We just got this brutal video from an eXiled reader in Spain (HT: Àngel): Spanish riot police savagely attacking anti-austerity protesters in Madrid, without any apparent provocation. So far, the number of injured is at least 76 and growing, according to Àngel. The protests were fueled by today’s announcement of the largest austerity cuts in Spain since the days of fascist dictator General Franco—meaning the bankers are going in for the kill in Spain, despite false PR reports of bankers easing up on their demands.
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There’s a new Boomer vs. Millennial piece over at Esquire making its way across the intertubes. If you hadn’t noticed, wringing one’s hands about Baby Boomers gorging themselves on the syrupy sweet hopes and dreams of the young’ns is the…
A man shot himself on April 4th in the very center of Athens. He is the latest in hundreds of suicides during and because of the crisis. Dimitris Christoulas chose the place (Syntagma Square) and the time (rush hour) to pass his message…
I arrived in Athens only hours after the February 12 anti-austerity riots, the acrid odor of burnt-out banks still lingering downtown. I checked into a familiar haunt, the Hostel Zorbas on Victoria Square. The last time I stayed there, in the summer of 2001, the place still took drachmas and buzzed with backpackers just returned from Piraeus, where the ferries fan out to the pleasure islands of the Aegean. A decade later, those memories felt like the flashback scenes in The Road.
The co-ruling PASOK party had its national conference today. Its goal is to elect the new party leader who will succeed George Papandreou and will lead the Socialists in the coming elections. The candidates are Christos Papoutsis and Evangelos Venizelos. At some point, an old man approached Venizelos, complained about the cuts in his pension and then threw him a yogurt…
Today, thanks in part to UC Davis chancellor “Chemical” Linda Katehi, Greek university campuses are no longer protected from state security forces. She helped undo her native country’s “university asylum” laws just in time for the latest austerity measures to kick in. Incredibly, Katehi attacked university campus freedom despite the fact that she was once a student at the very center of Greece’s anti-junta, pro-democracy rebellion–although what she was doing there, if anything at all, no one really knows.
November 17: a date that haunts Greece. It’s the date when the uprising of several hundred of students, who stood up against the military dictatorship by occupying the Athens Polytechnic, was brutally crushed. The iconic photo of a tank driving through the Polytechnic’s gate is a symbol of freedom for (probably) all Greeks.
