Austerity has consequences
by David Atkins
John Kass, writing in the Chicago Tribune (h/t Georgia Logothetis):
The old man, reportedly ill with cancer and exhausted by the agony devouring Greece, just couldn’t take it anymore.
His name was Dimitris. And so he walked out Wednesday morning onto the beautiful and peaceful Syntagma Square across the street from the Parliament. And with him he carried the tools of his martyrdom: He carried a piece of paper that was his suicide note, and he carried a gun.
He stood on a patch of grass near a tree in the shade. Then he pulled the trigger.
And instantly, the 77-year-old retired pharmacist became a symbol in this economically desperate nation, where one-fifth of the workforce is unemployed.
News traveled fast, and by nightfall rioters were breaking up marble steps and throwing the chunks of rock at a phalanx of police. The cops returned fire with tear gas as the so-called anarchists with their faces covered attacked the beautiful Hotel Grand Bretagne. They painted the hotel wall with this slogan: Eat the rich.
And that’s how I watched despair turn into rage.
“The politicians killed him!” said Iannis Kotaras, 82, a short man whose hands are thick with years of labor, as he stood near the spot of Dimitris’ suicide and pointed up at the Parliament…
“The occupation government… has literally wiped out my ability to survive, based on a respectable pension which I had paid for during a 35-year period,” the pensioner said in an excerpt published in Greek newspapers.
“I find no other solution for a dignified end before I start sifting through garbage to feed myself,” he allegedly wrote in red ink.
But it’s very important that wealthy bondholders be made whole on Greek debt, or there’s no telling what suffering might occur.
Go read Georgia Logothetis at DailyKos for a great encapsulation of why austerity was the wrong answer to the Greek problem, and why it’s especially stupid to be pushing the same policies here in the U.S.
Though something tells me that opinion leaders who don’t yet understand that austerity is the wrong approach given current income inequalities, aren’t ever going to change their minds.
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