Greek state's racism scapegoats migrants

Greece’s economic crisis has prompted a series of criminal acts by the Greek state against migrants. The European Union is largely silent except where it is helping Greece to keep refugees from entering its borders.

In their desperation, undocumented migrants and asylum seekers have launched hunger strikes and protests, including attempted suicides and self-mutilation, in detention camps across Greece.

Rounded up by the Greek state with no access to lawyers or information about their future, thousands of migrants are imprisoned both on the mainland and on islands where people are locked up straight from the boats that many arrive in.

Detainees are on hunger strike at Amygdaleza, one of the largest camps which consists of dozens of containers. There in the hot sun, up to 2,000 undocumented migrants are kept short of food and rarely allowed out for exercise or activities.

Nearby, hundreds of children are being held in a dark building, and they too complain of never being allowed out, or properly fed or permitted to wash themselves or their clothes. In this film, a Greek police officer tells visiting members of the European Parliament that this is by far the best of the camps.

Hundreds of Syrians attempting to cross from Turkey across the Evros river have drowned. Greek police are accused of using boats to shove them back into Turkish waters. Police forces from other EU states are taking turns in policing the river area, and now a huge fence has been completed at a cost of €17m.

For black and Asian people living in Greece, life is little better. Greek police carry out thousands of checks on people's papers every day. They also facilitate attacks on them by organised gangs from the two Greek fascist parties.

Migrant agricultural workers are facing horrific exploitation, and there are calls for a boycott of Greek strawberries, after bosses opened fire on workers in Manolada, a farming area in the Peloponnese.

Around 200 mostly Bangladeshi workers at a strawberry farm confronted bosses over seven months unpaid wages and 28 were injured when supervisors opened fire with shotguns. Their rate of pay was less than €4 an hour and the bosses were deducting one day's pay every week to cover their accommodation in filthy polytunnels.

The immediate response of Nikos Dendias, the New Democracy MP who is minister for Public Order and Citizen Protection, was to order the arrest of the injured workers for being undocumented. Four were seized immediately on leaving hospital. After an international outcry Dendias said they would be given refugee status, but that has not yet happened.

Such attacks are commonplace in Manolada, a so-called economic success story which has been achieved almost entirely at the cost of terrible slave labour conditions for migrant workers.

All the parties in the Greek parliament are guilty of allowing this growing racism. The coalition is keen to keep the focus on immigrants to divert attention from the terrible economic crisis and the increasingly insane austerity measures being forced on Greek people by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Even Syriza, nominally a left party, recently signed a parliamentary pact with the fascist Independent Party calling on the Greek government to save the money-laundering Cypriot banks. This inexplicable move shows that none of the parties in the Greek parliament can offer a real alternative to the fascists.

The people of Greece urgently need to develop an independent political movement, with no connections to the state and its corrupt parliament, that is prepared to challenge the capitalist status quo. While the system stays in place, Greeks face decades of austerity, unemployment, poverty and misery – and the racism and fascism that it spawns and nurtures.

Penny Cole

Divide and rule in Greece and Egypt

The sigh of relief expressed by the financial markets and the major capitalist governments over the outcome of the Greek election reveals how desperate the ruling elites are for any “good news”, however ephemeral it proves to be.

The crisis of the euro is now centred on Spain, the fifth largest economy in Europe, which now faces sovereign bankruptcy as well as debt-ridden banks. And next in line is Italy.

Whatever the right-wing New Democracy-led government cobbles together, the fact is that the Greek economy has been smashed, working people can take no more austerity measures and basic supplies like medicine are drying up.

So nothing is different this morning, except that Syriza, which wanted to renegotiate the draconian bail-out terms, did not win. The Brussels bureaucracy and German chancellor Merkel were terrified that an “unreliable” left coalition might come to power in Greece, just as the euro is in its deepest ever crisis.

But it remains a narrow victory for the New Democracy, Greece’s conservative party, which garnered only 3% more of the vote than the Syriza left coalition. Party leader Antonis Samaras is now in negotiations to form a coalition with the Pasok pseudo-Socialist Party, which received 12%, in an attempt to increase his majority – in advance of either party’s agreement to the talks.

Real fear spread in the commanding heights of Europe after the May 6 general election in Greece when the Syriza party, lead by Alexis Tsipras, appeared out of nowhere to gain some 17% of the vote. Syriza’s share of the vote has risen to 27%, thus bucking the notion that European voters cannot be enthusiastic about a left radical party.

Syriza is a coalition of 13 groups including democratic socialists, euro-communists, Marxists and greens. It is, however, pro-European Union as well as in favour of staying in the euro and simply wanted to ease the burden on the Greek people.

Tapping into the suffering caused by the harsh terms of the bailout, Tsipras has won over public sector workers many of whom have received no wages for months, unemployed young people and Greeks of many political complexions who feel they have nothing to lose by taking a chance.  

Meanwhile, in Egypt, the military has effectively seized power as the country awaits the result of the presidential election. It has issued a declaration granting itself sweeping powers. The document by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (Scaf) says new general elections cannot be held until a permanent constitution is drawn up. It also gives the Scaf legislative control.

On the eve of the elections, under the influence of pro-Mubarak judges, Egypt’s Constitutional Court, dissolved parliament. Emergency laws were then revived, which give the military free rein to arrest civilians without reference to the courts.

It is a pre-emptive coup d’état by Egypt’s “deep state” – the military-economic establishment – has moved to forcibly end the dual power situation that has prevailed in Egypt since Mubarak’s overthrow by a mass uprising last year.

The two candidates in the election both stood for reaction. On the one side, the Muslim Brotherhood Mohamed Mursi, on the other, the continuation of  Mubarak's “deep state” through prime minister Ahmed Shafiq. So in the absence of a real choice. In both rounds, voters opted for the candidate who would best counteract the contender they do not want. In other words, “the lesser of two evils”.

Have we seen the exercise of the people’s will in either of these elections?  In Greece, even though 55% of voters opposed the pro bail-out parties, the country now has a pro bail-out government! In Egypt, the army is determined to retain control – whatever the outcome of the presidential election while dissolving parliament altogether.

Elections have made no difference in either country to decide who truly holds power. The elections were in fact a form of democracy denied, with serving to polarise and divide society and allow the elites to stay in power – a form of “divide and rule”.  The conclusion?  If there ever was a time to create new forms of democratic expression such as people’s assemblies, it is now.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

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State is the enforcer of austerity

Q. Why did the 100 billion euro loan to bailout Spanish banks recycled from the 27 members of the European Union via the European Financial Stability Mechanism go to the government rather than, as some wanted, direct to the banks where it is needed?

A. Because the people who run the EFSM act as ciphers for the needs of the global capitalist system. And they have to ensure that states – governments, civil administrations, legal system, armed forces including police – extract the repayments on the loans from their populations.

In the social, economic and political system that operates currently there’s no other way to make it happen.

If the people of a country elect a government that’s less than willing to enact the needs of global investors, the “international community” does everything in its power to ensure that it is replaced, by a more compliant power.

It’s a salutary warning as the people of Greece go to the polls again this Sunday, deciding whether to back Syriza’s policy of opposing the bail-out conditions imposed on the country by the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank.

Within hours of the announcement of the loan to Spain, after the briefest period of market traders’ profit-taking euphoria, the reality of the crisis returned. No amount of new credit can restore Spain, or any other part of the global economy to growth.

Potential lenders, so-called “vulture” funds, pushed Spain’s cost of borrowing to a new record of 6.8%. A further 18 banks had their credit rating reduced.

Stephanie Flanders, the BBC’s Economics Editor put it like this: “It's largely the grim prospects for the Spanish economy that has led Fitch and other ratings agencies to downgrade so many Spanish banks in recent days. Emergency lending is helpful. But it can't make the recession go away, and it can't take away the need for many more years of fiscal austerity...the vicious circle is complete. And not just in Spain.”

The second phase of the crisis that erupted five years ago is engulfing the world and the global economy is contracting. Unemployment levels are already higher in some countries than were reached in the worst period of the 1930s. Millions have lost their jobs and homes, millions more have had their wages slashed, seen pensions wiped out.

The only plans on the table from governments, central banks and international agencies like the IMF are far more doses of austerity which are certain to see more public services eliminated, and “restructuring” by which they mean wiping out surplus productive capacity.

The Greek heath service is in already in tatters increasingly unable to provide life-saving drugs, as pharmaceutical companies refuse supplies until bills are paid.

Zombie car manufacturing giant, GM, brought back from the dead in 2009, employs more than 200,000 world-wide and operates in 157 countries. With a return to growth off the agenda, GM is pushing to rid itself of responsibility for paying pensions to former workers.

Its CEO Dan Akerson, says that the European car industry has an overcapacity of 7-10 plants, and is in “constructive” discussion with unions which will see tens of thousands of job losses accompanied by savage wage and benefit cuts.

As recent history has shown, the spiral-down logic of capitalist contraction leads only one way – to forced labour. It’s no coincidence that the plight of unpaid security staff featured so prominently in the Royal Jubilee celebrations. The continued existence of the for-profit regime depends on unimaginable conditions for those in any kind of productive work, and the abandonment of the rest to their own fates.

The alternative to the profit system is one based on identifying and satisfying the needs of the 99%. To make it happen, we’ll have to replace the worn-out, compromised system of politics dominated by corporate interests, with a global network of People’s Assemblies which can take the productive resources into social ownership and set them to work under democratic control.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

EU-IMF blackmail aimed at Ireland and Greece

The principle of self-determination of nations may, to some, appear irrelevant in the context of the eurozone crisis. The 17 countries signed up to the single currency are all, on the face of it, independent states free to determine their own destiny.

Dig deeper and it’s another story, however. Take the examples of Greece and Ireland, two of the so-called “periphery” eurozone states.

They may be at opposite ends of Europe but they share one thing in common – a clear and present threat to their right to determine their own future.

Irish voters have been told in no uncertain terms to vote “yes” in Thursday’s referendum on whether the country should back the new European Union fiscal union treaty that imposes strict spending controls on member states.

Yesterday, Irish prime minister Enda Kenny went on television to warn voters that a rejection of the new treaty would bring “uncertainty at a time Ireland definitely doesn’t need it”. He attacked the No side for “its politics of negativity, of defeat, of opportunism and of fantasy economics”.

This was a bit rich coming from a political class that helped drive the Irish economy and financial system into the ground in a rampant demonstration of the self-same fantasy economics.

Jim Stewart, senior lecturer in finance at TrinityCollege, Dublin, points out in the Social Europe Journal, says the fiscal treaty can be added “to the list of flawed policy making that has helped turn an economic crisis … into a national catastrophe.”

If the Yes vote succeeds, the treaty will be incorporated into the Irish constitution and gives other signatories the right to bring a case against Ireland in the event of non-compliance. “It is the same thinking that initially set penal interest rates on Ireland’s borrowing under the EU/IMF Programme.”

In practice, the long struggle for Irish independence is fundamentally weakened by a form of EU blackmail imposed by Germany, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And this is the case in Greece too.

Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF, has now added insult to injury with a fresh attack on the Greek people who are seen as thankless for daring to hold a general election on the bail-out terms imposed on the country in exchange for loans.

Lagarde said Greeks had to take responsibility for their fate, adding that deprived children in Africa needed more help than people in Greece. "I think they (the Greeks) should help themselves collectively ... by all paying their tax." That’s a bit difficult when one in five is out of work – rising to 50% amongst young people – and the economy is in free-fall as a result of the EU-IMF imposed austerity measures.

Just as in Ireland, ruling class politicians are passing on the threat if voters next month repeat their support for parties like Syriza that want to renegotiate the bail-out conditions. Antonis Samaras of New Democracy said a vote against the loan terms would leave Greece with “no food, no drugs, no fuel. It will have to live with permanent power cuts".

What Samaras is saying in effect is that there is no point in next month’s elections which follow the recent stalemate. You can vote against austerity but in the end, the EU-IMF will have their way. You can vote against the fiscal treaty in Ireland, but ultimately there’s no choice, according to prime minister Kenny.

The struggle for self-determination clearly needs renewing and not just in Greece and Ireland. Working people throughout the capitalist EU will have to create their own popular, democratic independence, working together across Europe on a new revolutionary and equal basis.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor