A group of community-minded gardeners have turned a former Athens airport into a blooming vegetable plot, showing how Greece's eroded soil holds the keys to a revival in farming and a way to buck the jobless trend. Written by Beatrice Yannacopoulou 'If we want to survive on this land we must first help to heal the earth,' said Nicola Netién, agro-ecologist, teacher and co-creator of the NGO Permaculture Res ...

On the last day of 2011, a headline in The Wall Street Journal read: “Spain Misses Deficit Target, Sets Cuts.” The cruel forces of poor economic logic were at work to welcome in the new year. The European Union has become a vicious circle of burgeoning debt leading to radical austerity measures, which in turn further weaken economic conditions and result in calls for still more damaging cuts in government s ...

Georges Prévélakis Historically positioning themselves between an unruly, oriental population and the western powers, since 1981 Greek elites have siphoned off EU funds into a bloated public sector favouring corruption, patronage and social climbing. The threat posed to Europe by the breakdown is less contagion to the centre than a wave of anti-western feeling that could exacerbate geopolitical instabilitie ...

It's clear that punishing the poor will only deepen the recession – so why are the IMF technocrats intent on further austerity? During an official visit to the LSE in November 2008, the Queen asked a professor why economists had failed to predict the financial crash, the most dramatic event in recent economic history. The professor's answer is not known. A year later, after a British Academy seminar, eminen ...

A recent video which has been circulating the internet claims to be from a 48 hour strike which occurred in June and clearly shows police loading molotovs into a knapsack which belongs to a protester who has been arrested.  Once again the integrity (if they have any left) of the Greek police has been called into question.  This is not an isolated incident as far back as 2003 there are videos in which the Gr ...

In October, the leader of PVV, Geert Wilders, heavily criticized the moral of Greeks with respect to paying taxes. He pointed  to the huge deposits of rich Greeks in Switzerland. What Wilders failed to report is that the Netherlands is helping the Greeks with tax evasion. From a research that De Pers carried out, it seems that many Greek companies use the Netherlands as a way to avoid the tax authorities. I ...

Dear fellow-workers, once more we are witnessing a huge solidarity wave to our struggle that begun on 30/10. On that day, Greek Steelworks SA started the unjustified lay offs in an effort to terrorize us and force us to accept a modification of the collective wage agreement ruling an average  wage reduction of 40%, a reduction of working hours to 5 per day together with the introduction of shift work. The l ...

On 6 December 2008, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old student, was killed in cold blood by two policemen in Exarcheia in central Athens. The murder of Alexandros by the police resulted in large protests and demonstrations, which escalated to widespread rioting, with hundreds of rioters engaging riot police with Molotov cocktails, stones and other objects. Demonstrations and rioting soon spread to seve ...

A Europe-wide austerity drive can only be defeated if UK nurses join forces with Portuguese teachers and Greek bus drivers. Maria is a softly spoken teacher, but she's clearly furious. As far as she is concerned, she is being mugged by the economic and political elite. "I think they are stealing from us," she tells me. "It's theft." Maria Juan spoke to me in the centre of Lisbon as thousands of striking wor ...

The 400 workers of the “GREEK STEELWORKS” (Helliniki Halivourgia) industry, are on strike, united as one fist, for more than three weeks. And they continue! They do not move back, they have chosen the path of honor and dignity, to defend the bread and the future of their children. They do not return to work, in fire and iron, for 500€. They demand, their 34 colleagues, who were laid off, to return to work. ...