Bring Down the Spanish Banking Sector?
The Spanish banking system passed a so-called "stress test" in 2012, but sovereign government bonds are are not included in the evaluation.
We saw how well that worked with Greece (over and over again), and with Cyprus as well. It was Cypriot exposure to Greek bonds that collapsed the Cypriot banking system.
With that backdrop, please consider Will Portugal Bring Down the Spanish Banking Sector?
At its peak in the second quarter of 2008, France’s exposure to Greece totaled $86 billion. That exposure has since plummeted, partly because French banks took advantage of the ECB’s Securities Market Programme (SMP) during 2010-11 to fob off Greek bonds, effectively forcing a eurozone mutualization of the debt. SMP was terminated in September 2012.Stress-Free Tests
What is much less widely known is that Spanish bank exposure to Portugal today, as shown in our Geo-Graphic, is higher than French bank exposure to Greece in early 2010, despite the fact that the Spanish banking sector is only 40% the size of the French. Spanish bank stress tests in 2012 suggested that the capital hole was more manageable than widely feared, but those tests looked only at the domestic lending books; foreign assets were excluded.
A restructuring of Portuguese sovereign debt similar to the one completed by Greece, which involved haircuts of over 50%, could wreak havoc on Spain’s banking system. Yet delaying restructuring, as Greece is showing, may simply drag down Portugal—whose debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to approach 125% next year—faster and further, worsening creditor losses.
Without an SMP to mutualize Spanish bank exposure to Portugal, the way it mutualized French bank exposure to Greece, delaying a Portuguese restructuring will also do nothing to help Spain weather the shock. The euro area has already lent Spain €41.3 billion to recapitalize its banks, but finding a politically palatable way to convert that debt into mutualized eurozone equity may be a necessary cost of sustaining the European single currency.
Recall that seven banks that now make up Bankia collapsed over bad real estate loans. Exposure to Greek bonds was not even the issue with Bankia, and the banks allegedly passed stress tests. Bankia needed a bailout, then another. And it is going to need another.
Also recall that Greek bonds suffered thru round after round of haircuts which in turn caused a collapse in the Cypriot banking system. Sometime down the line, the same thing is going to hit Spanish banks.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
GLOBAL LOOTING: The new EU bailin law was passed 8 days ago….did you notice?
Revealed: official details on how the EU will steal from us
Are you a citizen with rights, or just a helpless crustacean?
Three beaming eurocrats – Barroso, Van Rompuy and Lithuanian Dalia Grybauskaite – emerged triumphant from a session two days ago, in which they mapped out the biggest bank heist in world history. This is to put flesh on the eurozone law hastily passed on August 1st (while EU citizens were on holiday) to deal with theinevitability event of a bank collapse. Under this draft proposal – which many expect to be applied to the entire EU – no depositor big or small will in future be able to feel safe with money deposited in a bank. The Slog now calls for those who represent us, across the entire cultural spectrum of European society – to do something.
In a barely read piece a month ago, the International Business Times reported on the rapidly drafted new EU law for “overhauling its policy on how banks receive bumper bailouts”. Be aware: this is an EU move, not a eurozone move: it is already law (it passed on August 1st) and although for now it applies only to the eurozone, it is an EU law. Hardly anyone has commented on this, but the approach being taken matches word for word the 3-card trick George Osborne used six weeks ago when he said:
“In future, taxpayers will not be called upon to bail banks out. It will be down to the creditors and the owners”.
The most remarkable example of double-speak to date, at the time I pointed out that creditors are taxpayers (they’re account holders, simple as that) and so as the Establishments daren’t ask us for higher taxes to bail out their mates in the banking system, they will take it via, if you like, Direct Debit. It is exactly the same principle of stealing the Troika wishes to apply to Greek private pension funds.
The initial piece at the IBT website noted that ‘Eurozone leaders agreed upon the major policy shift and also confirmed that the new rules will help protect the taxpayer and move the burden of bailing out the banks onto shareholders and junior debt holders.” Again, more bollocks: how will ripping your money outprotect you? And note – junior debt holders…aka, you and I.
But yesterday from the German site Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (German Economic News) came a piece reporting that all bets are off as far as the ‘guarantee of all funds under €100,000′ pledge is concerned. Under the current Lithuanian Presidency of Dalia Grybauskaite (seen left between a Trot and a poet), the proposal as drafted – and almost entirely ignored by the Western media – states as follows:
* Treatment will not be the same regardless of size of deposit, BUT small account holders will have to wait up to four weeks to get their money….’depending on how serious the insolvency is’. During that time, there will be a maximum withdrawal of €100-200 per day – again, perhaps less depending on the seriousness of the failure. (Based on the Cyprus experience, the haircut in the end will be at least 60%).
* The EU Parliament – allegedly – is demanding that deposits of €100,000+ euros should be confiscated within five days. (So much for MEPs offering us some kind of protection from the Sprouts).
* In the event of a banking collapse, all previous government commitments are null and void. The force majeur of “exceptional circumstances” can lead to ways round such pledges. Part of the new plan suggests savers could also be subject to a ‘penalty tax’ if they have less than € 100,000 in the bank. (So much for Merkel’s promise to the German people).
George Orwell could’ve dropped acid and still not come up with a scheme quite so assumptive and brazenly deranged as this one. It is based on the following insane principles:
1. Putting money in a bank makes every citizen a creditor of that bank, equally prone to confiscation in order to repay….who exactly? The answer is, other banks it owed money. So it’s not really our money after all, it’s the banking sector’s money. After it’s been taxed by the Government, despite the fact that we earned it…it’s really all bankers’ money after all. Unbelievable.
2. If we are prudent enough to keep money in smaller amounts in lots of accounts, we will have to pay a ‘penalty tax’ – well of course we will: I mean, given it’s never our money really – we’re just borrowing it, or something – then quite right too. And because it isn’t really our money, we shall be given strictly limited spending money per day. The brass neck is beyond belief.
3. If you have been seditious enough in your life to actually make quite a lot of money legally, then within five days the money that was never really yours will be taken back by its rightful owners…the bankers….or the Government rescuing the bankers but without doing it in our taxes. Why five days – why not five seconds? I mean, it’s their money: we were just earning it for safe keeping, right? Of course we were.
4. Anything is an exceptional circumstance if they say it is. Even the Nazis in 1933 had to burn down the bloody Reichstag to declare a State of Emergency. In 2013, it requires just one dumb, over-leveraged, f**kwitted bank to collapse under the weight of its CEO’s ego, and we’re all pauperised by Law.
I think the time has finally come when we must give our legislators and ‘leaders’ here in the UK a gigantic kick up the jacksy. And I think the time has come for every decent organisation to mobilise even Wayne and Waynetta to GTF off the sofa and start making it clear to the scheming Wankers of Westminster that we’re not having any of this crap here in Britain.
As I tried to point out two years ago, this is no longer a political issue. This is a case of one simple rule by which decent citizens must abide: stealing things is wrong…especially when it’s done to repair your own stupid decisions in the past.
These are the questions we should address to everyone supposed to represent us,starting today:
1. To German Sloggers, demand Angela Merkel make the safety of ALL EU citizens’ bank money a solid Election pledge next month.
2. To the Christian, Jewish, Muslim and humanist leaderships of Britain: start an outcry in the media. Why aren’t you giving your parishioners more support? Where is the outcry about pilfering from innocent citizens? Where is the condemnations of illegal, amoral confiscation?
3. To the anti-EU Conservative Right, to UKip and its leader Nigel Farage, to our MEPs – especially Dan Hannan: do you realise the delayed referendum on EU membership will come far too late to stop this? When are you going to start spelling this out to your supporters and media contacts that this is now a matter of citizen survival? Why hasn’t there been uproar in the European Parliament about this? You guys talk a good game, but where’s the line in the sand?
4. To the TUC: Your members are about to be fleeced by the Co-op’s management, and stand to be ruined by the EU’s ECB-driven policy of slashing both the wages and assets of the European workforce. Can we have less political point-scoring, and more ecumenical organising action?
5. To the Labour Party leadership: show that you truly are our friend in tough times. Stop doing bloody focus groups and poncing about between the lines of bland policy statements designed to make you look harmlessly voteworthy. Come back off your holidays and take a stand – when are you going to start hounding Camerlot bigtime on this iniquitous policy? Or are you complicit in it? Please tell us.
6. To the whingers and it-won’t-make-any-difference-it’s-nothing-to-do-with-me brigade: sorry, but you just ran out of road. Like it or not, you’re involved. Start a movement now to remove every penny of current account and deposit monies from the bank. Are you a live Homo sapiens, or a braindead lobster?
The Co-operative scandal is just the beginning. They are going to take our money and leave us all penniless….at their mercy. To combat this, we really don’t need any slogan beyond this one:
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