Greek union denounces “coup d’etat”

The besieged people of Greece awoke this morning to blacked-out television screens. They discovered that the conservative Samaras-led coalition government had shut down the ERT, the Greek equivalent of the BBC. No discussion, no warning, no consultation, not even with the two smaller parties in the coalition.

Thousands gathered outside ERT's headquarters after the announcement, and riot police blocked the entrance to a studio in central Athens where protesters had unfolded a banner reading "Down with the junta, ERT won't close!"  In Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, some 500 gathered outside ERT’s northern headquarters. The news editors union called for solidarity from private broadcasters.

The shutdown is a further twist in the spiral of attacks against journalists in Greece. Journalists occupyed the ERT building as their union denounced the shutdown as a "coup d'etat" and called for strikes by all media workers in the country.

The abrupt announcement followed a ministerial decree authorising the government to shut down public enterprises. And it came in the wake of its failure on Monday to find a buyer for the gas utility DEPA part of a general sell-off of state assets. Greece was left unable to meet its bailout targets.

On Monday, inspectors from the so-called troika of lenders, the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were back in Athens to conduct their latest review of Greece's progress in implementing spending cuts and reforms. They insisted on the immediate sacrifice of 2000 public sector jobs

ERT’s 2,600 staff are to be paid off immediately, whilst, the government story goes, the three domestic television channels, along with regional, national and external radio stations, costing Greece 300 million euros ($400 million) a year, will be restructured, drastically slimmed-down.

According to government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou, the 70–year-old public broadcaster had become a "typical case of ... incredible waste", comparing its costs with the private channels.

"At a time when the Greek people are enduring sacrifices, there is no room for delay, hesitation or tolerance for sacred cows," said Kedikoglou.

ERT’s workers occupied the studios, but the state forces took command. Police went onto the mountain and neutralised the people who managed the transmitter, according to Nikos Roukounakis, an engineer at ERT for 30 years.

There are fears that ERT’s orchestra and its valuable cultural archive will be lost forever.

Dimitris Papadimitriou, general director of the radio department and a well-known Greek composer, said that even the 1967-1974 military junta hadn't taken such action.

"Such a thing never happened before, not even during the dictatorship."

Papdimitriou is right to make this comparison.  No previous crisis in the short history of capitalist society bears comparison with the scale of the unfolding catastrophe, in Greece and around the world.

In the wake of the unprecedented 2007/8 crash, central banks and governments dreamed an estimated $12 trillion dollars worth of new credit into existence.  They injected these huge amounts into the global economy which was knocking at death’s door, transferring the cost of mountainous and unrepayable debts across states, individuals and corporations. 

Extending its death agony with such extreme measures as ‘quantitative easing’, guaranteed that a new more severe event would not be long in coming.

The Samaras government’s response to the troika’s demands reflects the desperation and determination of those seeking to shore up the global capitalist economy.  They will allow nothing to stand in their way.

Using the market imperative to shut down a public broadcaster is indeed a form of dictatorship. For this to happen in the birthplace of ancient democracy, and a small country which through its long history has struggled time and again against tyranny, gives this latest twist of events a greater resonance.

What is happening in Greece is a stark warning, not only for Europe but the rest of the world, about the anti-democratic repercussions of the global economic and financial crises.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Taksim Square takes its place alongside Tahrir Square

The nationwide protests sweeping Turkey, the hundreds of thousands who jammed Lisbon’s streets and other Portuguese cities at the weekend and the activists who staged Blockupy in Frankfurt are linked by a common goal. They want the right to determine their own futures.

In Turkey, this right is denied by the authoritarian, rampant pro-business regime led by prime minister Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamic-rooted AK Party. In Portugal, the demonstration was against a right-wing government that is implementing instructions from the so-called Troika.

The notorious Troika is comprised of the European Union’s ruling commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It is essentially in charge of economies across Europe, including those of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus, Slovenia and Italy.

Blockupy staged its anti-austerity action in Frankfurt, home of the ECB headquarters. Activists demanded an end to the Troika’s oppression of countries like Greece and succeeded in blocking access to the bank for a short time.

The most significant new development in an upsurge that began with revolutionary movements in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 is the anti-government protests in Turkey. In power for more than a decade, the AK Party has replaced quasi-military regimes with a quasi-Islamic regime that has scant regard for democratic rights.

Resistance to the decision to turn one of Istanbul’s few remaining green spaces into a bizarre combination of a shopping centre, mosque and replica of an historic military barracks sparked off the protests.

Taksim Square and the adjacent Gezi Park is a green patch in Europe's fastest-growing city which dedicates just 1.5%  of its land to public parks, according to the World Cities Culture Report. Taksim is also the traditional venue for rallies and the start of demonstrations, which Erdogan clearly wants to put an end to.

That’s why it’s fast resembling Tahrir Square, the site of Egypt’s revolution.

But the background is rising youth unemployment and inequality in a country where the business elite has grown rich under Erdogan’s protective umbrella, together with a growing Islamisation of a country whose modern tradition is secular.

"If it were up to the prime minister, I would be wearing a head scarf," said Tugba Bitiktas, a 25-year-old unemployed university graduate, before she joined anti-government protests in central Istanbul late. "All this government worries about is rewarding its own. Those with a different voice are marginalised. That's what I'm protesting.”  

Rampant economic growth has ground to a halt and one in five of the 15-24 age group is out of work. Overall unemployment is more than 10%, according to official figures. A growing resentment has gone unreported by a media that is the government’s pockets.

While rioting was gripping several cities, newspapers hardly mentioned the confrontation with riot police while Turkish TV showed cooking programmes! Hardly surprising in a country which jails more journalists than any other.

In January 2013, 11 journalists were arrested during a raid on a Marxist political party meeting. Police said the group were planning to attack and murder government officials. Five of them were sentenced to jail, joining the 64 media workers already behind bars. They joined thousands of government opponents, including students, academics, lawyers, Kurdish activists, military officers and the alleged leaders of ultra-nationalist gangs.

It’s not about to get better any time soon. Erdogan said yesterday: “There is now a menace which is called Twitter. The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society." He has clearly lost the plot.

"An administration that has no opposition for balance and no free media to monitor it can easily spin out of control," said Kadri Gursel, chairman of the International Press Institute's Turkish committee. "The Turkish experiment has now answered the question of whether moderate Islam and democracy are compatible without checks and balances."

This is a critical observation which, with adjustments for different national traditions, could be applied across the capitalist world. The political system is a busted flush and serves no purpose other than to prop up a status quo which lurches from one crisis to the next.

Clearly, the challenge lies in developing this international movement from one of resistance and protest into a force that creates its own democratic political and economic system.

 Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Banks in 'collateral crunch' as debts mount

Thousands of high school students took to the streets outside parliament in Nicosia yesterday. They were protesting against the harsh consequences the people of Cyprus can expect from the deal imposed by the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank.

This conspiracy of non-elected bodies is the technical arm of a near-dictatorship ruling throughout Europe. It is fighting belligerently to save a social, economic and political system that is wrecking the fabric of societies. The resources that are being consumed, let alone the lives ruined, surely don’t justify the results. As for the people of Cyprus, they simply get no say as the deal is not going to parliament, just in case it’s rejected.

The banking crisis in Cyprus is just one of the storms in the vast clouds of credit and debt invented to finance the global growth of production and consumption from the 1980s onwards. This one was triggered months ago when Greece was forced to write down the value of its government bonds as part of the bail-out punishment for its people. At the end of 2011, the Bank of Cyprus had $14 billion tied up in Greek debt, while Laiki Bank had more than $24 billion.

The botched and brutal temporary patch designed to prevent a formal default by the smallest member of the eurozone will reverberate throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The imposition of capital controls to stop instant transfer of funds out of the country undermines the fragile state of both the eurozone and the wider European Union.

UK  civil servants won’t have been the only ones working through the night to minimise the impact on ex-pat Cypriot bank branches, like those in Mayfair and Birmingham. President Putin’s people will have been hard at it too, searching for ways to extricate the remains of the vast amounts of Russian wealth that found its way into Europe via Cyprus in recent years.

Cyprus, already in a deep recession, now facing an estimated further 20-30% cut in its GDP as a result of the deal, will be devastated. Thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of jobs will disappear overnight. The story is being replicated throughout Europe.

Portugal, where unemployment is heading towards 20%, is entering a third year of contraction amplified by austerity; and Spain’s jobless rate will pass 27% according to its central bank as the Europe-wide contraction drives the country into a deeper slump. France, the second biggest eurozone economy, has seen 22 months of rising unemployment, now exceeding 10% and certain to rise further as car factories are shut down due to overcapacity.

The global recession is spreading like a virus across the United States too. Cities wrecked by the crisis, including Detroit in Michigan, San Bernardino and Stockton in California are seeking bankruptcy protection to exempt their pension funds from being raided to pay debts.

In the UK, observers are warning that the decision by the Bank of England today to require banks to raise another £25 billion of capital, will could lead to a “collateral crunch” that could shut down the market for credit. So don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s just Cypriot banks that are over-stretched. UK banks have piles of debt that no one is paying interest on, which is why the Bank of England has stepped in.

Wherever you look, which ever way you turn, the conclusion must be the same. Capitalism as an economic and political system is in extermination mode. In this situation,  private and public sector employees and pensioners need to unite with finance sector workers throughout the world with one goal in mind. All the resources needed for production, distribution and exchange must come under social ownership and control. So long as they remain out of reach, the worse our prospects become.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Resistance by Cypriots deepens eurozone crisis

The deepening crisis in Cyprus, where every single MP voted against plans to steal a portion of people’s savings, has thrown eurozone leaders into turmoil. Clearly the snail pace of parliamentary processes forcing through austerity is proving too slow for Europe’s ruling elites.

Cypriot MPs effectively rejecting the blackmail letter drawn up by Berlin and sent via the dreaded Troika of European Union, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. 

Buoyed up by the huge anger uniting its people and to everyone’s surprise, not even the MPs of the right-wing government voted in favour of the ‘deal’ which would have seen the EU dipping its hands into every bank account to extract 10% of any money they can find.

In saying ‘No’, the MPs joined the growing resistance across Europe – from Italy, to Spain and Greece – to austerity measures that are designed to rescue a capitalist system that is drowning in debt.

The attack on savings – while leaving bank creditors out of the frame – is a new tactic designed to extract tribute for the sovereign debt monster affecting so many countries blown up in the wake of the Great Global Crash of 2007-8.

Even the Church of Cyprus’ Archbishop Chrysostomos is with the opposition, at least for the moment: "The entire wealth of the Church is at the disposal of the country ... so that we can stand on our own two feet and not on those of foreigners." The church is a major shareholder in Cyprus's third-largest domestic lender, Hellenic Bank

Banks and the stock market remain closed. No one knows when (or should that be if?) they will reopen. The 1.1 million population of the small island, as well as the bevy of foreign tax-avoiders are denied access to their funds. But the threat of a Europe-wide bank run contagion is very real. People everywhere are eyeing up the security of their savings. Those that have any.

The fragile peace engineered by the co-conspirators of the Troika in the form of a Europe-wide banking union has been shattered. In a sign of nervousness in other eurozone countries, Spain’s finance minister declared savings accounts in his country

“sacred”, adding Cyprus was “special and unique”. Wishful thinking.

But as Cypriot finance minister Michael Sarris flew to Moscow seeking help, much to the consternation of EU officials, the problems mounted. Even if Russia granted an extension of an existing loan and reduced the interest rate, it wouldn’t make a difference. Cyprus may even offer newly-discovered gas resources could also be on offer.

Wolfgang Schäuble, German finance minister, is insisting that the Troika’s plan prevails.

After the vote in Cyprus, he said: “Cyprus is living with a banking sector with low taxes and favourable laws that is completely overdrawn and that makes Cyprus bankrupt. This business model is not sustainable.”

With the two big Cypriot banks living off emergency liquidity from the central bank, the real possibility is that the country will be ejected from the euro, plunging the single currency into a downward spiral.

Cyprus is part of a growing global contagion which austerity policies have deepened,

Inflation is rising just as manufacturing is declining. With only the faintest signs of life in the US economy, investors have now begun to assess the likelihood - and catastrophic consequences - of an end to the years of historically low interest rates.

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve ominously began a speech with these words: ‘Why are long-term interest rates so low in the United States and in other major industrial countries?’ Later today, he’s expected to give his views on the end of quantitative easing.

With these new developments in an increasingly desperate situation, our attention must turn from just resisting austerity to replacing the bankrupt system altogether. A global network of peoples’ assemblies has to take control of the banks and the financial networks. Then they could be converted into a democratically run not-for-profit service to co-operative enterprises producing for need.  

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Cypriots angry against bail-out at their expense

Punish the poor, protect big investors and retain Cyprus as an offshore banking haven for oligarchs. That was the meaning of measure rammed down the throats of Cypriots over the weekend under the direction of the infamous Troika.

Instead of restructuring broken banks, the right-wing government was told by the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF to cut the value of ordinary people’s deposits as the price for an £8.6 billion bail-out.

But if they thought it was a clever move, they have been proved completely wrong. Fears immediately grew of a run on banks around Europe after panic-stricken scenes in Cyprus. Cash points ran out as savers tried to pre-empt government measures to dock their accounts.

Even as an emergency session of the Cyprus parliament began, there were warnings that the Cyprus crisis could spark off of the next global financial crisis. Savers in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain may also panic if they think they are next. Anti-austerity Strikes and demonstrations around Europe are adding to the tension.

Eurozone finance ministers in Brussels and Berlin want to take 6.75% of the savings of those with less than €100,000 and 9.9% of those with over that amount. Cyprus’ new president Nicos Anastasiades’ claims that the measure will mainly hit Russian oligarchs who use the island for money-laundering has failed to convince as pensioners and life-savings are hit hard.

Financial experts like David Kotok of Cumberland advisors have expressed amazement: “The madness of this decision about Cyprus is unfathomable. We expect runs on Cypriot banks when they open on Tuesday. Europe has found a new way to shoot itself in the foot.”  

So is Cyprus – a small country of 1.1 million – simply a unique case? Well, of course every country is special, not least Cyprus, which has been divided into two for 40 years since being invaded by Turkey in 1974. Unemployment stands at a record high of 15%. 

Yet the banking sector has mushroomed – fuelled by speculation in the island’s property market – to become more than eight times the size of the nation's economy. The Russian mafia has exploited Cypriot banks for money-laundering and rubs  shoulders with native property-speculating millionaires in the luxury villas on the coastline.

And, in addition to its tax-evading oligarchs, the Russian government has strategic reasons for retaining influence there. It is a stop-off point for ships supplying the Assad dictatorship with arms. British bases on the island are to be turned into NATO bases, under a secret agreement made last autumn.

The rulers of Europe desperate to save the euro are bearing down on ordinary people to impose the needs of the banks and the economic system over which they preside. 

The needs of the ordinary people of Cyprus as well as modest pensioners from cold climates, let alone the country’s fragile eco-systems many of which have been destroyed by rampant speculative building, count for nothing in this entire debacle.

But this is the pattern, not only in Cyprus, but also in Ireland, Spain, Italy and UK. The demands of millions of people to end austerity have been ignored. In Italy, where a majority voted against further cuts, the electorate is left disenfranchised.

The disarray at the top of the European Union is leading to dismay in significant circles. Today the Financial Times commented: “The biggest risk is political. The prescription of universal austerity combined with kid-gloves treatment of big investors in banks is increasingly toxic to European voters. Leaders have just added fuel to the fire.”

Leaving the Euro, however, as some politicians in Cyprus and Britain are threatening to do, will not solve the deep debt crisis that lies behind the dictatorship of the Troika. That will require taking the power from the bankers and their political allies and re-structuring the economic system so that it works for people and not profiteering speculators.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Eurocrats fear 'protest against entire system'

The game is up for eurozone countries Italy and Greece and a fatal blow to the single currency may not be far behind. A deadlock of different sorts has arrived in both countries and the political systems are locked into the impasse.

At the heart of the crisis are the austerity programmes imposed on the population from the outside, by the infamous Troika – the European Central Bank (ECB), European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Ordinary people in both Italy and Greece have had enough. And their resistance has had an impact, not in the sense that austerity policies have been reversed – they haven’t – but in the inability of the political system to deliver what the Troika demands.

Troika officials are in Athens this morning, combing through the books and demanding more cuts before further tranches of the bail-out are transferred to Greece (from where they leave instantaneously for a creditor foreign bank or hedge fund).

Athens agreed to cut 150,000 public sector jobs by 2015 in return for financial support.  Under that plan, 25,000 employees were to be transferred this year to a "mobility" scheme, the first step towards redundancy.

With unemployment having reached a European record of 27%, the coalition government fears enforced redundancies will lead to total unrest. “The public sector has shrunk by 75,000 people in the last one and a half years," the finance minister, Yannis Stournaras, said. "There will be no layoffs."

With its GDP set to contract for a sixth straight year, unemployment is forecast to be more than 30% by the end of this year. Over 60% of those without work are under 25.

This cuts no ice with Troika monitors, with spokesman Thomas Wieser declaring: "All that was agreed in the bailout plan has must be implemented.”  

Across the sea to the west, near neighbour Italy is without a Pope, without a government and, from next month, will be without a president when Giorgio Napolitano stands down. Napolitano was in Berlin over the weekend, getting his marching orders from Chancellor Merkel, self-appointed guardian of the euro.

The line from Germany is that, whatever happens, the electorate must be kept away from the ballot box any time soon following last week’s general election. That resulted in the anti-establishment Five Star Movement founded by comedian Beppe Grillo picking up 26% of the vote and 163 MPs. They met for the first time yesterday and the only thing they agree on is not working with discredited political parties and leaders.

With the formation of a government ruled out, Napolitano is preparing to appoint another “technocratic” government of officials and so-called experts. Yet this is the regime led by banker Mario Monti that the Italian voters rejected overwhelmingly, with over 57% casting their ballots against anti-austerity parties.

This time Bank of Italy governor Ignazio Visco is front-runner to take over as premier.

This would be a slap in the face for ordinary Italians who have seen the economy dive into depression, with output having fallen by 10% from its peak, and where youth unemployment is at a staggering 37%.

What Napolitano is considering will effectively amount to a coup in a country where a corrupt, bureaucratic state is considered the problem by most people. “Nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the Italian Republic. We are seeing a true crisis of the regime,” said Professor Luca Ricolfi from Turin University.

Grillo dismissed the ploy and repeated his vow to “bring down the old system” and added: “We’re not a political party, we’re a civic revolution. This country is in ruins with two trillion in debts and we have to rebuild it from scratch.”  

In Brussels, the old order is trembling at the prospect of Greece being thrown out of the euro and Italy – if Grillo had its way – deciding to quit the single currency. Giles Merritt from EU think-tank Friends of Europe said Brussels could handle old-style politicians like Silvia Berlusconi.

Grillo really worried them, he added, because it was a “protest against the entire system, and they are afraid it is spreading to other countries”. He’s not wrong there.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Global economy heading 'down for the count'

Stark warnings from the International Monetary Fund about the risk of financial collapse in Europe have coincided with indicators from the Brookings Institution and the Financial Times showing that the global economy is “on the ropes”.

They give some context to Coalition prime minister Cameron’s “hour of reckoning” speech to the party faithful today. Except that it is not just for the British economy that the bell tolls but for capitalism internationally, if its own agencies and researchers are to be believed.

The IMF said that the euro area's debt crisis was the main threat and the risks to global financial stability had risen in the last six months, leaving confidence "very fragile". Concerns centre on European banks offloading $2.8 trillion in assets over two years to cut their risk exposure. That could shrink credit supply dramatically.

Report author Jose Vinals said: “The choice today is between making the necessary but tough policy and political decisions or delaying them – once more – in the false hope that time is on our side. It is not."

His fears are confirmed by indicators compiled by the Brookings Institution and the Financial Times which show that “the global economic recovery is on the ropes, battered by political conflicts within and across countries, lack of decisive policy actions, and governments’ inability to tackle deep-seated problems such as unsustainable public finances that are stifling growth.”

All of the Tiger (Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery) measures show that the global economy is operating at a lower level than before the 2007-8 crash and heading downwards. Spokesperson Professor Eswar Prasad warned: “In the absence of a broader range of decisive policy measures – including fiscal, financial system and structural reforms needed in many countries – the world economy may soon be down for the count.”

This is the stark reality of global contraction which is the driving force at the epicentre of the planetary emergency.

The brutal treatment of protesters demonstrating against German chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Athens, together with the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn in Greece are clear warnings of the depths of barbarity the defenders of the system will plumb as do what is necessary to save capitalism.

Merkel’s visited Greece to strengthen the determination of the government of prime minister Antonis Samaras which must force another round of austerity onto the Greek people. They are already going through intolerable pain in terms of cuts to living standards, unemployment, shortage of medicines and homelessness.

Merkel is acting as spokesperson for the Troika – the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Union – which once again is confounded by the facts.  Three years ago they said that Greece's economy would contract by 2.6% in 2010, before growing by 1.1% in 2011, and 2.1%in 2012. Greek GDP instead contracted by 4.5% in 2010, 6.9% in 2011, and is likely to shrink a further 6% this year.

But Greece is not an isolated case.

According to Professor Prasad, The Brookings-FT Tiger index shows growth momentum has dissipated in nearly all major advanced and emerging market economies. Central banks of the major advanced economies have responded with a range of conventional and unconventional policy monetary policy actions.

He says while these measures have put a “floor on short-term financial market risks” they have been unable to reverse declining growth momentum. “As a result, financial markets continue to go through short-term cycles of angst and euphoria even as indicators of real economic activity remain mired in weakness.”

These indicators reveal the objective movement of the global capitalist system which has already brought millions of people onto the streets protesting against the unbearable consequences of contraction. On any measure, the capitalist system of production has failed. At the same time, threatening political reaction is the order of the day in Britain, Greece, Spain and in many other countries.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Down with the 21st century Troika!

Whoever coined the term ‘Troika’ for the combined staff of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission has a grim sense of recent history.

During the 1930s, Troikas – commissions of three appointees - were instruments of Stalinist repression operating at every level of administration. They were introduced to circumvent the legal system with a means for quick execution or imprisonment following a conviction without trial.

Troikas were responsible for sentences of death or exile for more than 600,000 Soviet citizens. They had other punishments available too. They and other parts of the Stalinist machine were used to consign upwards of 20 million people to forced labour camps.

And forced labour camps using and consuming 15 million workers from close to 20 European countries were also the basis of the economy in Nazi Germany before and during World War Two.

What have all these terrible episodes of 20th century European history got to do with today, you may ask? Surely the EU-ECB-IMF version of the Troika has nothing like labour camps in mind?

Well, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. But the logic and the consequences of the actions they are pursuing in Greece (soon to be visited on other countries) – unless they are halted – are just as terrifying.

Greek workers are to be reduced to pauperism to deliver the terms of the €130 billion bail-out agreed in principle this week. For the Greek economy to approach anything like competitiveness, its workers would have to be driven to work for lower levels of pay than anywhere else. That is equally certain to stoke up the revolt.

Germany’s stronger economy, is already dependent on ultra-low rates of pay. Its low wage sector grew three times as fast as other employment in the five years to 2010. Pay in Germany, which has no nationwide minimum wage, can go well below one euro an hour, especially in the former East German region. Greek workers will have to labour for less.

Having done its work in Greece, the Troika must now turn its attention back to the rest of Europe where conditions are deteriorating fast. But their efforts won’t be enough to keep a lid on the volatility and growing social resistance around Europe.

Back in December, Pedro Nuno Santos, vice-president of the Socialist Party in Portugal’s parliament, transmitted something of the feeling of the protests in the streets against the new right-wing government’s plans to raise the working week to 42 hours. and cut wages by 16% for the higher paid, and 8% for lower paid public workers.

"We have an atomic bomb that we can use in the face of the Germans and the French: this atomic bomb is simply that we won't pay," he said. "Debt is our only weapon and we must use it to impose better conditions, because recession itself is what is stopping us complying with the (Troika) accord. We should make the legs of the German bankers tremble," he said.

Santos’ call for southern European states to join forces to resist the austerity dictates of the stronger northern economies was quickly replaced by the 17 eurozone countries agreement on a stricter fiscal discipline which will loom large in the Troika’s armoury over the coming period.

The scale of today’s global crisis, prepared by decades of ballooning fantasy finance, overshadows the 1930s. We cannot begin to imagine the consequences of allowing capital to continue to its reign. Strikes and street protests have to become part of a wider revolutionary struggle for power over capital and crony political state systems. We cannot defeat the modern Troika without that perspective. And to succeed, we need a global network of organisations that are committed to seeing this struggle through to the end.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor