Greece's 'potato movement' grows in power

[tabatha]

Tzanis and his mayoral team have plunged into a series of social measures. They have secured European Union funds to assist poor children and battered women, and have already organised six distributions of rice, flour, potatoes and oil on the town's main square.

Tzanis has also defied powers greater than himself to raise his voters' quality of life. He recently bulldozed his way to take control of a municipal waterfront leased to the Peiraieus Port Authority - a wealthy public company that runs the country's largest container terminals in collaboration with China's COSCO - and is organising children's activities there.

He said he is also in talks with Formula One to recast his municipality's coastal highway, already highly developed for truck traffic, as a racetrack abutted by parks. His goal is nothing less than a recreation economy to tame a 50 per cent unemployment rate.

Both in Katerini and in Keratsini-Drapetsona, the potato movement is championed by those who have understood the sea change in Greek values: independence from party and special interests, and a dedication to public service. These "new values" may today be limited to grassroots activism and local government, but judging by the ferocity with which Greek party hierarchies are being shaken, it may only be a matter of time before they reach the top.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/06/2012611102126662269.html

[PoliticAverse]

1. Interesting. n/t

[mick063]

2. I m starting to believe

that Argentina is the model and Greece appears to be going down that road.


It is the road I hope America takes when austerity reaches our shores.

Screw the financial power brokers. Their greed will be their undoing, similar to the pompous 19th century French aristocrats before their revolution. The vultures of that time are no different than the present breed of vulture capitalists.

Flaunting wealth at the worst possible time (for them).

[Zalatix]

3. Let's hope Greece and Argentina's examples spread worldwide.

[Art_from_Ark]

5. Do you REALLY want to follow Argentina's example?

Five different currencies in the last half century, with inflation so bad that the current currency (peso convertible) is equal to 10 trillion of the first currency (peso moneda nacional) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_peso , and an extremely high crime rate to boot https://www.osac.gov/pages/ContentReportPDF.aspx?cid=10748.

[Zalatix]

6. Where we're going right now is worse.

The Plutocrats will retreat behind their walled cities and ultra green properties while the rest of the world lives in squalor, crime, perpetual shortages, and pollution. And they'll keep control of the masses with their drones.

I'll take Argentina over that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_(1999%E2%80%932002)#Immediate_effects

Eduardo Duhalde finally managed to stabilise the situation to a certain extent, and called for elections. On 25 May 2003 Néstor Kirchner took office as the new president. Kirchner kept Duhalde's Minister of Economy, Roberto Lavagna, in his post. Lavagna, a respected economist with centrist views, showed a considerable aptitude at managing the crisis, with the help of heterodox measures.
The economic outlook was completely different from that of the 1990s; the devalued peso made Argentine exports cheap and competitive abroad, while discouraging imports. In addition, the high price of soy in the international market produced an injection of massive amounts of foreign currency (with China becoming a major buyer of Argentina's soy products).

I'll take their huge trade surplus, thank you very much.

As a result of the administration's productive model and controlling measures (selling reserve dollars in the public market), the peso slowly revalued, reaching a 3-to-1 rate to the dollar. Agricultural exports grew and tourism returned.
The huge trade surplus ultimately caused such an inflow of dollars that the government was forced to begin intervening to keep the peso from revaluing further, which would ruin the tax collection scheme (largely based on import taxes and royalties) and discourage further reindustrialisation. The central bank started buying dollars in the local market and stocking them as reserves.

I like how their wages are also slightly outpacing inflation - unlike ours.

Argentina has managed to return to growth with surprising strength; the GDP jumped 8.8% in 2003, 9.0% in 2004, 9.2% in 2005, 8.5% in 2006 and 8.7% in 2007. Though average wages have increased 17% annually since 2002 (jumping 25% in the year to May 2008),[50] consumer prices have partly accompanied this surge; though not comparable to the levels of former crises, the inflation rate was 12.5% in 2005, 10% in 2006 and is believed by private economists to have approached 15% in 2007 and to exceed 20% during 2008[citation needed](even if the Ministry of Economy refuses to acknowledge inflation greater than 10%). This has prompted the government to increase tariffs for exporters and to pressure retailers into one price truce after another in a bid to stabilize prices, so far with little effect.

And also I like how the workers took over.

During the economic collapse, many business owners and foreign investors drew all of their money out of the Argentine economy and sent it overseas. As a result, many small and medium enterprises closed due to lack of capital, thereby exacerbating unemployment. Many workers at these enterprises, faced with a sudden loss of employment and no source of income, decided to reopen businesses on their own, without the presence of the owners and their capital, as self-managed cooperatives.[51][52]
Worker managed cooperative businesses range from ceramics factory Zanon (FaSinPat), to the four-star Hotel Bauen, to suit factory Brukman, to printing press Chilavert, and many others. In some cases, former owners sent police to remove workers out of these workplaces; this was sometimes successful but in other cases workers defended occupied workplaces against the state, the police, and the bosses.[51][53]

Argentina is not a paradise but I'd rather have the above than what we have now... much less the hell that we're headed for.

[Art_from_Ark]

9. There are plutocrats in Argentina as well

For example, in 2006, incomes of the top 10% Argentines were 43 times higher than the bottom 10%.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/world/americas/25argentina.html?_r=1

The GINI indexes of the US and Argentina are practically the same.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html

Argentina has also had its share of not only economic, but political turmoil as well.

I have known people who lived in Argentina. One family fled the country for economic reasons during the Peron regime, but the matriarch of that family generally agreed with the subsequent military junta's detentions and disappearances of dissidents (the "desaparecidos&quot . A different family had fled because of the both the unstable economic situation and the dictatorship. Although the country's situation today may be somewhat better politically, there is no way that I would want to emulate it. The Japanese model would be far better.

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. appreciate your post, complete with facts and links.

thank you....

[Jessica3344]

4. Spam deleted by gkhouston (MIR Team)

[tralala]

8. Individualism is mrely brutish apoliticism;

sectarianism is apoliticism, and if one looks into it carefully is a form of personal following, lacking the party spirit which is the fundamental component of "State spirit". The demonstrartion that party spirit is the basic component of "State spirit" is one of the most critically important assertions to uphold. Individualism on the other hand is a brutish element, "admired by foreigners", like the bheavior of the inmates of a zoological garden.