Posted by greydogg, 99GetSmart

Today in Athens, the government-of-the-regime showed their real face against the Greek people, the workers and the unions. Within the last two weeks, the rioting police and SWAT teams attacked the metro workers, the municipality workers and now the union PAME. Thirty-five workers, who were engaged in a symbolic occupation of the MInistry of Labor, were arrested and are being held at Police Headquarters.

Photos/Video by Elias Theodoropoulos @ http://99getsmart.com/greece-repression-of-the-people-by-the-government/

By Iddhis Bing, 99GetSmart

Greek Medicine And The ICC

The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect. - Alice in Wonderland, chapter VI

Do cuts to Greek medical care violate human rights laws?

This article is in three parts: excerpts from and brief comments on an amicus brief filed to the International Criminal Court in the Hague; some facts on the ground in Germany at present; the latest information, as of press time, on Doctor Kosmopoulos’s situation in Athens. It’s a long piece, so thanks for your patience.

1.

And so we return to the game of cat and mouse, in which the mouse is Greece, in danger of being swallowed whole. But who is the cat? That’s the part of the picture we don’t see. Like Alice, we see only the smile in the tree – an appropriate place for this Cheshire cat, looking down from high above.

Because discussions are so often seen through a lens of Germany vs. Greece, or Europe vs. the Piigs, with the people of Europe on the sidelines, it might be useful to get other opinions.

This summer, journalists Georgios Tragkas, Panagiotis Tzenos, and Antonios Prekas, along with Dimitrios Konstantaras of the Nea Democratica party, filed suit at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, against Christine Lagarde of the IMF, Herman van Rompuy (President of the European Council), Jose Manuel Barroso (President of the European Commission), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and that country’s Minister of Finance, Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble. The charge: Crimes Against Humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute.1

That passed with little notice. But a curious thing happened in the last week of November. A supporting, or amicus, brief has been filed that backs up the original charges, with compelling evidence.

Sarah Luzia Hassel-Reusing is a practicing psychologist and human rights activist in Wuppertal, Germany. And one non-Greek on whom the meaning of solidarity is not lost.

Her thirty-page ICC filing substantiates, in copious detail, the charge of Crimes Against Humanity for actions carried out as part of the various Greek debt rescues, which have resulted in destruction of Greek medicine, their hospitals, doctors and their all too frequently malnourished patients.2

Readers should do a bit of research on Crimes Against Humanity. Wikipedia has the full text of the Rome Statute. Briefly, a crime against humanity is defined as taking place when someone knowingly attacks a civilian population, and does this either as part of a larger plan or systematically (art. 7 of the Rome Statute). In addition, Hassel-Reusing cites the UN Social Pact (Articles 11 and 12, the universal human rights to food and health). The ICC is now part of the apparatus of world law and as such has prosecuted well-known cases from Serbia to Ruanda.

Read the rest of this entry →

Greek journalist Kostas Vaxevanis, arrested for revealing names of wealthy tax evaders

On the evening of October 27, the Greek journalist Kostas Vaxevanis was awakened by police who arrested him and hauled him off to jail. The charge? Hot Doc, the magazine he writes for and edits, published portions of the  ‘‘Lagarde List” containing the names of 2,059 Greeks who allegedly spirited money out of the country and into the warm embrace of UK-based HSBC’s Swiss offices.

Vaxevanis was charged with the publication of private data, although only names, and not account numbers or amounts, were listed. Vaxevanis did not allege that anyone on the list was guilty of a crime, merely that an investigation into the matter was in order. The List  has been the talk of Greece, although not its newspapers, for months.

Interestingly, a website run by Makis Triantafillopoulos (zougla.gr), published the same list just hours before Hot Doc. No arrests have been made in that case. Triantafillopoulos is widely regarded as having close ties to Greece’s ruling class.

The Lagarde List has a fascinating if brief history. Compiled by Christine Lagarde when she was Finance Minister in the Sarkozy Government, it is said to contain the names of over 22,000 individuals with hidden accounts from across Europe. It was given by Lagarde to members of the Greek government in 2010 and promptly ‘‘lost.” Since then, officials in Greece have been scrambling to find it. Several ministers claim they gave it to another minister in another department…

Since publication of the list on Friday, two men whose names appear on it, Leonidas Tzanis, a former Greek minister who had been under investigation, and Vlassis Kambouroglou, a wealthy businessman in the defense industry, have turned up dead, both apparent suicides.

Kostas Vaxevanis was released from jail on Monday, October 29.

Meanwhile, in France, with la rentrée in full swing, the season of awards is upon us.

The prestigious 2012 Louise Weiss Award for European Journalism has been given to Edouard Perrin for his film Les petits secrets des grandes entreprises. The TV2 documentary was made in conjunction with Panorama, the investigative magazine of BBC1, and is the basis for the Invisible Money series on GroundReport.

According to the prize committee, the documentary, which aired on May 11, 2012 is ‘‘an unprecedented investigation which revealed in copious detail the methods used to achieve what is shamefully called ‘fiscal optimisation.’ ”

The TV2 team had this to say upon receiving the award:

‘‘We  were able to successfully reveal the opaque legal arrangements by which a multitude of large corporations subtract billions of Euros from their tax declarations. The investigation depicted in detail how this takes place with the complicity of Luxembourg’s government. We remain disappointed by the silence of our governments in dealing with the practices we revealed.”

On an angrier note, the documentarian Paul Moreira had this to say on his Facebook page: “I’m pissed. Edouard Perrin’s stunning investigation wins the Louise Weiss Prize and the Budget Ministry completely fails to react… Edouard showed how large European companies avoid paying taxes… We’re not talking about peanuts but tens of billions of Euros. It could give the Budget Ministry a few ideas. Obviously, it would require being a bit rude with the Luxembourgeois, who are, as everyone knows, people with impeccable manners.”

Two journalists, two wildly different scenarios for what are, essentially, facets of the same story – a story Europe’s leaders find simply too hot to touch, let alone discuss publicly. Vaxevanis could not ask for better publicity: his magazine is now known around the world. Perrin did a lot of work the old fashioned way, door to door, office to office, and he nailed the perpetrators in copious detail. Hats off to both gentlemen. Neither story is about to go away.

published 04/10/2012 by panos

translation: “Snake” Arbusto, 99GetSmart

Logo of the Greek neo-nazi Golden Dawn party.

Although three days have already gone by since the anti-Fascist motorcycle demonstration-poster distribution on Sunday 30 September, we feel there is a need to make certain clarifications.

On Sunday 30 September, following a public call, a motorcycle-mounted anti-Fascist demonstration and poster distribution was held in downtown Athens, leaving from Exarchia. The demonstration was intended to be a response to the Fascist pogroms and attacks against immigrants perpetrated in several areas of central Athens by Fascist gangs disguised as “citizens’ and merchants’ committees” and assisted by official gangs connected with the government.

The ties between Golden Dawn and the Greek police are well known and have been evidenced many times, and analyzing or explaining that phenomenon is not what we are interested in at the moment.

After the attack on the demonstration by members of Golden Dawn, there was a charge by the DIAS unit, which was following at the rear of the demonstration and in the parallel streets and alleys.

Finally, fifteen anti-Fascist militants were arrested and beaten on various parts of their bodies – head, arms, legs. Tasers (weapons that cause an electric shock) were even used.

We were brought to the seventh floor of the GADA building, in front of the “régime protection” section, where, through the night, we were beaten, threatened, had our hair pulled, and were subjected to burns, and the Delta units who were guarding us took pictures for their personal albums.

Threats along the lines of “Now we know who you are, and we’ll break you the way we did your grandparents during the Civil War” are characteristic of the climate of terror the imbecilic Praetorians of the Delta units attempted to create – not to mention the fact that all communication with attorneys or doctors was prohibited for a period of 19 hours. The following day, after the “perp walk” and picture-taking, we were finally taken to the Evelpidon courthouse.

During our stay there, the MAT riot police attacked the people who had gathered in solidarity, savagely beating several of them, arresting 25 and finally keeping four in custody. After their arrest, these individuals were taken to the seventh floor of the GADA, where the same climate of intimidation was created via humiliating body searches. In a decision of an unprecedentedly vindictive nature, these persons were held for three additional days; the original 15 were held through Thursday, 4 October.

We were all taken to the cells at the GADA, on the eighth floor, in an overcrowded wing (designed to hold 30 persons, whereas 80 are currently “living” there under execrable conditions), to “put us through hell it”; however our experience was one of unique solidarity among the people there, some of whom had been “forgotten” for three months.

In a period of “economic crisis,” with more and more people being dragged into poverty and destitution, with social cannibalism rewarded as a virtue, with Fascism rearing its head in our countries and our neighborhoods, with aggression by the State intensifying at all levels, the choice of self-management and self-organization, solidarity, comradeship, and direct action can not only create a rampart against the fear they want to impose on us, but open the way to another type of social organization.

FASCISM: UNDERSTAND IT IN DEPTH.

IT WON’T JUST DIE ALL BY ITSELF; WE HAVE TO KILL IT.

The militants arrested on the 30/9 and 1/10

(Some of whom are proud descendants of “Anarcho-Communist bandits.”)

Related Article @ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/09/greek-antifascist-protesters-torture-police?INTCMP=SRCH

By Eirene, A Place Called Space

Antonis Samaras, the Greek PM, expressed his fears about Greece’s future in an inverview to the German daily, Handelsblatt. He stressed the fragile political and social situation in Greece and likened it to Germany’s Weimar Who exactly was he warning, and who does he think will deal with the situation? He is Prime Minister, the head of the government, and governments are elected to govern, to make decisions and then implement them. What exactly has Mr Samaras, as head of the government done to deal with the rise of the neo-Nazis so that the country does not ‘descend into chaos’?

Hate crimes which are racially motivated have been intensifying all over Greece in the last months to such an extent that they have become a daily occurrence. Gangs on motorbikes attack people at night and sometimes in broad daylight. These attacks are spearheaded by the neo-Nazi group who maintain that their aim is to ‘cleanse’ the public space. What has Mr Samaras done to stop these attacks?

Gangs of black clad motorcyclists are terrorising the towns on the Northern borders of Greece looking for illegal immigrants and beating up anyone whose colour does not match their idea of what an ‘ideal Greek’ looks like. The Muslim minorities in some of these towns, where Muslims and Orthodox Greeks have coexisted for years, have been attacked by the same gangs.  What has Mr Samaras done to ensure that all citizens are treated equally?

What did Mr Samaras do when immigrants kept in detention centres were attacked by the neo-Nazis? What did he do when non-white vendors had their stalls pulled apart and their merchandise smashed? What parliamentary action did he instigate against the neo-Nazi MPs who took part in these attacks? Was he not worried about the challenge to democracy then? Did he not feel, that, as the head of the government, it was his responsibility to ensure that the law was obeyed and enforced?

Victims of these attacks have reported that the police are discouraging them from filing complaints and some have even been warned that they would be detained if they insisted on an investigation. As head of state, what has Mr Samaras done to ensure that the police are doing their job? What has he done to ensure that all are treated equally under the law? Surely this is what the democracy that he is so worried about, means.

No prosecutor seems to be looking into any of the allegations of racial abuse.  Up to date not one single perpetrator of a racist attack has been convicted. What has Mr Samaras done to ensure that the legal arm of the state is working effectively, guaranteing that democracy is working?

Finally, we must not forget that it is Mr Saramas’  government that has introduced the Xenios Zeus operation aimed at arresting and detaining illegal immigrants of Asian and African origin, transporting them to makeshift detention centres where they are detained in appalling conditions. It is Mr Samaras’ government that is driving a wedge in the middle of Greek society, dividing its citizens and creating scapegoats that are indeed reminiscent of the Weimar Republic.

StopCartel TV broadcasts live from Athens, Greece weeknights @ 6 pm Athens time. The following post is a loose transcript of the July 30, 2012 broadcast.

By greydogg and snake arbusto, 99GetSmart

- The steelworkers from the Hellenic Halyvourgias Steel Mill in Aspropyrgos held a general assembly of their union on Friday, 27 July and Saturday, 28 July and voted to officially terminate their nine-month strike. One hundred fifty workers were reported present. 107 voted to end the strike, while 14 voted against and 29 abstained.

The workers voted to strike last October, protesting layoffs, cuts in working hours and a decrease in pay to 500 euros ($615) per month. The heroic nine-month strike was interrupted at 5:30 a.m. on Friday, 20 July, in a brutal raid by rioting police, who were working in the interest of a private owner, Nikos Manesis.

Again, during the early morning hours on Monday, 23 July, the Greek rioting police used chemical weapons to disperse a group of striking steelworkers gathered outside the gates of the mill. The workers were there to protest the reopening of the steel mill.

Supporters of the steelworkers, who quickly organized an impressive rally - 10,000 people gathered in Omonia Square and marched to Syntagma Square on Monday (23 July) evening – were stunned at the decision to end the strike.

The details are still unclear, but it appears that the strike has ended without any of the steelworkers’ demands being met. Longtime supporters feel that the struggle of the steelworkers represents the larger struggle for workers’ rights in Greece and that this was not their decision to make alone. Supporters feel an especially deep disappointment that the strike seems to have ended without any gains for Greek society.

Kritios Katsionis, an MP from the Communist Party, asks “What are the demands from the union now?” He also responded to the steelworkers’ supporters, who are asking “Who is giving orders to whom?”

The arrangement with the government was that once the strike ended, the rioting police would be removed from the steel mill because there would be no reason for their presence. The Minister of Justice said that the rioting police would be removed by Monday morning. But despite promises from the government, the rioting police remain on guard.

According to Mr. Katsionis, industrialist Nikos Manesis, a private citizen and the owner of the Hellenic Halyvourgias Steel Mill, is giving direct orders to the Greek government, who then pass down his orders to the rioting police. Manesis has instructed the government to leave the rioting police at the steel mill, in order to marginalize the workers.The rioting police were also instructed, by Manesis, to let the workers into the factory one by one, in a show of control.

The government continues to insist that it had acted upon the wishes of the workers, while the radical-Left main opposition party SYRIZA and the Communist Party condemned the police action.

——————

- “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.” –  Jean Claude Juncker, May 2011.

From Suddeutsche Zeitung:

“No time to lose”: The chairman of the €-group feels that a crucial point in the debt crisis has been reached. Jean-Claude Juncker supports plans by ECB chief Draghi for the purchase of government bonds – and says that Germany is partly to blame for the crisis. Berlin treats the euro area “as a branch,” Juncker said, and that “chatter about the withdrawal of Greece” is not helpful.

Juncker confirmed that the euro countries are preparing together with the bailout fund EFSF and the European Central Bank to buy government bonds from struggling countries if necessary. Because there is no doubt, he said, that “It is still necessary to decide exactly what we will do and when.” This depends “on developments in the next few days and on how fast we have to react.”

Except that Germany’s Finance Minister “denied plans for a new aid program for Spain, according to newspaper Welt am Sonntag, after the media reported European Union leaders aim for Spanish government bond purchases by the European rescue fund and the European Central Bank.”

Tyler Durden, from zerohedge, summarizes:

i) since the head of the Eurogroup is back to outright refuting what Germany said a day earlier, Europe is once again back to Plan B – lying, which means things are again on the verge of an all-out collapse, and a plunge in the EURUSD (which, as a reminder, is precisely what the German export industry wants more than anything), and

ii) just as at the June 29 summit, beggars are again hoping they can be choosers, and force Germany – by way of a full-blown media onslaught in which they represent a vague possibility as a certain outcome, and thus have already set expectations about 5% higher than they it would be otherwise – to succumb to the will of the beggars, and allow full-blown debt monetization.

In conclusion, here are excerpts from a Spiegel magazine interview with Mr. Juncker, highlighting his hilarious attempts to justify his lies:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Prime Minister, you are a Christian Democrat and a Catholic, which is why we want to talk to you about the Ten Commandments.

Juncker: I already have an idea of what you are getting at.

SPIEGEL: Are you familiar with the Eighth Commandment?

Juncker: Of course. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

SPIEGEL: Apparently you don’t take it very seriously. More than two weeks ago, you denied a  report by SPIEGEL ONLINE about a secret meeting of several European Union finance ministers to discuss the situation in Greece, even though the official limousines were already pulling up in Luxembourg.

Juncker: The most important commandment is not to inflict harm on others. Although it isn’t stated quite that way in the Ten Commandments, it follows from them. The finance ministers of several Euro Group nations had agreed to meet on Friday with the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Jean-Claude Trichet. Because the financial markets in Europe were still open and trading was still underway on Wall Street, we had to deny the existence of the meeting. Otherwise the rate of the euro against the dollar, which had already fallen as a result of your report, would have plunged disastrously.

SPIEGEL: With this false denial, you not only harmed your own credibility, but that of European financial policy as well.

Juncker: And it didn’t exactly enhance the credibility of SPIEGEL ONLINE to disseminate the false report that we were meeting in Luxembourg to discuss Greece’s withdrawal from the monetary union.

SPIEGEL: Forgive us for saying so, but SPIEGEL ONLINE had obtained information to that effect from government sources, as well as a working document prepared specifically for this meeting for the German finance minister.

Juncker: It is not unusual for finance ministers to have documents with them that contain all of the issues being discussed in public. And the question of Greece’s withdrawal from the monetary union is certainly being discussed in public. But that’s a far cry from saying that the issue is on the agenda of a meeting. As a result, I had to be all the more careful to ensure that no unnecessary turbulence would occur in the markets.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that, as a finance minister in the age of global capital markets, you cannot tell people the truth?

Juncker: I do not have a ready answer to your question. My main concern is to protect people from detriment. That’s why I feel practically compelled to make sure that no dangerous rumors begin to circulate. I’m certainly not going to go to confession because of a false denial. God understands more about the financial markets than many who write about them.

…

SPIEGEL: When secret meetings are held and the truth isn’t always being told, people get the impression that there must be something wrong with this Europe.

Juncker: People understand perfectly well that politicians have to discuss sensitive issues behind closed doors. I had 10 seconds to decide how to react to the report in SPIEGEL ONLINE. Let us say, hypothetically, that I had said: “Okay, we are having a meeting, but I’m not going to tell you what we intend to talk about.” That would have triggered a tsunami in the financial markets. Instead, I chose to produce a small wave of outrage over a white lie.

SPIEGEL: Nevertheless, we’d like to try aiming for the truth.

——————

- Of the 11.5€ billion to be cut from Greece’s budget, employees, pensioners and patients are scheduled for 5€ billion in cuts. Some of the proposed measures include:

A cap for pensions: maximum pension would be 2,000-2,200 euro

Pensions: A 5% cut for pensions 1,000-1,400€. A 10% cut for pensions over 1,400€. The cut will be applied to the total amount, for those receiving more than one pension.

Allowances, Social Benefits: More than 89 social and welfare benefits will be given according to income and social criteria. Only the unemployment allowance and EKAS (a welfare benefit for low pensioners) are “untouched’’ by the measures, even though a very low-income cap was set and applied last year for EKAS.

There have been some rumors that there will be cuts to unemployment allowance for seasonal workers (agriculture, tourism), but this has not been confirmed.

Lump sum: There will be a lump-sum cut of 22.67% for civil servants, and a total of 40% in cuts for insurance funds that pay a higher lump sum than the employees’ contributions.

Healthcare: Maximum annual spending per insured patient will be 1,500€! This amount includes expenditures covered by insurance funds for prescription medicine, 2 check ups per year and 1 hospital stay.

If this amount is exhausted before the year’s end, patients will have to pay 10€  per visit to a doctor and 15% of the daily cost for a hospital stay.

——————

StopCartel TV broadcasts live from Athens, Greece on weeknights at 6pm Athens time @ http://www.livestream.com/stopcarteltvgr