Since the first bailout to Greece, in 2010, the Troika has been blackmailing Greek people with the dilemma “Memoranda or Bankruptcy”. Ever since, Greek people have experienced both: a total social bankruptcy that the adoption of Memoranda caused. “If you don't say yes to the Memoranda, you will have no gasoline for your cars, no food on the supermarket shelves, no medication in your drugstores, salaries and ...

Worried by the current crisis affecting the Eurozone and many other parts of the world, we also sometimes feel disempowered by our lack of deeper understanding of the mechanisms that have triggered such devastating developments. Some time back, Allegra started to explore the financial world (here),  the current transformations of Universities (here and here) as well as the power and failures of bureaucracie ...

Are the economic policies needed to maintain the euro still compatible with democracy? Greece’s state broadcaster was established after the fall of the military dictatorship. Last month the Greek government (which is implementing EU injunctions) decided to shut it down without authorisation from parliament (see Where Syriza stands). ...

La Grèce, berceau culturel de la civilisation occidentale, pays qui inventa l’admirable notion de "démocratie", vit aujourd’hui - avec l’illégitime et brutale fermeture de sa radio-télévision publique (ERT) - une des périodes les plus sombres de son histoire moderne et contemporaine. Lettre ouverte Monsieur le Premier Ministre du Gouvernement Grec, Antonis Samaras, Les intellectuels et artistes d’Europe vou ...

Now in Greece laws are canceled without the approval of the parliament. Evading the parliament, is evading democracy. This has led to the shutting of the Greek national broadcaster. Solidarity is the only way to reverse this. ...

Paul Mason Economics editor, for bbc.co.uk The language and the time zone changes but, from Turkey and Bulgaria to Brazil, the symbolism of protest is increasingly the same. The Guy Fawkes masks, the erection of tent camps, the gas masks and helmets improvised in response to the use of tear gas as a means of collective punishment. The handwritten signs - scrawled in defiance of the state's power and the uni ...

The unprecedented decision by the government to shut down ERT – the Greek Public Broadcaster has been a heavy blow for all. Both me and my colleagues, journalists and technicians, we ran immediately at the ERT Broadcasting Center. Since the beginning, every day we are recording what we see. We just edited quickly nine minutes to not erase from our memory what happened the first day. This is our way to react ...

On Tuesday night, the Greek government blocked the transmission of the Greek public broadcaster (ERT). The decision was taken earlier that day by the government in a totally undemocratic way. There was no prior discussion about it in the parliament. PM Samaras' "success story" has not convinced anyone, so he decided to take one more "successful" step towards the Troika's demand for 4.000 layoffs of civil se ...

You can find the recent report from IMF on Greece here: Link [pdf] Some read the recent IMF report on Greece as a mea culpa for its mistakes in the Greek bailout. We see it differently. You can say sorry for an unintended mistake, a miscalculation. The case we have here is not an accident. IMF’s inhumane and otherwise ineffective policies are not, as IMF asserts, the result of a methodological error, simply ...

The European Union owes its existence to the efforts of political elites who could count on the passive consent of their more or less indifferent populations as long as the peoples could regard the Union as also being in their economic interests all things considered. The Union legitimized itself in the eyes of the citizens primarily through its outcomes and not so much from the fact that it fulfilled the c ...