lunedì 31 dicembre 2012

2012 good news





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domenica 30 dicembre 2012

Felicità interna lorda



SGI


caldeggiamo fortemente la visione integrale di tutti gli episodi di "Felictà Interna lorda" , visibili su RAI3.IT



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A sinistra il solito casino

Non impareremo mai. Dopo anni, decenni di errori, siamo di nuovo qui a ripeterli. Mentre il capitalismo mostra la sua faccia peggiore, mentre la democrazia viene bistrattata, mentre il sistema occidentale va a rotoli, noi siamo ancora qui con le nostre piccole beghe di cortile.
Non ci sono innocenti, in questa situazione. Non il movimento arancione di De Magistris che ha calato pesantemente il suo cappello sulla nuova lista, il quarto polo anti-liberista. Non Antonio Ingroia, persona di prestigio e lotte specchiate, che trasforma una iniziativa dal basso in una lista personale, senza nemmeno passare per una consultazione democratica. Non i segretari dei partiti (escludendo, va detto, Paolo Ferrero che un passo indietro lo aveva fatto) che invece di fare un pò di autocritica, guardando ai disastri politici (e nel caso dell'IdV non certo solo politici) combinati in questi anni, hanno deciso di rilanciare la vecchia e ormai screditata nomenklatura. Ma anche non il movimento Cambiare#sipuò che sembra ormai avviato verso la rottura con Rivoluzione Civile non sulla base dei programmi, comuni, ma sul metodo - appunto sulle candidature. Quanto poi al metodo di stilare delle richieste e poi giocare al "prendere o lasciare", non mi pare un modo serio di dialogare con gli altri interlocutori, a cui è semplicemente chiesto di abbassare la testa.
No, non ci sono innocenti. Siamo davanti ad una occasione storica, siamo nel pieno della crisi economica, siamo in una situazione in cui le istituzioni della democrazia occidentale non riescono a rappresentare milioni e milioni di cittadini. E noi ci si divide sui nomi, sul metodo. Quando il problema comune di tutti è la crisi del capitalismo e la società che ne verrà fuori. Pensiamoci.


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mercoledì 26 dicembre 2012

Il grande crash spagnolo

Oggi proponiamo un documentario prodotto da Paul Mason che racconta la crisi finanziaria in Spagna.




Il documentario è stato duramente attaccato dal governo spagnolo e questo è solamente un motivo in più per guardarlo. Mason, che ha seguito per NewsNight tutta l'evolversi della crisi greca e di quella europea in generale, fornisce un dettagliato resoconto di cosa sia la vita in Spagna ai tempi della crisi, dell'economia drogata dalla finanza e di come i salvataggi della UE siano sempre a favore dei soliti noti.
Un'ora di grande giornalismo, da non perdere assolutamente e da diffondere il più possibile.



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lunedì 24 dicembre 2012

Alfonso Gianni lascia SEL

Pubblichiamo di seguito la lettera di Alfonso Gianni, uno dei fondatori di SEL, a Nichi Vendola. Lettera in cui si annuncia l'abbandono di Gianni. Una lettera tutta politica che bene inquadra i limiti politici della scelta di Vendola e la sostanziale marginalità di SEL sia nella lotta politica che nel futuro assetto governativo.

Ecco perché lascio SEL

di Alfonso Gianni

da controlacrisi.org

Caro Nichi,
con la presente voglio renderti nota la mia decisione di terminare qui la mia militanza in Sinistra Ecologia Libertà.
Immagino che la cosa non ti stupisca. Ho sempre espresso nel corso dei miei interventi all’Assemblea nazionale e negli scritti nel nostro sito – fintanto che qualcuno ha assunto la decisione di non farli più comparire – le ragioni ampiamente articolate e motivate del mio crescente dissenso rispetto alla linea che la nostra organizzazione veniva assumendo, per la verità più nella realtà dei comportamenti che dei documenti ufficiali.
Sai bene che fin dal congresso di Firenze non ho mai creduto che si potesse mantenere in vita un’organizzazione, che pure incorporava in sé il principio del superamento di sé stessa, senza darle un profilo politico-programmatico e una vita autonomi. Visto che a te piace l’espressione forbita, espressi questa osservazione dicendo con linguaggio ironico, ma sincero, che non si può essere transeunti se almeno non si è essenti.
Così non è stato. Progressivamente si è sempre più indebolita la dimensione autonoma della nostra esistenza, finendo per trovarci nel cono d’ombra dell’iniziativa del Pd.
Tutto è ruotato attorno alla questione delle primarie. Queste avrebbero dovuto riaprire la partita in alternativa alla costruzione del partito. Tuttavia quando esse sono giunte il nostro ruolo non è certo stato protagonista e l’esito è stato contenuto. Un risultato che era nell’ordine delle cose e che non considero di per sé sconfortante, ma che indubbiamente era ed è anni luce molto lontano dalle attese create da un gruppo dirigente che da tempo aveva perduto il senso della realtà.
Coerentemente con questa impostazione ogni struttura è stata lasciata nella più totale indeterminazione, dai forum all’evanescente comitato scientifico.
Le tue ultime dichiarazioni rilasciate alla stampa hanno del resto chiarito che tu affidi alle primarie stesse il ruolo di fase costituente per la costruzione del “partito dei progressisti, il partito del futuro”. Esse non sono quindi un mezzo per democratizzare una contesa elettorale strozzata da una legge elettorale ingiusta (che peraltro noi non siamo riusciti a modificare, anche perché scegliemmo il referendum sbagliato), ma il viatico per la costruzione di una cosiddetta grande sinistra imperniata sul ruolo preponderante del Partito democratico.
Un desiderio legittimo, ma che non condivido e che a mio parere contraddice apertamente la scelta congressuale fatta a Firenze. Per questa ragione ho anche avanzato la richiesta di un congresso straordinario, cui si è risposto con il silenzio o peggio con la derisione.
In questo quadro sono venute avanti scelte di collocazione internazionale che spingono Sel verso il Pse. Alla mia richiesta di un chiarimento politico su un simile percorso, cosa certamente di non lieve importanza data la centralità dell’Europa nel nostro agire, non si è mai data risposta, né si è pensato fosse opportuno aprire un dibattito nelle sedi preposte.
Siamo giunti così alla firma di una carta di intenti che costringe Sel al rispetto di trattati internazionali che, proprio in nome del nostro convinto europeismo, avevamo respinto nei nostri documenti ufficiali e alle decisioni prese a maggioranza nei gruppi parlamentari che si costituiranno su tutte le questioni controverse. Sapendo in anticipo che tale maggioranza sarà saldamente in mano al Pd è già chiaro quale sarà il nostro futuro. Questo è il motivo che mi ha convinto a non partecipare alle primarie, che comportavano la firma di un appello che includeva l’accettazione di quella carta di intenti, e che mi porterà a non votare per la coalizione dei progressisti e dei democratici nelle prossime elezioni politiche.
Già alla fine di agosto del 2010, in un articolo su il Manifesto, avvertivo che il confronto programmatico con il Pd, se si voleva salvare il centrosinistra, andava cominciato da subito, chiamando a questo impegno l’intera sinistra alternativa, a cominciare da quella diffusa sul territorio ed espressione diretta dei movimenti sociali. Una simile scelta avrebbe rafforzato non solo la posizione di Sel nei confronti del Pd, ma la sua autorevolezza come forza guida nel campo della sinistra radicale.
Non lo si è voluto fare, se non in forma parziale, ristretta e quasi clandestina verso la fine del governo Berlusconi. Ma quando Monti venne nominato da Napolitano abbiamo faticato ad assumere una decisa posizione di opposizione. Ma soprattutto il nostro gruppo dirigente non ha colto la novità sostanziale che quel governo rappresentava: quello di dare corpo a una nuova governance delle classi dominanti, fortemente integrata con le elites vincenti in Europa, sostituendo alla destra berlusconiana una più presentabile dignitosa destra tecnocratica. Un governo costituente, quindi, tutt’altro che una parentesi, che avrebbe proiettato la sua ombra ben oltre la durata della legislatura, come sta puntualmente accadendo.
Un simile passaggio imponeva, al di là delle scadenze elettorali, di dare vita a un vero lavoro di costruzione di una sinistra moderna, inclusiva, ma autonoma da quella che si era ormai fatta centro, collegata con le migliori esperienze europee che si muovono in questa direzione e capace di elaborare un programma e una proposta per fare uscire il paese dalla crisi senza un massacro sociale. Una crisi che per quanto riguarda l’Europa ha caratteri di durata, gravità e impatto sociale ancora peggiori di quella degli anni Trenta. Una crisi che non si può affrontare con le mani legate dal fiscal compact e dal pareggio di bilancio in Costituzione, così fortemente voluti e difesi dal Pd. Credo che purtroppo Sel abbia mancato completamente questo obiettivo, con l’aggravante di non offrire neppure spazi reali per una effettiva discussione politica al proprio interno su questi temi cruciali, concentrando ogni energia sulle vicende elettorali. Per questo cercherò di perseguire l’obiettivo della costruzione di una forza politica autonoma della sinistra in altro modo e per altre strade.
Naturalmente quando si lascia una comunità politica, cui peraltro si è partecipato fin dal primo momento, non si prova solo rimpianto per una straordinaria occasione perduta, ma un senso profondo di sconfitta personale, di corresponsabilità in questo insuccesso.
E’ con questo stato d’animo, caro Nichi, che ti invio il mio saluto ed i miei auguri.

fonte: www.controlacrisi.org/notizia/Politica/2012/12/24/29624-gianni-caro-nichi-ecco-perche-lascio-sel/


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domenica 23 dicembre 2012

Monti ha ragione, non è un conservatore. E' un reazionario.

Monti si è scatenato oggi. Soprattutto contro Berlusconi, e questo va sempre bene. Anche se racconta balle quasi al livello del nostro Silvio. Certo son bugie meno crasse, meno volgari, ma sempre bugie. Quando dice che sarebbe demagogia dire che lo spread si è abbassato grazie alla BCE e non grazie al suo governo, dice semplicemente balle. Altrimenti deve giustificare l'innalzamento dello spread dopo il Salva-Italia e dopo la riforma del lavoro, quelle misure che dovevano riconquistare la fiducia dei mercati. Ma è un Monti demagogico, come d'altronde lo sono quasi tutti i liberali. E il suo governo, fatto di slogan, di ricette pre-confezionate, di formulette da libri, senza nessuna attenzione all'economia reale lo dimostrano. E d'altronde se il metro del successo è lo spread basso mentre siamo in recessione e con la produzione industriale a picco, beh, allora forse questo signore non ha le idee tanto chiare in economia come in politica.
Ma poi, dopo l'attacco a Berlusconi, Monti se l'è presa con la CGIL ("La riforma del lavoro è stata frenata da una componente sindacale, che trova difficile evolvere") e Vendola ("Il presidente Vendola... ha detto di me che sono un liberale conservatore. Liberale sì, conservatore sotto molto profili è Vendola"). Altra demagogia in serie. Ma cosa dovrebbe fare la CGIL? Fare gli interessi di Marchionne? E' questa l'idea di sindacato di Monti? E quanto a Vendola, forse sarà pure conservatore, che vuole difendere dei diritti che Monti giudica vecchi. E Monti ha ragione, non è un conservatore, è un reazionario, vuole riportare indietro le lancette della storia. Un pò come sentire De Maistre e Metternich dare dei conservatori ai repubblicani francesi che volevano conservare la Repubblica, invece di tornare indietro alla Monarchia.
E poi, per finire, la retorica sui giovani, il cui futuro non ha svenduto. Cosa abbia fatto lui, non si capisce. Ha aumentato il debito. Li costringe e lavorare fino a 70 anni. Aumenta la disoccupazione sia con politiche restrittive sia con la riforma delle pensioni. Aumenta il precariato e diminuisce i diritti (il vero tesoro a cui ogni giovane avrebbe diritto) con la riforma del lavoro. E ha il coraggio di parlare in favore dei giovani.
Più serio, più onesto, meno offensivo di Berlusconi. Ma Monti rimane un uomo di potere a difesa della banche, dei poteri forti, dei ricchi. Un reazionario.


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Il ricatto dei mercati e la grande bugia dello spread

Riproponiamo oggi un articolo uscito su Ombre Rosse appena all'indomani della caduta del governo Monti, quando gia' si vagheggiava di un attacco contro l'Italia dei mercati finanziari. Come si e' visto, l'ennesimo falso ideologico costruito a favore del governo.

di Nicola Melloni

da Ombre Rosse

Cade il governo e ricomincia la solita storia: panico e preoccupazione per la reazione dei mercati. Il solito ricatto che sentiamo da almeno 12 mesi. Non si può fare politica, bisogna semplicemente ubbidire a quello che richiede il mercato, pena la bancarotta.

E dunque, lo scorso weekend è stato tutto un piangersi addosso. Ha iniziato Napolitano che invece di tranquillizzare ha deciso di buttare benzina sul fuoco, con parole torve e minacciose: «I mercati? Vedremo cosa fanno lunedì». E poi han continuato Corriere e Repubblica e tutti gli altri grandi sponsor del governo tecnico: «Comunità internazionale che non capisce e da lunedì ci farà pagare un prezzo assai alto» (De Bortoli), «Le dimissioni di Monti sono arrivate come un fulmine. Non certo un fulmine a ciel sereno perché sereno non è affatto ed anzi è rigonfio di nubi nere e cariche di tempesta….una campagna elettorale con l'insegna del "tanto peggio tanto meglio", con i mercati in agguato e la finanza pubblica a rischio di grave pericolo» (Scalfari). Il messaggio era chiaro: non si può mettere in discussione la linea di politica economica finora adottata.

Lunedì  la Borsa ha aperto in ribasso, lo spread è salito, ed ecco che tutti i giornali titolavano sul grande rischio che correva l’Italia. Intanto Monti ribadiva: «I mercati? Li capisco». E di questo, almeno, nessuno ha mai dubitato. Forse allora avevano avuto ragione l’anno scorso quando ci era stato imposto il governo tecnico, una sorta di male necessario per evitare il peggio.

Ed invece… Mercoledì l’asta dei Bot è stata un successo coi rendimenti in ribasso, nonostante la crisi di governo. E giovedì è intervenuto addirittura Moody’s con una dichiarazione che ha tagliato la testa al toro: «Le turbolenze politiche in Italia hanno conseguenze limitate sull'affidabilità creditizia del Paese». Ma che sorpresa! Allora si può andare a votare senza mettere a rischio la stabilità del Paese, come d’altronde, nel mezzo della crisi, avevano fatto in Spagna, Portogallo, Irlanda e perfino, per ben due volte, in Grecia.

Attenzione però, ci dicono ora. Votare va bene, ma bisogna votare in un certo modo. Non a caso la preoccupazione principale del centrosinistra è quella di rassicurare i mercati e i partner europei (così giorni fa l’Unità ed anche Bersani intervistato dal Wall Street Journal). Che tradotto vuole circa dire, votate, vinciamo, ma la famosa agenda rimane sempre la stessa perché lo vogliono i mercati. E chi la discute è demagogico, populista, irresponsabile.

Ma siamo sicuri che sia proprio così? Chi sono questi mercati e cosa vogliono esattamente? Occorre fare chiarezza. I mercati sono entità astratte, composte da migliaia di operatori. I mercati, in fondo, siamo anche noi quando compriamo un Bot o un CCT. Gli investitori, quelli cioè che hanno messo i soldi, vogliono semplicemente una cosa, che i debiti vengano onorati. Che lo si faccia tassando i ricchi o i poveri, per loro ha poca importanza. Altra cosa, invece, è quella che vogliono i grandi capitalisti (anche se non tutti, per fortuna): loro vogliono meno tasse per i ricchi, libertà di licenziamento, salari bassi. C’è una bella differenza.

Per un anno e più ci hanno detto che l’austerity non si poteva discutere se non si voleva fallire. E che austerity non vuol dire, ad esempio, patrimoniale, ma Iva maggiorata e tagli a sanità e scuola. Ma eran tutte balle. In America, dove non c’è stata austerity, ed il debito è salito, i tassi di interesse sono scesi, non saliti. E recentemente, l’ex vice presidente di Moody’s ha attaccato Monti e Draghi, responsabili dei pessimi risultati dell’Italia. Ed anche un editoriale del Financial Times ha festeggiato le dimissioni di Monti, le cui politiche si sono rivelate inadeguate. Tanto per citare alcune autorevoli voci dei mercati finanziari che non credono in questo tipo di politica economica che arricchisce alcuni ma mette a rischio la tenuta proprio di quei famosi mercati di cui tanto parliamo. Gli investitori, infatti, sarebbero ben più contenti se l’Italia crescesse, perché soltanto con la crescita, e non certo con l’austerity, si possono pagare i debiti.

In realtà in questo anno, sotto il cosiddetto ricatto dello spread, si è approfittato della crisi per scassinare la Costituzione e far passare a tamburo battente le contro-riforme del lavoro e delle pensioni. L’agenda Monti è stata l’agenda del grande capitale che si approfitta di crisi, disastri ed emergenze per imporre politiche altrimenti inaccettabili, come spiegato già qualche tempo fa da Naomi Klein nel suo Shock Doctrine. Ora ci vorrebbero far votare sotto lo stesso ricatto, ripetendo le stesse bugie.

fonte: http://www.controlacrisi.org/notizia/Politica/2012/12/15/29354-il-ricatto-dei-mercati-e-la-grande-bugia-dello-spread/


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sabato 22 dicembre 2012

Monti a Napolitano: "Missione compiuta". Ora voltiamo pagina

Finalmente è finita, ed era proprio ora. Pare che Monti, rassegnando le dimissioni a Napolitano-Ceaucescu, si sia lasciato scappare: "Missione compiuta, Presidente". Proprio vero. In 12 mesi hanno distrutto i diritti dei lavoratori e manomesso la Costituzione, avvelenando le acque per tutti i futuri governi. Hanno abbassato lo spread facendo pagare tutto il prezzo a lavoratori, pensionati e consumatori. Hanno messo in ginocchio l'economia italiana, piegando il mondo del lavoro ed i sindacati, umiliando il lavoro, aumentando la disoccupazione e la sperequazione sociale. Ma son tutte cose che abbiamo già detto.
Ora è giunto il momento di cambiare. E cambiare in maniera vera. Non certo col PD che ha sostenuto Monti, non certo con Bersani che sostiene la riforma Fornero. Lo si può fare solo con la nuova lista a sinistra. Una lista che ancora non ha nome e che ha molti limiti, il primo sicuramente dettato dal ritardo con cui ci si è messi al lavoro. Che non ha ancora un programma chiarissimo, che potrebbe aver problemi a scegliere i candidati. Ma che fornisce garanzie a sufficienza: perché saranno gli unici senza dubbio alcuno contro l'austerità. Perchè saranno gli unici a volere uno Stato veramente laico che non butta soldi pubblici per finanziare scuole, ospedali, ma anche negozi e alberghi privati (leggi: confessionali). Perché tra FIAT e FIOM scelgono senza nessun dubbio la seconda. Perchè son contro i segreti di Stato difesi da Napolitanescu e dal PD. Perchè non hanno aiuti dai poteri forti ma anzi li combattono. Perché, soprattutto sai cosa voti e cosa ti trovi dopo - non come altri che voti PD e poi ti becchi Casini al governo. Perchè sono gli unici ad andare risolutamente contro all'agenda Monti.
Son solo gli inizi, con dubbi, e passi falsi: ma la direzione è quella giusta.


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venerdì 21 dicembre 2012

TraMonti 2 - Il peggio della campagna elettorale

Bersani-Tafazzi: "Tra prendere alle elezioni il 51% o il 49% io preferisco prendere il 49%. Non voglio fare tutto da solo". Come non vincere anche quando si può. Ma allora perchè non andare alle elezioni alleati con Casini? Normalmente si gioca per vincere, non per pareggiare... 

Berlusconi: "Ho proposto io di invitare io Monti alla riunione del PPE". Smentito ancora prima che l'ennesima panzana andasse in onda. Un bugiardo patologico.

Berlusconi 2: "Una forzatura inutile fissare le elezioni il 17 Febbraio". Il nostro prende tempo. Ma perchè allora sfiduciare il governo? Segni di demenza senile sempre più chiari. 

Berlusconi 3: "Rimarrei assolutamente sorpreso se ci fosse una partecipazione ad una campagna elettorale di Monti. Sarei d'accordo, forse per la prima volta, con D'Alema." Ma una settimana prima aveva detto: "Se Monti guida i moderati, io non mi candido". Se lo candida lui va bene. Se no....

Bindi: "Il limite dei 3 mandati deve valere per tutti". Già, peccato che la dichiarazione risalga a 18 anni fa. Tutti passati in Parlamento, e ormai siamo a 5 legislature (più una precedente a Bruxelles). Ma la signora vuole pure la sesta. Si sa che le regole valgono per tutti, meno per chi è coinvolto.

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Il senso degli italiani per il ridicolo: Monti tra gli operai e la farsa di fine regime

Lo diceva già Marx, la storia si ripete sempre, prima come tragedia e poi come farsa. E l'Italia di fine 2012 sembra una patetica, farsesca copia di un paese socialista degli anni 70. 
Le ultime uscite della politica italiana sconfinano nel ridicolo, se non peggio. Aveva iniziato il popolo della libertà con finte convention in cui venivano deportati anziani ignari in giro per funghi, alla moda dei pionieri sovietici. Ma Monti ha fatto, se possibile, anche peggio. Per annunciare il suo ingresso in politica è addirittura sceso a parlare tra gli operai ammaestrati di Pomigliano, scene che ricordano da vicino Honecker e la nomenklatura della vecchia DDR, accolta in fabbriche festanti presidiata da polizie e spie del regime. Andare a Pomigliano è il massimo di cattivo gusto possibile, in una fabbrica dove sono stati negati i diritti sindacali di chi non è d'accordo, dove si impose un referendum ricattatorio per demolire i sindacati recalcitranti, dove Marchionne ha cercato di riassumere solo gli operai a lui fedeli, quelli che ieri, bravi bravi, si son messi come tanti soldatini ad applaudire Monti. La claque organizzata dal capo-fabbrica per applaudire il segretario generale in visita, robe da oltre-cortina (di ferro, anche se Monti è più abituato alle Alpi). 
E d'altronde il trend di regressione prosegue: i leader politici girano circospetti, paurosi del popolo. E per chi protesta ormai ci son solo botte. Qualsiasi forma di contestazione viene vissuta come eversione, come attentato allo Stato. E tutto ciò in fondo ha senso: la nostra Costituzione è stata riscritta per imporre una certa visione del mondo, non diversamente dalle Costituzioni socialiste. Allora il socialismo, qui ed ora il liberismo. E quindi chiunque non sia liberale è contro la Costituzione! Non basta: anche noi ormai siamo diventati un Paese a sovranità limitata, come l'Ungheria di un tempo: una volta le decisioni si prendevano a Mosca, oggi a Bruxelles e Berlino.
Ed infine abbiamo Napolitano che ormai si crede Ceaucescu (per fortuna al netto della Securitate, appunto più farsa che tragedia), una sorta di sovrano intoccabile, al di sopra della legge come lo erano, una volta, i leader comunisti. Lui è immune dalle leggi tradizionali e chi parla con Lui, anche se sotto indagine e con i telefoni controllati, non può essere ascoltato. Trattasi, se capiamo bene, di cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, e quindi di ogni legge. E per di più amante di intrighi e segreti, invece di spingere per la verità sulla trattativa Stato-Mafia, si intrattiene al telefono con un indagato.
Il tutto puzza di vecchio, marcio, decomposto. Come lo erano quei regimi, che fecero una fine ingloriosa. Occhio.


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giovedì 20 dicembre 2012

Gli aggiornamenti delle rubriche di RI

The City of London
Profitti e salari nell'America del dopo crisi: Ultimamente Paul Krugman ha rilanciato con forza un argomento che l'economia mainstream ha per anni accuratamente evitato: la lotta di classe. In un recente post Krugman ha fornito qualche dato sul conflitto capitale-lavoro [continua la lettura


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La pazzia di Re Giorgio e la grazia a Sallusti


L'attivismo di Napolitano non ha fine. Dopo aver ordito per far cadere il governo Berlusconi, dopo aver maneggiato per formare il governo Monti, dopo aver contribuito in maniera attivissima a manomettere la nostra Costituzione (Benigni, chissà come mai, non ne parla..), ora si dedica alle mansioni proprie del monarca, quelle di ribaltare le sentenze e fare carta straccia dello Stato di Diritto.
Chiaro, il Presidente ha il potere di dare la grazia, ma perché darla a Sallusti? Su quali basi? Qualche tempo fa, su Micromega, Patrizio Gonnella faceva un giusto parallelo tra Fall Alioune, un ambulante senegalese condannato a 21 anni (!!!) per aver venduto a più riprese cd contraffatti, e Alessandro Sallusti, direttore diffamatore condannato e per di più evaso. Alioune ha compiuto un reato certo: lo ha fatto perchè aveva fame, non aveva altre possibilità di lavoro e doveva sbarcare il lunario. Il suo reato non ha offeso nessuno né fatto male ad alcuni, anche perché altrimenti dovrebbero essere condannati tutti i milioni di persone che scaricano musica illegalmente. Ma per Alioune non c'è grazia. C'è grazia per Sallusti che ha fatto scrivere sul suo giornale un ex-giornalista prezzolato, pagato dai Servizi e noto diffamatore (servigi che lo hanno portato al Parlamento, nientemeno). Non solo il direttore è naturalmente responsabile per le cose scritte sul suo giornale, ma si è anche sempre rifiutato di rettificare  una notizia platealmente falsa che non ha nulla del reato di opinione ma, appunto, tutto, della diffamazione.
Chissà cosa sarebbe successo se un giornalista fosse finito in carcere per aver detto che Napolitano disprezza la democrazia, che preferisce i carri armati, che è un pericolo per le nostre istituzioni, che butta via i soldi pubblici mentre la gente subisce i tagli dell'austerity. Chissà se anche ad un giornalista che avesse diffamato la sua regale persona, Napolitano avrebbe concesso la grazia. Di sicuro non la concederà ad Alioune.


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Verso la fine della Repubblica Americana?

Proponiamo oggi un interessante articolo da Project Syndicate che traccia un parallelo tra la decadenza della Repubblica Romana prima della sua trasformazione in Impero, e processi storici simili che stanno accadendo negli Stati Uniti. L'autore, Steven Strauss, è stato Managing Director a New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) e lavorato per la McKinsey, quindi ha uno sguardo non accademico, ma certo da persona informata dei fatti. A prescindere da qualche forzatura storica, l'articolo si inserisce con autorità nel presente dibattito sulla trasformazione della democrazia liberale in oligarchia - cosa che in America sembra sempre più visibile ma pare semplicemente anticipare un processo globale che sta travolgendo anche l'Europa.

Is America's Republic Ending?


di Steven Strauss

Eight Parallels Between the Collapse of Rome's Republic and Contemporary America
"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
-Karl Marx

Lawrence Lessig's Republic Lost documents the corrosive effect of money on our political process. Lessig persuasively makes the case that we are witnessing the loss of our republican form of government, as politicians increasingly represent those who fund their campaigns, rather than our citizens.
Anthony Everitt's Rise of Rome is fascinating history and a great read. It tells the story of ancient Rome, from its founding (circa 750 BCE) to the fall of the Roman Republic (circa 45 BCE).
When read together, striking parallels emerge -- between our failings and the failings that destroyed the Roman Republic. As with Rome just before the Republic's fall, America has seen:
1 -- Staggering Increase in the Cost of Elections, with Dubious Campaign Funding Sources: Our 2012 election reportedly cost $3 billion. All of it was raised from private sources - often creating the appearance, or the reality, that our leaders are beholden to special interest groups. During the late Roman Republic, elections became staggeringly expensive, with equally deplorable results. Caesar reportedly borrowed so heavily for one political campaign, he feared he would be ruined, if not elected.
2 -- Politics as the Road to Personal Wealth: During the late Roman Republic period, one of the main roads to wealth was holding public office, and exploiting such positions to accumulate personal wealth. As Lessig notes: Congressman, Senators and their staffs leverage their government service to move to private sector positions - that pay three to ten times their government compensation. Given this financial arrangement, "Their focus is therefore not so much on the people who sent them to Washington. Their focus is instead on those who will make them rich." (Republic Lost)
3 -- Continuous War: A national state of security arises, distracting attention from domestic challenges with foreign wars. Similar to the late Roman Republic, the US - for the past 100 years -- has either been fighting a war, recovering from a war, or preparing for a new war: WW I (1917-18), WW II (1941-1945), Cold War (1947-1991), Korean War (1950-1953), Vietnam (1953-1975), Gulf War (1990-1991), Afghanistan (2001-ongoing), and Iraq (2003-2011). And, this list is far from complete.
4 -- Foreign Powers Lavish Money/Attention on the Republic's Leaders: Foreign wars lead to growing influence, by foreign powers and interests, on the Republic's political leaders -- true for Rome and true for us. In the past century, foreign embassies, agents and lobbyists have proliferated in our nation's capital. As one specific example: A foreign businessman donated $100 million to Bill Clinton's various activities. Clinton "opened doors" for him, and sometimes acted in ways contrary to stated American interests and foreign policy.
5 -- Profits Made Overseas Shape the Republic's Internal Policies: As the fortunes of Rome's aristocracy increasingly derived from foreign lands, Roman policy was shaped to facilitate these fortunes. American billionaires and corporations increasingly influence our elections. In many cases, they are only nominally American - with interests not aligned with those of the American public. For example, Fox News is part of international media group News Corp., with over $30 billion in revenues worldwide. Is Fox News' jingoism a product of News Corp.'s non-U.S. interests?
6 -- Collapse of the Middle Class: In the period just before the Roman Republic's fall, the Roman middle class was crushed -- destroyed by cheap overseas slave labor. In our own day, we've witnessed rising income inequality, a stagnating middle class, and the loss of American jobs to overseas workers who are paid less and have fewer rights.
7 -- Gerrymandering: Rome's late Republic used various methods to reduce the power of common citizens. The GOP has so effectively gerrymandered Congressional districts that, even though House Republican candidates received only about 48 percent of the popular vote in the 2012 election -- they ended up with the majority (53 percent) of the seats.
8 -- Loss of the Spirit of Compromise: The Roman Republic, like ours, relied on a system of checks and balances. Compromise is needed for this type of system to function. In the end, the Roman Republic lost that spirit of compromise, with politics increasingly polarized between Optimates (the rich, entrenched elites) and Populares (the common people). Sound familiar? Compromise is in noticeably short supply in our own time also. For example, "There were more filibusters between 2009 and 2010 than there were in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s combined."
As Benjamin Franklin observed, we have a Republic -- but only if we can keep it.

Read more at
http://www.project-syndicate.org/blog/is-america-s-republic-ending#KcrwrWLJJ7pWXyal.99 


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mercoledì 19 dicembre 2012

Gli aggiornamenti delle rubriche di RI

The City of London
La Tobin Tax e l'ennesima bufala del governo Monti: Governo dimissionario, ma pur sempre in grado di far danni. Alla fine della settimana scorsa l'esecutivo ha proposto un emendamento sulla cosiddetta Tobin Tax, la tassa sulla transazioni finanziarie. Un emendamento, non c'era da dubitarne, per annacquare la tassa e fare l'ennesimo favore alle banche. [continua la lettura]


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Sotto traccia: un'altra eredità del governo Monti

di Francesca Congiu

Il governo fa ricorso contro la sentenza della Corte Europea che il 28 agosto scorso aveva bloccato la legge 40 sulla procreazione assistita.. E lo fa nell'ultimo giorno utile, a fine novembre, in silenzio, senza annunci o proclami. 

“Sarebbe sorprendente che un governo tecnico ed europeista in economia non fosse altrettanto tecnico ed europeista quando ci sono da tutelare i diritti e la salute delle persone e, anzi, agisse in danno dei cittadini più poveri. Questi, in caso di ricorso, si vedranno discriminati nel loro desiderio di maternità e paternità, mentre i più ricchi potranno rivolgersi alle cliniche per l’infertilità degli altri Paesi europei e avere l’assistenza che la legge 40, e adesso anche l’iniziativa del governo, nega loro in Italia”.
Parole di Ignazio Marino che più volte ha messo in luce le contraddizioni e l’ipocrisia della legge 40.

Intanto, “dall’alto dei cieli” di twitter, dove si è recentemente insediato, Benedetto XVI stabilisce le regole della vita, esclude il diritto alla libertà. Ciò, sia attraverso violenti proclami ex cathedra, sempre troppo sottovalutati, come la recente dichiarazione sulle unioni gay, viste come “ferita alla pace” - e sapientemente decostruita da Alessandro Esposito; sia nella pratica del condizionamento delle istituzioni. Si prenda, a caso, proprio uno dei martellanti articoli di Avvenire sulla legge 40:

28 agosto
http://www.avvenire.it/Vita/Pagine/corte-europea-boccia-legge-40.aspx

20 novembre
http://www.avvenire.it/Commenti/Pagine/Difesa%20della%20legge%2040%20%20attendiamo%20fatti.aspx

21 novembre
http://www.avvenire.it/Vita/Pagine/ricorso-legge-40-il-governo-acceleri.aspx

24 novembre
http://www.avvenire.it/Vita/Pagine/contro-la-legge-40-il-coro-dei-candidati-pd.aspx

28 novembre
http://www.avvenire.it/Vita/Pagine/ricorso-legge-40.aspx

29 novembre
http://www.avvenire.it/Vita/Pagine/legge-40-appello-strasburgo.aspx

Ricordando che i cattolici, Udc in prima linea, hanno fortemente voluto il ricorso a Strasburgo, mi torna
alla mente la chiusa di Pierferdinando Casini durante l’insediamento alla Camera nel 2001: si rivolgeva
alla Madonna di San Luca: “confidando nel suo aiuto per svolgere con serena imparzialità e rigore il mio mandato di Presidente della Camera dei deputati”.

In realtà, come ben postilla Esposito se “le norme giuridiche sono stabilite dai parlamenti”, esse
“soggiacciono alla legge ineluttabile di tutto ciò che è umano” e le “invasioni di campo” non fanno bene.

Il vizio di forma che avrebbe determinato il ricorso alla Grand Chambre da parte de Governo “super partes” di Monti, mal cela l’ennesima stoccata contro la laicità dello Stato. Urge ricordare ai tecnici e ai politici cattolici o filo cattolici, che “l’imparzialità” è aconfessionale o “onniconfessionale” e qualsiasi restringimento a questa apertura si traduce pericolosamente in minore democrazia.



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lunedì 17 dicembre 2012

Alle elezioni meglio soli che male accompagnati

Al voto! Al voto! Finalmente, dopo un anno in ostaggio possiamo finalmente andare alle urne per decidere chi ci governa. Ci andiamo, naturalmente, con la spada di Damocle dei mercati, o almeno questo è quello che ci vogliono far credere.
Ovviamente il PD è favoritissimo per vincere le elezioni, nettamente avanti in tutti i sondaggi e col premio di maggioranza, grazie al Porcellum che ha strenuamente difeso, a portata di mano. E sul carro di Bersani si siederà anche Vendola, dopo una umiliante sconfitta alle primarie, doppiato da Matteo Renzi.
Ma dopo aver vinto le elezioni toccherà anche governare il paese e, possibilmente, uscire dalla crisi. Bersani si è presentato come un socialdemocratico "moderno" (anche se non so cosa questo voglia dire..), con uno sguardo attento al mondo del lavoro. E' proprio questo "odore di sinistra" che ha convinto Vendola ad aderire all'alleanza, anche a costo di rompere con l'IDV e con i Movimenti. Vendola dice bisogna governare con un vero spirito riformista e che questo nuovo governo dovrà mettere in soffitta l'Agenda Monti - e che, naturalmente, non c'è bisogno di nessun accordo con Casini perché l'alleanza di centro-sinistra si deve basare su un programma politico ben chiaro.
A me pare però he Vendola abbia delle idee assai confuse su cosa sarà il programma. Si aggrappa ad una Carta d'Intenti super vaga che ognuno potrà usare a piacere. Vendola richiede, lo abbiamo detto, la fine dell'agenda Monti, sostenuta fino ad ora dal PD. E che il PD non ha intenzione di abbandonare: come ha detto Bersani, la sua agenda è uguale a quella Monti, con qualcosa in più. Bersani vuole dare un ruolo a Monti anche dopo le elezioni (Quirinale o Ministero dell'Economia, comunque un posto di potere vero, non un contentino). E vuole l'accordo con Casini dopo le elezioni - prima evidentemente non deve suonare troppo bene tra gli elettori del PD. Non solo, al Wall Street Journal ha detto molto chiaramente che "Non farò a meno del suo (di Vendola, nda) contributo su questioni come l'ambiente e i diritti civili" ed in caso di disaccordi "il mio partito è stimato attorno al 30 per cento; Sel attorno al 5-6. Abbiamo firmato un accordo nel quale c'è scritto che, in caso di disaccordo, votiamo e la maggioranza vince". Questione chiusa: comanda il PD e si continua con l'agenda Monti. Vendola (e chi nel quarto polo ha ancora voglie di alleanza col PD) se ne faccia una ragione.
E d'altronde perché no? Bersani è fedele alla storia del PD-DS-PDS degli ultimi 20 anni. Nell'ultimo governo hanno votato fiscal compact, riforma del lavoro (e Bersani si oppone strenuamente al referendum che Vendola ha firmato, anzi dice: La riforma Fornero ha aumentato la flessibilità del mercato e ha fatto qualche passo nella direzione di regolare i contratti a termine. Non ne do un giudizio negativo), riforma delle pensioni, aumento dell'IVA, commesse militari. Si dirà, ma c'era la crisi (qualcuno mi deve ancora spiegare perché la crisi vale per tutti ma non per i caccia militari, ma va beh). E allora ricordiamoci di cosa avevano fatto i vari governi Prodi-D'Alema-Amato-Prodi. Riporto da un bell'articolo di Domenico Moro: "Il primo governo Prodi aumentò l’Iva dal 19% al 20%, ridusse gli scaglioni e la progressività dell’Iperf, di cui portò l’aliquota massima Irpef per i ricchissimi dal 51% al 45,5%. Soprattutto diede inizio al processo di precarizzazione del mercato del lavoro italiano con la legge Treu (1997). Tale legge, secondo l’Ocse, ha inciso in termini di deregolamentazione del mercato del lavoro molto più della Legge Biagi, varata dal governo Berlusconi nel 2003. Le privatizzazioni effettuate dal governo Prodi sono state molte di più di quelle effettuate del governo Berlusconi, a partire dalla “madre” di tutte le privatizzazioni, quella di Telecom (1997).....(Durante il secondo Governo Prodi) furono le aliquote dell’Irpef per i redditi più bassi ad essere aumentate, mentre le imposte per le imprese, l’Ires e l’Irap furono diminuite. In particolare, la tanto sbandierata riduzione del cuneo fiscale andò tutta a favore delle imprese. Sul piano della politica estera, l’Italia incrementò il numero dei suoi soldati e dei suoi mezzi offensivi in Afghanistan, dove furono impiegati in vere e proprie azioni di guerra, malgrado le continue smentite del governo". Se non bastasse ricordiamo gli emendamenti a favore dei soldi alle scuole privati, d'altra parte iniziati proprio nell'Emilia rossa sotto l'allora presidenza di, pensate un po', Pierluigi Bersani.
Ecco, questo è il PD con cui si vuole alleare Vendola con la premessa che in tutte le decisioni controverse, il partito di Bersani mostrerà i muscoli e obbligherà SEL alla disciplina, in cambio di un registro per le coppie di fatto e 4 pale eoliche. Importanti, ma al momento, forse c'è anche altro da fare in politica.
Ecco allora che pare giusta, coerente e seria la posizione del Quarto Polo, Rifondazione, Alba e Cambiare #sipuò che rivendicano autonomia programmatica ed elettorale dal PD. Alle elezioni soli, portando avanti un programma radicalmente diverso da quello di Bersani e suoi ed in totale discontinuità con l'agenda Monti ma anche con le politiche neo-liberiste del centrosinistra Anni 90. Solo la costituzione di un Polo numericamente consistente ed una eventuale discussione post-elettorale potrà influenzare veramente il prossimo governo del Paese. Per non ripetere gli errori del passato, per cambiare veramente, per aprire una nuova stagione.



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Sinistra e Destra nella Grecia in crisi


Oggi proponiamo un articolo del New Statesman sulla situazione politica ad Atene, un soggetto che viene tuttora largamente ignorato dai nostri media. L'articolo racconta la crescita di Alba Dorata ed il significato politico e le radici sociali e culturali dell'avanzata del fascismo. E contrappone questo al "fenomeno|" Syriza e all'alternativa che questo rappresenta per l'Europa.

A warning from Athens


di Daniel Trilling

New Statesman

It’s Saturday morning in Athens and the players are taking up their positions for a familiar ritual. Around the National Garden, behind the Greek parliament, fortified police vans lie in wait, their occupants playing cards or chatting on mobile phones. Along the streets that stretch north from Syntagma Square, in front of the parliament building, there are more police, standing on street corners in riot gear, drinking iced coffee and idly watching groups of tourists or Athenians running Saturday errands. Crisis or no, this is still a bustling capital city.
Next door to the National Archaeological Museum, the courtyard of which is peopled with ancient statues rescued from a shipwreck, limbs eroded and faces barnacled, is the Athens Polytechnic. Inside the gates, a crowd of people – elderly men, mothers with teenage children, twentysomething couples – has gathered to lay red and white carnations in front of a memorial stone. Around them, students are making banners, leafleting and gathering into groups according to political affiliation. Later, they will march noisily into the centre of Athens. For now, however, the atmosphere is quiet, reverential, if a little tense.
Demonstrations have become commonplace in Athens, so much so that people talk of “protest fatigue”. In the past month alone, there have been two general strikes, plus another walkout on 14 November as part of a pan-European day of action. On the night of 7 November, police tear-gassed protesters in Syntagma Square, while inside the parliament MPs debated a new wave of public spending cuts and privatisation demanded by the troika – the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank – in return for another slice of bailout money. Opposition is such that the measures are being implemented by ministerial decree –emergency legislation reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. And it’s hurting: Eurostat reports that 31 per cent of the population, 3.5 million people, are living near or below the poverty line and 15 per cent cannot afford “basic commodities”. Greece is a laboratory for austerity, the most extreme iteration of policies that are being imposed by governments from London to Lisbon.
On Saturday 17 November, the protest is of a different kind. It is the date on which Greece commemorates the fall of the military junta that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. On this day in 1973, a tank burst through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic, which had been occupied by students protesting against the military regime and demanding the right to elect their leaders. This direct democracy had been too much for the colonels to bear and 24 people were killed in the crackdown that followed. The massacre spelled the beginning of the end for their regime, which fell a year later. The 17th has long been a symbolic date for the Greek left but in the past few years the ranks of marchers have been swelled by a new generation.
As the students begin to form into blocs, stamping their feet in unison, the old chant of those who fought the junta goes up: “Bread, education, freedom!” Now, though, it comes with a reply: “The dictatorship is not over!”

**

Manolis Glezos, white-haired and dressed in a sharp, powder- blue jacket, leans forward across the desk and jabs a finger. “I want to write an ‘I accuse’ to Britain. During the war, we stood by them as allies. So where’s Britain now?”
At the age of 90, Glezos knows Greece’s recent history intimately. In 1941, he and a comrade tore down the swastika flag from the Acropolis, at the height of the Nazi occupation. They were imprisoned and tortured. When civil war erupted in 1946, between the communist- led resistance partisans and a rightwing government propped up by Britain and the US, he was sentenced to death. He was sent to prison camps twice more in the years that followed – along with thousands of other leftists – and eventually forced into exile when the junta came to power. Yet Glezos is more than a symbol of resistance; he is back in front-line politics, as an MP.
I meet Glezos in his office at the Greek parliament, which is staffed by a couple of young assistants who are busy posting copies of his speeches on Facebook. (The most recent one has been “liked” 680 times, Glezos tells me.) He is an MP for Syriza, the coalition of radical left-wing parties that has been the main bene - ficiary of public discontent. In the past three years, it has gained momentum as support has drained away from the centre-left Pasok, which once promised Greeks a welfare state and national self-determination but now finds itself in coalition with the right-wing New Democracy, administering the troika’s demands. In May’s general election, Syriza won an unprecedented 17 per cent of the vote. At a second election, called when the government failed to hold a coalition together, its vote rose to 27 per cent and it narrowly missed an outright victory. It is now the main opposition party and most opinion polls put it on course to win power the next time elections are held.
For the first time since 2008, Europe faces the real possibility of a government whose stated aim is, as Glezos tells me, to “cancel” the debt, halting the programme of spending cuts and demanding that the troika renegotiate terms. “Two and a half thousand years ago, an ancient writer, Menander, said: ‘Loans make people slaves.’ You can forgive other people if they don’t know this but Greeks are not allowed not to know this.”
According to Procopis Papastratis, a professor at Panteion University in Athens, Syriza’s success has sent a shockwave through the Greek political establishment. “The left terrifies a lot of people . . . They say that if the left comes, they will slaughter us or they will take our houses like Stalin did in the Soviet Union. The big businesses say that they will leave Greece and they say to those who work for them that if you vote Syriza, you will be unemployed because we will take our companies and go.”
For Glezos, the division is “not between left and right. It is between the Greek people and those who have subjected themselves to the troika and the will of the powerful.” And the elite have good reason to be scared. “We don’t just want to give a good make-up to the system. We really want to change it.” Glezos sets out a range of measures – a crackdown on Greece’s endemic tax evasion; forcing banks to loan the government money at zero interest; investment in industry and agriculture – that he believes would restore economic prosperity.
His pugnacious stance encapsulates the popular feeling that the current government is not acting in the nation’s best interests. “The crisis was not provoked by Greek people. Why should [we] pay for the crisis? This is a basic question. I am never going to stop asking until someone has an answer.”

**

Nationalism, however, always has its dark side. Like many other Greeks I meet, 31-year-old Kelly feels deep anger at the way her country was led into crisis. Greece only gained entry to the eurozone by manipulating economic data – as did other countries, including Italy – and was left exposed when the crash came. “I feel it was a lie all these years. The way they told us how things will be – that you will have a good career if you study. For our generation, we have learned one system and now suddenly there is a big change.”
Kelly is not doing too badly –when we meet, at a sandwich chain in a southern suburb of Athens, she has just been promoted to sales manager at the telemarketing firm where she works. But Kelly wants to “punish” the politicians she believes have led Greece into crisis. She feels the biggest shock she can inflict on the system is to give her vote to the fascist Golden Dawn. To Kelly, the party’s main appeal is that it’s “real”: “They say to you, ‘I am the devil,’ and they are devils. I prefer someone that says the truth and says to me, ‘You know what, I am the bad guy,’ rather than another one that says to me, ‘I am the good guy and I will save you.’” She stops and asks, a little nervously, “Does that make me crazy?”
Kelly is not alone. The first almost anyone outside Greece heard of Golden Dawn was in May 2012, when the party swept into parliament with 7 per cent of the vote. Politics in Greece have polarised – and just as Syriza’s support soared, so right-wing voters have been pushed further and further to extremes, as a succession of right-wing parties have been tainted by coalition.
Europe has become used to the slow, attritional progress of far-right movements; those led by fascists such as Nick Griffin or the Le Pen family, who have put on suits and concealed their real views in an attempt to enter the mainstream. But from Golden Dawn’s Nazi-esque imagery to the militaristic rallies and openly violent conduct of its members, it was immediately apparent that this time was different. Golden Dawn did not emerge from nowhere. As Dimitris Psarras, an investigative journalist who has recently published The Black Book of Golden Dawn, explained to me, the party was founded in the early 1980s by Nikolaos Michal - oliakos, a right-wing extremist with connections to the junta.
From the outset, the group’s core beliefs were “neo-Nazi” and “pagan”, says Psarras, mixing the ideas of Adolf Hitler with a nostalgia for ancient Greek culture – and the movement was structured along quasi-military lines, modelled on the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s stormtroopers. During its early years, Golden Dawn operated as a kind of security service, doing bodyguard work and “the dirty jobs” for certain members of Greece’s wealthy elite.
In the 1990s, explains Psarras, a series of changes in Greek society enabled Golden Dawn to grow. First came a rise in nationalist sentiment after disputes with the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia over its name and with Turkey over ownership of islands in the Aegean Sea. Then came a wave of immigrants following the collapse of the eastern bloc and wars in the Balkans. Finally, with the advent of unregulated private television channels –whose sensationalist output, says Psarras, is “like your Sun newspaper in Britain” – came a rise in antiimmigrant sentiment.
These feelings continued to grow throughout the 2000s, exacerbated by mainstream politicians who pandered to xenophobia. Now, many Greeks have come to see immigration as a cause of the country’s economic turmoil. During my conversation with Kelly, she was at pains to stress that she bore no animosity to foreigners. “I want you to know about Greek people that we are very generous, very clever, very open-minded and very hard-working,” she told me. “But at this time, it’s like a ship – we have water [coming in] from one side and, on the other side, sharks.”
For all its shocking brutality, Golden Dawn has consolidated its support in a way typical of far-right parties across Europe. It follows a theory of community politics derived, says Psarras, from the French nouvelle droite – a group of far-right intellectuals who set out the blueprint for the Front National’s success in France and whose ideas Griffin tried to emulate as leader of the British National Party.
The difference is in Golden Dawn’s relationship with the state. Greece has a history of right-wing militias collaborating with the police and there have been documented incidents in which Golden Dawn members have appeared to work in tandem with officers in attacking left-wing protesters. One study of voting patterns suggests that as much as 50 per cent of Athens police officers voted for Golden Dawn at the last election.
A Golden Dawn MP, Ilias Kasidiaris, physically attacked a female opponent on live television but managed to evade arrest. Three others were filmed smashing up market stalls belonging to immigrant vendors – and posted the video on Golden Dawn’s website –yet have not been charged with any crime.
The tide may be turning: in response to public outrage, all four have now been stripped of parliamentary immunity to prosecution but Klio Papapantoleon, a lawyer who has represented several victims of attacks committed by Golden Dawn members, points out that the Greek justice system, while slow at the best of times, has been “very lenient in judging these members”. She points to the testimony of victims and witnesses who say that they have been “obstructed and encumbered by police officers while trying to sue members of Golden Dawn”.
For now, mainstream politicians follow the same logic as in other countries when faced with a threat from the far right: they compete on its territory. The government’s most recent move on immigration, for instance, has been to suspend all applications for Greek citizenship. Since August, a major police operation has been in progress to round up undocumented migrants and put them in detention centres. Yet such moves have only further legitimised Golden Dawn, which now positions itself as the real defender of the Greek people against austerity, taking a strong anti-bailout line and staging “Greeks-only” food distribution, blood donations and soup kitchens.
Still, the same Nazi beliefs lie at its core, glimpsed on occasions such as when one of its MPs read out a part of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in parliament or in the anti-gay protests it organised that forced the closure of the play Corpus Christi.
Through an intermediary, I contact “John”, a member of Golden Dawn who would speak to me only on the condition of anonymity. Now 32 and working for a banking group in Athens, he joined the movement at 16, convinced that politicians had “betrayed” Greece over the territorial dispute with Turkey. He tells me he was attracted by the “total discipline” of the group. “There was mutual appreciation and, of course, respect towards higher-ranking members.” There were frequent meetings and talks aimed at “ideological orientation”, towards the ideas of what John describes as “National Socialism”. His main task, he says, was to spread these ideas among his friends and classmates, handing out fliers and selling copies of the party newspaper.
Because of family and work commitments, John is no longer an active member but he still votes for the party. What, I ask, would Golden Dawn do if it got into government? “We’ll do what others don’t dare . . . I think about how many times people have laughed at us [during election counts] – and now half of them feel intimidated and half consider us the only solution.”
Journalists, drawn as ever to a good story, have struggled to deal with this. I do, too. Nobody wants to underplay the threat Golden Dawn poses to Greek democracy and there’s a pressing need to expose its underlying extremism. Yet the aggression, which may seem alarming to an outsider, is exactly what attracted voters such as Kelly in the first place. “They do bad things. I don’t agree with that I don’t want them to be the government,” she tells me. “My intention is just to get them in the parliament.”
For now, though, the door to power remains ajar. And it will be much harder to shut than it was to open.

**

Just north-west of the centre of Athens stands the grand Orthodox church of Aghios Panteleimonas, dedicated to the fourth-century martyr St Pantaleon. In the square outside is a children’s playground; it’s locked shut and looks like it has been that way for some time. When I visited with a friend early one weekday morning, our only companions were stray cats that picked their way through the weeds sprouting through the tarmac beneath the swings. Greek flags hung limply from apartment balconies beyond the square and, on the ground in front of the church steps, spray-painted in blue and white, was the message “Foreigners out – Greece for the Greeks”.
A few blocks away, down a side street off one of the main boulevards, is the office of Yonous Muhammadi, chair of the Greek Forum of Refugees. I had trouble finding it: there is no sign outside and the buzzer is unmarked. It’s for a good reason, Muhammadi tells me – he was chased out of his previous office two years ago by fascist thugs, who smashed the place and beat him up. For im migrants such as Muhammadi, who came to Greece from Afghanistan in 2001, the rise of Golden Dawn has merely brought an existing problem out into the open. “In 2010, when we closed the office of the forum, we held a big press conference. We told them, now it is our problem, migrants and refugees, but it will be a problem for Greek people, also. For all of you.”
Like the rest of Europe, Greece experienced a further wave of immigration from the late 1990s onwards. Refugees – from conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere – were joined by economic migrants from South Asia and Africa. Three things combined to turn this into an acute crisis. The first was Greece’s lack of a functioning immigration system. Applying for citizenship was – and is – so difficult that the only way most migrants can get permission to stay in the country is by presenting themselves as refugees. Temporary papers are renewed every six months and it can take up to ten years for an asylum application to be processed. The second was the removal of landmines from the Evros region in northern Greece, on the Turkish border. This opened up a safer route for migrants who previously had to make dangerous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean.
The third, decisive factor was the construction of “fortress Europe” – a pan-European immigration policy designed to make it harder for migrants from poor countries to enter the EU. Spain and Italy strengthened their border controls, making Greece an even more popular point of entry for migrants crossing from Asia or the southern Mediterranean. Along with this came the Dublin II Regulation, a 2003 agreement that asylum-seekers would be sent back to the country where they first set foot in the EU.
It was a perfect storm: hundreds of migrants a day being “returned” to a country they never intended to live in, with thousands more arriving, unaware of what awaited them.
Many migrants, such as Muhammadi, have made successes of their lives here: a trained doctor, he now works as a nurse in one of the capital’s main hospitals. Tanzanian and Pakistani shopkeepers have businesses all over the city. However, the failed policies have led to thousands of people being trapped in Greece, vulnerable to people-smugglers and crammed into apartments in once-smart citycentre neighbourhoods or sleeping rough, without sanitation, work or food, in squares such as Aghios Panteleimonas. At its peak, estimates Muhammadi, there were perhaps 5,000 Afghans intending to stay in Greece but a constant turnover of between 12,000 and 15,000 coming and leaving. Crime – theft, drug-trafficking and prostitution – rose in Athens city centre, and at one point around 500 people were sleeping rough in the playground outside Aghios Panteleimonas. The local council’s response was to lock it shut, forcing them on to the streets.
What came next, says Muhammadi, could have been avoided if the police had done their job and kept order. Instead, feeling like they had been abandoned, Greek residents in the area surrounding the church formed a campaign group – the “angry citizens” –which was soon infiltrated by members of Golden Dawn. The party encouraged Greeks to hang the national flag from their windows to show opposition to immigration and began carrying out “vigilante” patrols and covert attacks on immigrants. “The violence was here before the crisis,” says Muhammadi. “And the police were there, they were looking, but they were doing nothing. When I was attacked, I was bleeding but when I went to the police station to complain, the policemen who were standing in front told me, ‘If you complain, we’ll put you in a detention centre for two nights.’”
Then, in May 2011, came the spark. A shocking murder – of a Greek man as he fetched his car to take his pregnant wife to hospital – committed by two illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, caused a national media scandal. It provoked a two-week pogrom around Aghios Panteleimonas orchestrated by Golden Dawn, with fascist gangs attacking non-whites in broad daylight, dragging them off buses and destroying their shops. The playground was closed, immigrants forced off the streets and the message sent out: Golden Dawn is the group that knows how to sort out the immigrant “problem”. We do what others don’t dare.
The difference now, Muhammadi tells me, is a much wider acceptance of this violence as part of everyday life. “Before, the fascists would attack a group of immigrants and leave straight away. Now, they are there, they are waiting, they are attacking and the others look on. And nobody can do anything.”
Later, after my meeting with Muhammadi, I visited Saxi and Hakima, an Afghan couple in their late twenties with three young children. Kicking off my shoes, I was welcomed into their small apartment, which they share with four other refugees. We sat on carpets and cushions in their living room, while Hakima brought tea and boiled sweets. When I asked if their children had been born here, meaning in Greece, Hakima said, “Yes, here,” and pointed to the floor just in front of me.
As their two-year-old daughter Zeinab climbed over me and drew in my notebook, Saxi explained how he had been a policeman in Afghanistan but fled, fearing for his life, over a decade ago. “I haven’t seen my parents in 12 years,” he told me. “I would go back if it was safe.” After travelling through Iran and Turkey, he arrived in Greece, where he found work in the construction industry. Hakima joined him in 2008. It was always hard, explained Saxi, but things started to get worse from that year onwards. Two and a half years ago, he was beaten up so badly that he spent a week in hospital. When he came out, he was attacked again – and the time spent off work cost him his job. Saxi had recently found another job but Hakima told me that the family struggles for money and that she takes it in turns with other Afghan women to root through rubbish bins by night to find goods to sell and food to eat. They can’t go in large groups, because they’re scared of attracting attention and being attacked. “We thought we would come here, that we would be safe,” says Saxi, “but the people here don’t treat us like human beings.”
Saxi’s and Hakima’s story is typical. One recent study by the newly formed Racist Violence Recording Network noted 87 attacks in Greece between January and September 2012, 83 of which took place in public spaces – in squares, streets or on public transport. Daphne Kapetanaki, of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, tells me that these statistics are “just the tip of the iceberg”. Many immigrants will not report attacks, she says, because they lack papers and fear arrest or abuse by police officers. The network’s report also highlighted an almost total lack of prosecutions for racist attacks and identified 15 incidents in which police and racist violence were “interlinked”.
Many Greeks are shocked at the rise of fascism in their country but there is disagreement on what to do about it. Until recently, Syriza took the line that fighting austerity should be the focus. Anarchist groups have organised night-time motorbike patrols in areas with large immigrant populations. Yet Petros Constantinou of the Movement Against Racism and Fascist Threat (KEERFA) is adamant that a successful campaign will work only if it gives immigrants the courage to speak out, argue for their place in Greek society and join the wider protest movement. He looks to Britain’s history of successful anti-fascist movements; in particular the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism of the late 1970s. A national demonstration against racism and fascism in Syntagma Square has been called for 19 January.
For its part, the Racist Violence Recording Network hopes that its work will bring pressure on the government to reform the justice system: already, the minister of public order has promised to set up dedicated police units to tackle racist crime and to provide training for all officers in dealing with these issues. However, as Kapetanaki explains, what’s needed is “an assurance that migrants will not be arrested and detained if they report an attack”.
It will take hard work to lift the veil of fear. When I ask Saxi if he has ever considered joining anti-fascist protests, his answer is bleak. “Greek people, whoever they are, they hate us.”

**

By late afternoon on 17 November, the march from the Athens Polytechnic has swelled in numbers. Now some 20,000 strong, the students having been joined by various political groups, including the still-powerful Greek Communist Party (KKE), it snakes its way through central Athens, past the Academy, a neoclassical building from which glares in red the graffiti “Malakies [wankers] – you are the refugees of Europe!”; past Syntagma and the parliament, guarded by lines of police in gas masks; and up a palm tree-lined boulevard to its target, the US embassy. Obeying cold war logic, the US backed the colonels’ regime – just as Britain had backed the Greek right against the partisans two decades earlier – and to many Greeks, the troika’s bailout is just the latest instance of foreign interference.
By the time the march reaches the embassy, a looming Bauhaus edifice emblazoned with a giant state seal, it is dark. Everyone expects a confrontation with police. But this year, the marchers keep walking, pushing on further up the road. It is the third day of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the demonstrators have decided to take their protest all the way to the Israeli embassy.
It’s a symbolic gesture but it mirrors the many acts of solidarity, big or small, I see or hear about during my stay. One rainy evening later that week, I take a taxi out to Elliniko, a suburb of Athens, to visit a large medical clinic staffed entirely by volunteers. Set up to provide medical care to the growing number of Greeks without health insurance, it has dedicated rooms for a GP, for paediatricians, gynaecologists, psychologists and more.
A dentist whose practice was closing gave the clinic his entire surgery’s worth of equipment. There are arrangements to use the radiology and chemotherapy departments of nearby hospitals out of hours. Doctors come to work here for a few hours after doing a full day’s work. A trained pharmacist co-ordinates the sorting out and cataloguing of medicines. Cancer medication is particularly expensive and many people donate unused courses of tablets when relatives die. Volunteers without medical training spend their time doing clerical work or building up the network of donors.
Showing me around, Elena – a freelance economist by day, she says with an ironic laugh – tells me that since the summer the number of people using the clinic has doubled. It treated 1,200 in August and nearly 2,500 in October. As the number of people needing help soars, so, too, does the number of people ready to step in to help. “It’s not why I do it,” says Elena, “but every day I come here, I leave feeling just a little bit taller.”
There are two rules, she says – “No money and leave your politics at the door.” But its very existence raises an explicitly political question: what if we could build a society that operated this way not out of dire emergency, but by design?
It is this challenge that faces Syriza, should it fulfil expectations and win the next election. In 2011, ordinary Greeks began occupying public squares all over the country, in imitation of the indignados movement in Spain, and debating the changes they wanted to see in their country. Now, Syriza is trying to harness this energy and since the summer has been holding public meetings of its own to determine the party’s programme for government.
Manolis Glezos tells me he is one of the few MPs to have visited these meetings across eece and lists an array of proposals that the movement has thrown up: local and regional autonomy to combat corruption; a justice system free from political interference; giving social institutions such as trade unions and medical associations a say in proposing policies; the “socialisation” of banks, in which members of civil society sit on corporate boards; the right to recall MPs when they don’t implement the policies they have been elected to enact.
First, Syriza must transform itself from a broad coalition into a unified party. This month, it will hold the first of several conferences where delegates elected by each of the public meetings will discuss what principles the party should adopt.
The left is further divided: the KKE, along with a few other parties, remains aloof, convinced that Greece needs to exit the euro before any social change can begin. (Syriza would rather stay and build a wider European movement.) According to Glezos, the rise of grassroots democracy is already affecting how Greeks think about their country: “By taking these assemblies to industries, factories, workplaces, communities, it’s changing the whole shape of society.” This time, he says, there is a chance to avoid the past mistakes of the left, because this movement aims to put “the people in power and the people in government”.
Glezos recalls the slogan of the polytechnic uprising: “Bread, education, freedom. These questions are still current.”
A week after visiting the clinic in Elliniko, I go to see another project, supported once again by donations and staffed by volunteers. This time, it’s food, not medicine, to provide for those who are unable to feed themselves or their families. Staff tell me that they have been overwhelmed by donations from the local community: shoppers at the nearby supermarket drop by with anything from a few tins of tomatoes to whole carrier bags full of supplies.
However, this isn’t Greece. It’s London – just down the road from my house. Some 13 million people live below the poverty line in Britain and as austerity forces more out of work or on to part-time wages, a growing number of people are struggling to cover the basic necessities.
Since 2008, when 26,000 people used food banks, the number has soared: more than 100,000 used them between April and September this year and the Trussell Trust, which operates the largest network of food banks in the UK, estimates that 200,000 people will use them in the year to come.
Greece’s crisis may be acute but it is not unique. In Britain, its effects have so far been easier to hide, while outbreaks of dissent have been more spasmodic: the student occupations of 2010; the 2011 summer riots; last autumn’s Occupy movement. And fortunately, the far right is in decline, even though victim-blaming and xenophobia are rife in our media.
None of this has to happen; but to stop it, we need each other.It’s Saturday morning in Athens and the players are taking up their positions for a familiar ritual. Around the National Garden, behind the Greek parliament, fortified police vans lie in wait, their occupants playing cards or chatting on mobile phones. Along the streets that stretch north from Syntagma Square, in front of the parliament building, there are more police, standing on street corners in riot gear, drinking iced coffee and idly watching groups of tourists or Athenians running Saturday errands. Crisis or no, this is still a bustling capital city.
Next door to the National Archaeological Museum, the courtyard of which is peopled with ancient statues rescued from a shipwreck, limbs eroded and faces barnacled, is the Athens Polytechnic. Inside the gates, a crowd of people – elderly men, mothers with teenage children, twentysomething couples – has gathered to lay red and white carnations in front of a memorial stone. Around them, students are making banners, leafleting and gathering into groups according to political affiliation. Later, they will march noisily into the centre of Athens. For now, however, the atmosphere is quiet, reverential, if a little tense.
Demonstrations have become commonplace in Athens, so much so that people talk of “protest fatigue”. In the past month alone, there have been two general strikes, plus another walkout on 14 November as part of a pan-European day of action. On the night of 7 November, police tear-gassed protesters in Syntagma Square, while inside the parliament MPs debated a new wave of public spending cuts and privatisation demanded by the troika – the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank – in return for another slice of bailout money. Opposition is such that the measures are being implemented by ministerial decree –emergency legislation reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. And it’s hurting: Eurostat reports that 31 per cent of the population, 3.5 million people, are living near or below the poverty line and 15 per cent cannot afford “basic commodities”. Greece is a laboratory for austerity, the most extreme iteration of policies that are being imposed by governments from London to Lisbon.
On Saturday 17 November, the protest is of a different kind. It is the date on which Greece commemorates the fall of the military junta that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. On this day in 1973, a tank burst through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic, which had been occupied by students protesting against the military regime and demanding the right to elect their leaders. This direct democracy had been too much for the colonels to bear and 24 people were killed in the crackdown that followed. The massacre spelled the beginning of the end for their regime, which fell a year later. The 17th has long been a symbolic date for the Greek left but in the past few years the ranks of marchers have been swelled by a new generation.
As the students begin to form into blocs, stamping their feet in unison, the old chant of those who fought the junta goes up: “Bread, education, freedom!” Now, though, it comes with a reply: “The dictatorship is not over!”

**

Manolis Glezos, white-haired and dressed in a sharp, powder- blue jacket, leans forward across the desk and jabs a finger. “I want to write an ‘I accuse’ to Britain. During the war, we stood by them as allies. So where’s Britain now?”
At the age of 90, Glezos knows Greece’s recent history intimately. In 1941, he and a comrade tore down the swastika flag from the Acropolis, at the height of the Nazi occupation. They were imprisoned and tortured. When civil war erupted in 1946, between the communist- led resistance partisans and a rightwing government propped up by Britain and the US, he was sentenced to death. He was sent to prison camps twice more in the years that followed – along with thousands of other leftists – and eventually forced into exile when the junta came to power. Yet Glezos is more than a symbol of resistance; he is back in front-line politics, as an MP.
I meet Glezos in his office at the Greek parliament, which is staffed by a couple of young assistants who are busy posting copies of his speeches on Facebook. (The most recent one has been “liked” 680 times, Glezos tells me.) He is an MP for Syriza, the coalition of radical left-wing parties that has been the main bene - ficiary of public discontent. In the past three years, it has gained momentum as support has drained away from the centre-left Pasok, which once promised Greeks a welfare state and national self-determination but now finds itself in coalition with the right-wing New Democracy, administering the troika’s demands. In May’s general election, Syriza won an unprecedented 17 per cent of the vote. At a second election, called when the government failed to hold a coalition together, its vote rose to 27 per cent and it narrowly missed an outright victory. It is now the main opposition party and most opinion polls put it on course to win power the next time elections are held.
For the first time since 2008, Europe faces the real possibility of a government whose stated aim is, as Glezos tells me, to “cancel” the debt, halting the programme of spending cuts and demanding that the troika renegotiate terms. “Two and a half thousand years ago, an ancient writer, Menander, said: ‘Loans make people slaves.’ You can forgive other people if they don’t know this but Greeks are not allowed not to know this.”
According to Procopis Papastratis, a professor at Panteion University in Athens, Syriza’s success has sent a shockwave through the Greek political establishment. “The left terrifies a lot of people . . . They say that if the left comes, they will slaughter us or they will take our houses like Stalin did in the Soviet Union. The big businesses say that they will leave Greece and they say to those who work for them that if you vote Syriza, you will be unemployed because we will take our companies and go.”
For Glezos, the division is “not between left and right. It is between the Greek people and those who have subjected themselves to the troika and the will of the powerful.” And the elite have good reason to be scared. “We don’t just want to give a good make-up to the system. We really want to change it.” Glezos sets out a range of measures – a crackdown on Greece’s endemic tax evasion; forcing banks to loan the government money at zero interest; investment in industry and agriculture – that he believes would restore economic prosperity.
His pugnacious stance encapsulates the popular feeling that the current government is not acting in the nation’s best interests. “The crisis was not provoked by Greek people. Why should [we] pay for the crisis? This is a basic question. I am never going to stop asking until someone has an answer.”

**

Nationalism, however, always has its dark side. Like many other Greeks I meet, 31-year-old Kelly feels deep anger at the way her country was led into crisis. Greece only gained entry to the eurozone by manipulating economic data – as did other countries, including Italy – and was left exposed when the crash came. “I feel it was a lie all these years. The way they told us how things will be – that you will have a good career if you study. For our generation, we have learned one system and now suddenly there is a big change.”
Kelly is not doing too badly –when we meet, at a sandwich chain in a southern suburb of Athens, she has just been promoted to sales manager at the telemarketing firm where she works. But Kelly wants to “punish” the politicians she believes have led Greece into crisis. She feels the biggest shock she can inflict on the system is to give her vote to the fascist Golden Dawn. To Kelly, the party’s main appeal is that it’s “real”: “They say to you, ‘I am the devil,’ and they are devils. I prefer someone that says the truth and says to me, ‘You know what, I am the bad guy,’ rather than another one that says to me, ‘I am the good guy and I will save you.’” She stops and asks, a little nervously, “Does that make me crazy?”
Kelly is not alone. The first almost anyone outside Greece heard of Golden Dawn was in May 2012, when the party swept into parliament with 7 per cent of the vote. Politics in Greece have polarised – and just as Syriza’s support soared, so right-wing voters have been pushed further and further to extremes, as a succession of right-wing parties have been tainted by coalition.
Europe has become used to the slow, attritional progress of far-right movements; those led by fascists such as Nick Griffin or the Le Pen family, who have put on suits and concealed their real views in an attempt to enter the mainstream. But from Golden Dawn’s Nazi-esque imagery to the militaristic rallies and openly violent conduct of its members, it was immediately apparent that this time was different. Golden Dawn did not emerge from nowhere. As Dimitris Psarras, an investigative journalist who has recently published The Black Book of Golden Dawn, explained to me, the party was founded in the early 1980s by Nikolaos Michal - oliakos, a right-wing extremist with connections to the junta.
From the outset, the group’s core beliefs were “neo-Nazi” and “pagan”, says Psarras, mixing the ideas of Adolf Hitler with a nostalgia for ancient Greek culture – and the movement was structured along quasi-military lines, modelled on the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s stormtroopers. During its early years, Golden Dawn operated as a kind of security service, doing bodyguard work and “the dirty jobs” for certain members of Greece’s wealthy elite.
In the 1990s, explains Psarras, a series of changes in Greek society enabled Golden Dawn to grow. First came a rise in nationalist sentiment after disputes with the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia over its name and with Turkey over ownership of islands in the Aegean Sea. Then came a wave of immigrants following the collapse of the eastern bloc and wars in the Balkans. Finally, with the advent of unregulated private television channels –whose sensationalist output, says Psarras, is “like your Sun newspaper in Britain” – came a rise in antiimmigrant sentiment.
These feelings continued to grow throughout the 2000s, exacerbated by mainstream politicians who pandered to xenophobia. Now, many Greeks have come to see immigration as a cause of the country’s economic turmoil. During my conversation with Kelly, she was at pains to stress that she bore no animosity to foreigners. “I want you to know about Greek people that we are very generous, very clever, very open-minded and very hard-working,” she told me. “But at this time, it’s like a ship – we have water [coming in] from one side and, on the other side, sharks.”
For all its shocking brutality, Golden Dawn has consolidated its support in a way typical of far-right parties across Europe. It follows a theory of community politics derived, says Psarras, from the French nouvelle droite – a group of far-right intellectuals who set out the blueprint for the Front National’s success in France and whose ideas Griffin tried to emulate as leader of the British National Party.
The difference is in Golden Dawn’s relationship with the state. Greece has a history of right-wing militias collaborating with the police and there have been documented incidents in which Golden Dawn members have appeared to work in tandem with officers in attacking left-wing protesters. One study of voting patterns suggests that as much as 50 per cent of Athens police officers voted for Golden Dawn at the last election.
A Golden Dawn MP, Ilias Kasidiaris, physically attacked a female opponent on live television but managed to evade arrest. Three others were filmed smashing up market stalls belonging to immigrant vendors – and posted the video on Golden Dawn’s website –yet have not been charged with any crime.
The tide may be turning: in response to public outrage, all four have now been stripped of parliamentary immunity to prosecution but Klio Papapantoleon, a lawyer who has represented several victims of attacks committed by Golden Dawn members, points out that the Greek justice system, while slow at the best of times, has been “very lenient in judging these members”. She points to the testimony of victims and witnesses who say that they have been “obstructed and encumbered by police officers while trying to sue members of Golden Dawn”.
For now, mainstream politicians follow the same logic as in other countries when faced with a threat from the far right: they compete on its territory. The government’s most recent move on immigration, for instance, has been to suspend all applications for Greek citizenship. Since August, a major police operation has been in progress to round up undocumented migrants and put them in detention centres. Yet such moves have only further legitimised Golden Dawn, which now positions itself as the real defender of the Greek people against austerity, taking a strong anti-bailout line and staging “Greeks-only” food distribution, blood donations and soup kitchens.
Still, the same Nazi beliefs lie at its core, glimpsed on occasions such as when one of its MPs read out a part of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in parliament or in the anti-gay protests it organised that forced the closure of the play Corpus Christi.
Through an intermediary, I contact “John”, a member of Golden Dawn who would speak to me only on the condition of anonymity. Now 32 and working for a banking group in Athens, he joined the movement at 16, convinced that politicians had “betrayed” Greece over the territorial dispute with Turkey. He tells me he was attracted by the “total discipline” of the group. “There was mutual appreciation and, of course, respect towards higher-ranking members.” There were frequent meetings and talks aimed at “ideological orientation”, towards the ideas of what John describes as “National Socialism”. His main task, he says, was to spread these ideas among his friends and classmates, handing out fliers and selling copies of the party newspaper.
Because of family and work commitments, John is no longer an active member but he still votes for the party. What, I ask, would Golden Dawn do if it got into government? “We’ll do what others don’t dare . . . I think about how many times people have laughed at us [during election counts] – and now half of them feel intimidated and half consider us the only solution.”
Journalists, drawn as ever to a good story, have struggled to deal with this. I do, too. Nobody wants to underplay the threat Golden Dawn poses to Greek democracy and there’s a pressing need to expose its underlying extremism. Yet the aggression, which may seem alarming to an outsider, is exactly what attracted voters such as Kelly in the first place. “They do bad things. I don’t agree with that I don’t want them to be the government,” she tells me. “My intention is just to get them in the parliament.”
For now, though, the door to power remains ajar. And it will be much harder to shut than it was to open.

**

Just north-west of the centre of Athens stands the grand Orthodox church of Aghios Panteleimonas, dedicated to the fourth-century martyr St Pantaleon. In the square outside is a children’s playground; it’s locked shut and looks like it has been that way for some time. When I visited with a friend early one weekday morning, our only companions were stray cats that picked their way through the weeds sprouting through the tarmac beneath the swings. Greek flags hung limply from apartment balconies beyond the square and, on the ground in front of the church steps, spray-painted in blue and white, was the message “Foreigners out – Greece for the Greeks”.
A few blocks away, down a side street off one of the main boulevards, is the office of Yonous Muhammadi, chair of the Greek Forum of Refugees. I had trouble finding it: there is no sign outside and the buzzer is unmarked. It’s for a good reason, Muhammadi tells me – he was chased out of his previous office two years ago by fascist thugs, who smashed the place and beat him up. For im migrants such as Muhammadi, who came to Greece from Afghanistan in 2001, the rise of Golden Dawn has merely brought an existing problem out into the open. “In 2010, when we closed the office of the forum, we held a big press conference. We told them, now it is our problem, migrants and refugees, but it will be a problem for Greek people, also. For all of you.”
Like the rest of Europe, Greece experienced a further wave of immigration from the late 1990s onwards. Refugees – from conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere – were joined by economic migrants from South Asia and Africa. Three things combined to turn this into an acute crisis. The first was Greece’s lack of a functioning immigration system. Applying for citizenship was – and is – so difficult that the only way most migrants can get permission to stay in the country is by presenting themselves as refugees. Temporary papers are renewed every six months and it can take up to ten years for an asylum application to be processed. The second was the removal of landmines from the Evros region in northern Greece, on the Turkish border. This opened up a safer route for migrants who previously had to make dangerous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean.
The third, decisive factor was the construction of “fortress Europe” – a pan-European immigration policy designed to make it harder for migrants from poor countries to enter the EU. Spain and Italy strengthened their border controls, making Greece an even more popular point of entry for migrants crossing from Asia or the southern Mediterranean. Along with this came the Dublin II Regulation, a 2003 agreement that asylum-seekers would be sent back to the country where they first set foot in the EU.
It was a perfect storm: hundreds of migrants a day being “returned” to a country they never intended to live in, with thousands more arriving, unaware of what awaited them.
Many migrants, such as Muhammadi, have made successes of their lives here: a trained doctor, he now works as a nurse in one of the capital’s main hospitals. Tanzanian and Pakistani shopkeepers have businesses all over the city. However, the failed policies have led to thousands of people being trapped in Greece, vulnerable to people-smugglers and crammed into apartments in once-smart citycentre neighbourhoods or sleeping rough, without sanitation, work or food, in squares such as Aghios Panteleimonas. At its peak, estimates Muhammadi, there were perhaps 5,000 Afghans intending to stay in Greece but a constant turnover of between 12,000 and 15,000 coming and leaving. Crime – theft, drug-trafficking and prostitution – rose in Athens city centre, and at one point around 500 people were sleeping rough in the playground outside Aghios Panteleimonas. The local council’s response was to lock it shut, forcing them on to the streets.
What came next, says Muhammadi, could have been avoided if the police had done their job and kept order. Instead, feeling like they had been abandoned, Greek residents in the area surrounding the church formed a campaign group – the “angry citizens” –which was soon infiltrated by members of Golden Dawn. The party encouraged Greeks to hang the national flag from their windows to show opposition to immigration and began carrying out “vigilante” patrols and covert attacks on immigrants. “The violence was here before the crisis,” says Muhammadi. “And the police were there, they were looking, but they were doing nothing. When I was attacked, I was bleeding but when I went to the police station to complain, the policemen who were standing in front told me, ‘If you complain, we’ll put you in a detention centre for two nights.’”
Then, in May 2011, came the spark. A shocking murder – of a Greek man as he fetched his car to take his pregnant wife to hospital – committed by two illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, caused a national media scandal. It provoked a two-week pogrom around Aghios Panteleimonas orchestrated by Golden Dawn, with fascist gangs attacking non-whites in broad daylight, dragging them off buses and destroying their shops. The playground was closed, immigrants forced off the streets and the message sent out: Golden Dawn is the group that knows how to sort out the immigrant “problem”. We do what others don’t dare.
The difference now, Muhammadi tells me, is a much wider acceptance of this violence as part of everyday life. “Before, the fascists would attack a group of immigrants and leave straight away. Now, they are there, they are waiting, they are attacking and the others look on. And nobody can do anything.”
Later, after my meeting with Muhammadi, I visited Saxi and Hakima, an Afghan couple in their late twenties with three young children. Kicking off my shoes, I was welcomed into their small apartment, which they share with four other refugees. We sat on carpets and cushions in their living room, while Hakima brought tea and boiled sweets. When I asked if their children had been born here, meaning in Greece, Hakima said, “Yes, here,” and pointed to the floor just in front of me.
As their two-year-old daughter Zeinab climbed over me and drew in my notebook, Saxi explained how he had been a policeman in Afghanistan but fled, fearing for his life, over a decade ago. “I haven’t seen my parents in 12 years,” he told me. “I would go back if it was safe.” After travelling through Iran and Turkey, he arrived in Greece, where he found work in the construction industry. Hakima joined him in 2008. It was always hard, explained Saxi, but things started to get worse from that year onwards. Two and a half years ago, he was beaten up so badly that he spent a week in hospital. When he came out, he was attacked again – and the time spent off work cost him his job. Saxi had recently found another job but Hakima told me that the family struggles for money and that she takes it in turns with other Afghan women to root through rubbish bins by night to find goods to sell and food to eat. They can’t go in large groups, because they’re scared of attracting attention and being attacked. “We thought we would come here, that we would be safe,” says Saxi, “but the people here don’t treat us like human beings.”
Saxi’s and Hakima’s story is typical. One recent study by the newly formed Racist Violence Recording Network noted 87 attacks in Greece between January and September 2012, 83 of which took place in public spaces – in squares, streets or on public transport. Daphne Kapetanaki, of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, tells me that these statistics are “just the tip of the iceberg”. Many immigrants will not report attacks, she says, because they lack papers and fear arrest or abuse by police officers. The network’s report also highlighted an almost total lack of prosecutions for racist attacks and identified 15 incidents in which police and racist violence were “interlinked”.
Many Greeks are shocked at the rise of fascism in their country but there is disagreement on what to do about it. Until recently, Syriza took the line that fighting austerity should be the focus. Anarchist groups have organised night-time motorbike patrols in areas with large immigrant populations. Yet Petros Constantinou of the Movement Against Racism and Fascist Threat (KEERFA) is adamant that a successful campaign will work only if it gives immigrants the courage to speak out, argue for their place in Greek society and join the wider protest movement. He looks to Britain’s history of successful anti-fascist movements; in particular the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism of the late 1970s. A national demonstration against racism and fascism in Syntagma Square has been called for 19 January.
For its part, the Racist Violence Recording Network hopes that its work will bring pressure on the government to reform the justice system: already, the minister of public order has promised to set up dedicated police units to tackle racist crime and to provide training for all officers in dealing with these issues. However, as Kapetanaki explains, what’s needed is “an assurance that migrants will not be arrested and detained if they report an attack”.
It will take hard work to lift the veil of fear. When I ask Saxi if he has ever considered joining anti-fascist protests, his answer is bleak. “Greek people, whoever they are, they hate us.”

**

By late afternoon on 17 November, the march from the Athens Polytechnic has swelled in numbers. Now some 20,000 strong, the students having been joined by various political groups, including the still-powerful Greek Communist Party (KKE), it snakes its way through central Athens, past the Academy, a neoclassical building from which glares in red the graffiti “Malakies [wankers] – you are the refugees of Europe!”; past Syntagma and the parliament, guarded by lines of police in gas masks; and up a palm tree-lined boulevard to its target, the US embassy. Obeying cold war logic, the US backed the colonels’ regime – just as Britain had backed the Greek right against the partisans two decades earlier – and to many Greeks, the troika’s bailout is just the latest instance of foreign interference.
By the time the march reaches the embassy, a looming Bauhaus edifice emblazoned with a giant state seal, it is dark. Everyone expects a confrontation with police. But this year, the marchers keep walking, pushing on further up the road. It is the third day of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the demonstrators have decided to take their protest all the way to the Israeli embassy.
It’s a symbolic gesture but it mirrors the many acts of solidarity, big or small, I see or hear about during my stay. One rainy evening later that week, I take a taxi out to Elliniko, a suburb of Athens, to visit a large medical clinic staffed entirely by volunteers. Set up to provide medical care to the growing number of Greeks without health insurance, it has dedicated rooms for a GP, for paediatricians, gynaecologists, psychologists and more.
A dentist whose practice was closing gave the clinic his entire surgery’s worth of equipment. There are arrangements to use the radiology and chemotherapy departments of nearby hospitals out of hours. Doctors come to work here for a few hours after doing a full day’s work. A trained pharmacist co-ordinates the sorting out and cataloguing of medicines. Cancer medication is particularly expensive and many people donate unused courses of tablets when relatives die. Volunteers without medical training spend their time doing clerical work or building up the network of donors.
Showing me around, Elena – a freelance economist by day, she says with an ironic laugh – tells me that since the summer the number of people using the clinic has doubled. It treated 1,200 in August and nearly 2,500 in October. As the number of people needing help soars, so, too, does the number of people ready to step in to help. “It’s not why I do it,” says Elena, “but every day I come here, I leave feeling just a little bit taller.”
There are two rules, she says – “No money and leave your politics at the door.” But its very existence raises an explicitly political question: what if we could build a society that operated this way not out of dire emergency, but by design?
It is this challenge that faces Syriza, should it fulfil expectations and win the next election. In 2011, ordinary Greeks began occupying public squares all over the country, in imitation of the indignados movement in Spain, and debating the changes they wanted to see in their country. Now, Syriza is trying to harness this energy and since the summer has been holding public meetings of its own to determine the party’s programme for government.
Manolis Glezos tells me he is one of the few MPs to have visited these meetings across eece and lists an array of proposals that the movement has thrown up: local and regional autonomy to combat corruption; a justice system free from political interference; giving social institutions such as trade unions and medical associations a say in proposing policies; the “socialisation” of banks, in which members of civil society sit on corporate boards; the right to recall MPs when they don’t implement the policies they have been elected to enact.
First, Syriza must transform itself from a broad coalition into a unified party. This month, it will hold the first of several conferences where delegates elected by each of the public meetings will discuss what principles the party should adopt.
The left is further divided: the KKE, along with a few other parties, remains aloof, convinced that Greece needs to exit the euro before any social change can begin. (Syriza would rather stay and build a wider European movement.) According to Glezos, the rise of grassroots democracy is already affecting how Greeks think about their country: “By taking these assemblies to industries, factories, workplaces, communities, it’s changing the whole shape of society.” This time, he says, there is a chance to avoid the past mistakes of the left, because this movement aims to put “the people in power and the people in government”.
Glezos recalls the slogan of the polytechnic uprising: “Bread, education, freedom. These questions are still current.”
A week after visiting the clinic in Elliniko, I go to see another project, supported once again by donations and staffed by volunteers. This time, it’s food, not medicine, to provide for those who are unable to feed themselves or their families. Staff tell me that they have been overwhelmed by donations from the local community: shoppers at the nearby supermarket drop by with anything from a few tins of tomatoes to whole carrier bags full of supplies.
However, this isn’t Greece. It’s London – just down the road from my house. Some 13 million people live below the poverty line in Britain and as austerity forces more out of work or on to part-time wages, a growing number of people are struggling to cover the basic necessities.
Since 2008, when 26,000 people used food banks, the number has soared: more than 100,000 used them between April and September this year and the Trussell Trust, which operates the largest network of food banks in the UK, estimates that 200,000 people will use them in the year to come.
Greece’s crisis may be acute but it is not unique. In Britain, its effects have so far been easier to hide, while outbreaks of dissent have been more spasmodic: the student occupations of 2010; the 2011 summer riots; last autumn’s Occupy movement. And fortunately, the far right is in decline, even though victim-blaming and xenophobia are rife in our media.
None of this has to happen; but to stop it, we need each other.


fonte: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/12/warning-athens


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