In response to the ongoing Greek financial crisis, which I discussed in my article on Saturday, Crisis in Greece: Experts Call for Return of the Drachma, As Prime Minister Cancels Bailout Referendum, I was directed by my friend George Kenneth Berger to a video of the Spanish author and professor Pedro Olalla, who has been living in Athens since 1994, discussing the crisis, what it means for Greece, and for the wider European community, in which, in clear language that can be understood by those without specific economic expertise, he explains how Greece’s crisis has largely been manufactured by financial speculators and their willing and unquestioning servants in government.

Like others whose expertise is not in economics, I often struggle to understand quite what has been happening in the world since the financial crisis of 2008, and I found this to be a useful pointer towards a bleak truth that I can, nevertheless, at least partly comprehend from what has been happening in the UK since the Tories managed, with the support of the Liberal Democrats, to form a government 18 months ago. The Tories’ campaign of austerity involves falsely blaming all of Britain’s ills on its deficit — and making the ordinary people pay for it with savage cuts to education, welfare, health and any other services that involve the state — while obscuring the financial sector’s huge responsibility for creating the crisis. In this topsy-turvy world, the banks demanded and received huge bailouts, but then refused to reform their behaviour or to pay the taxes they owe, despite having created a situation that led to increased unemployment, reduced revenues, increased borrowing to compensate for the shortfall and for the increased pressure on the government’s finances.

Pedro Olalla’s 15-minute video, "Palabras desde Atenas — Words from Athens," was recorded on October 5, and is available below, via YouTube, where, I’m glad to note, over 125,000 people have already seen it. It is subtitled in English (from the original Spanish), and this morning, in an attempt to understand more fully what was being explained, and to provide a permanent record in print, I transcribed the subtitles, and, with some minor edits for style and comprehensibility, have posted it below.

If there are any glaring mistakes, feel free to let me know, but primarily I hope you find it enlightening, and take his advice to "globalize the resistance," in the face of governments and banks intent on impoverishing us all — and not just Greece — on a basis that, to reiterate, has much more to do with the cynical and destructive business practices of financial speculators, aided and abetted by compliant politicians, than with the deficit created by the ordinary people. Despite this, it is the ordinary people who are being asked not to react as the very fabric of their countries is demolished, leaving only the prospect of an ever-worsening spiral of unemployment and economic depression, as all their countries’ assets are used to service this manufactured debt, and to drive it further into terminal economic decline. Unless we fight back, the future for all of us promises top be very bleak indeed.

Palabras desde Atenas — Words from Athens
Transcript of a video by Pedro Olalla, October 5, 2011

Greetings to all. I want to record a few words for all who hear me from Spain or from elsewhere — urgent words addressed to my friends from Athens, an Athens more and more wounded. I want to inform you of a situation that concerns us all, and, due to its severity, is achieving what makes any other issue we might deal with seem almost frivolous. I also want to ask you for something, something important, but I’ll leave that to the end, because I trust that you will not mind waiting 15 minutes.

In recent times, the political and media discourse in Spain and other European countries has been to say, in a tone of relief, that "we are not Greece," that our income statements are better, and that the Greeks actually deserve what is now happening to them, for being lazy and unruly and prone to strikes and demonstrations.

Hopefully, now that the tide is coming to Spain and elsewhere, that there too salaries, pensions, rights and benefits are beginning to be cut, the Spanish and other Europeans will revise their opinion of Greece, and become aware of the true nature of the situation that threatens us all, and of its true range.

What is happening? In historical terms, what is happening is that those who control financial power in the world are taking possession of political power through the creation and exploitation of debt. And they are doing this with the connivance of our government, and, in part, because of the inability of the citizens of these countries to come up with an organized response.

So the problem of Greece is not a problem of local character; it is the visible face in Europe of a tragedy that affects us all — the progressive dismantling of the state and democracy by the agents of economic globalization. What is happening is very serious, because, when the economic and financial forces have completely conquered the political power, politics an an exercise of sovereignty will disappear, democracy will only be a grotesque chimera, and, independently of whoever might govern, we will all be slaves of a handful of money magnates.

To resist this process as citizens is the deeper meaning of all the mobilizations which, for the last year and a half, have preoccupied most Greeks every single day. The people of Greece are willing to make sacrifices, and many, but they are slowly realizing that all the sacrifices that are demanded and imposed upon them are not intended to stop a perverse system, but to feed and perpetuate it.

Why? Because the "rescue plan" organized by the hardcore of the EU and the IMF and imposed on us as the only desperate solution to bankruptcy is a plan designed to safeguard the benefit of speculators, to minimize their risk, and to open up the way for them to appropriate national wealth.

It is not at all a plan to alleviate the situation of the country, or to generate development, or to redistribute wealth more fairly to all. Quite the contrary, it is a plan to unfairly keep the wealth of all people increasingly flowing towards less hands.

Let’s be clear. What is presented as a "crisis" is actually an organized economic attack, and what is presented as "debt" is a carefully designed product as a weapon of submission, which gives continuity to colonialism and perpetrates the same violence.

We owe one of every five dollars of world debt to the IMF and the World Bank. For those who have notions of contemporary history, the practices of these institutions are well known in the countries where they have operated so far. If not, they should ask Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb countries, countries in Southeast Asia, or all of the so-called Third World, which, in recent decades, live bleeding by a growing process of accumulation of debt, paying back seven times what they receive in alleged development aid to the First World.

These institutions act as financial intermediaries, and, through their loans, offer greater payment guarantees to investors from the countries in which they invest. The purpose of the "investors," as it is known, is to encash money, but as private investors they have no guarantee that the countries in which they invest will produce the expected benefits and that the encashment will occur. They are subject to the risk of the bet, and their right to collect is limited to only a portion of the benefits, and never a part of the heritage of the country in which they invest.

So, in order to collect with guarantees, their goal is to bring a collection agent capable of transforming private speculation in government debt into the country. And that is what the International Monetary Fund has been doing since its creation. However, in order to achieve this, one must get the connivance of certain politicians. And that is what they have achieved in Greece.

Now, thanks to the IMF’s "converter effect," Greece no longer owes money to private speculators but to other states, making a non-payment more complicated. And now one has to answer for this dubious debt with the taxpayers’ sweat, and — what is even more attractive to investors — with national wealth which the government has seen to compromise as a guarantee beyond the "inalienable bounds" in the recently signed protocols’ text.

Let’s see: is Greece the most indebted country in Europe or the world, as some have tried to make us believe for some time now? Of course not. In "External Debt in millions of dollars," it is ranked 18th, in "Foreign Debt to GDP ratio," it is ranked 9th, and in "Debt per capita," it is ranked 15th, well behind France, Germany, England and Switzerland, and is even well behind Spain. Nor is Greece ranked first in terms of private debt and public spending or in terms of the number of staff.

But yes, it is the country with the highest rate of consumer prices in articles of basic necessity, and most Greeks have long been turning to family, moonlight jobs and precarious work to last through the month.

What then is this debt? The debt, on which Greece is being forced to raise the highest loan in the history of mankind, consists, as 90 percent of the total, of government bonds. And government bonds are not exactly "debt"; they are "investment mechanisms," freely negotiable in market values, bets with money that can be won or lost. And this makes a big difference.

Today, the capital which is moving in the loan market worldwide is 1,000 trillion (GB billion) dollars, while the world’s annual production is only 57 [trillion dollars]. The cause of the world’s "indebtedness" is rooted in this abysmal difference. It does not rely on the actual deficit, but on the "need" that just 1,600 big investors have of "exploiting" this capital.

In recent decades, economically speaking, we have constructed a world that is not only unjust but absurd. And yet, it seems we have to do everything possible to not let it break down. So, without going any further, two years ago Greece bailed out the banks with 70,000 million of taxpayers’ Euros, saying it was in order to "avoid major disasters." And now we have to rescue the financial sector, again with the taxpayers’ money.

Meanwhile — attention! — 50 percent of the money that moves in the world does so through offshore companies set up in tax havens to avoid taxes and to maintain their owners’ total anonymity. In Greece alone more than 4,000 offshore companies are operating, and in the last ten years more than a million of these companies, invented by Anglo-Saxon speculators, have been established worldwide.

Nowadays, coups are undertaken by financiers. The Greek people — following the dictates of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF — have to suffer tax rises, wage cuts, and unemployment, and all their health and social gains are snatched away. They have the privatization of their state enterprises imposed upon them, and are forced to put the country’s wealth in the hands of foreign investors. They are also forced to buy weapons from their creditors, and, on top of that, are forced to pay "solidarity fees."

Meanwhile, banks are subsidized, and not even the imposition of a minimum rate of 0.1 percent on international financial transactions is considered, with which more than 600,000 million Euros could be raised annually — more than the alleged Greek debt — without touching the taxpayers’ pockets, or the hunger of the poor. But this is not done, and that must be considered immoral.

While the world works in this manner, neither politicians nor financiers have the moral authority to impose the sacrifices they want. "So what can be done?" you will ask me. "What is not done?" [is the answer]. First of all, under what is now called European citizenship (if it even exists) in Greece, Spain and all European countries, citizens have to form a common front against the abuse, and have to demand that governments stop the speculators, obliging investors to take the "risk" of their rather devious operations instead of coming to the rescue with public money in order to make sure that they always end up winning.

They should, in short, rule for the people who entrusted them with power, and not for their own interests. In the case of Greece, European citizens should support it in refusing to recognize the "debt." Any plans for renegotiating the "debt" will end up in bankruptcy and subject to the conditions of the lenders. And this involves everyone, not just Greece. The path of debt is a bottomless pit, as history has shown repeatedly.

So, we must demand that the current political practice changes. We must immediately stop paying the "debt." We must clarify the origin and nature of this "debt," see if there are any guilty of crimes amongst those responsible for the borrowing, and determine precisely how much of this hefty amount is actually an "odious debt," contracted against the interests of the population of a country with full knowledge of the creditor, according to the concept the US coined to its own benefit, after the war with Spain for the independence of Cuba.

And once all this is cleared up and the guilty are punished, decisions will be made with serenity and justice on which loans, which sales or what new measures will have to deal with the legitimate debt, because the real deficit of the country in the last decade is only 4 percent of this supposed "debt."

One such measure, for example, could be to claim decisively the war reparations that Germany was ordered to pay to Greece after the end of World War II, which, despite the military occupation, the massive deportations to the extermination camps and over a million dead, have not been met. Other measures, cheaper and less "historic," would begin with prohibiting the operation of offshore companies on Greek soil, blocking their assets and obliging their anonymous shareholders to identify themselves and pay taxes to unlock their property. It is likely that most of them would not even dare to come forward.

Also, one should demand that the banks return all the money that was given to rescue them [in 2008], impose taxes on international financial transactions, impose fair rates on the shameful deposits in Switzerland and other tax havens — a series of tax measures to avoid the real fraud that is occurring throughout the banking sector and in stock exchanges, and in offshore companies. And besides all this, one would have to rethink one’s relationship with the European Union, and with the single currency, the Euro, designed with neo-liberal criteria for the priority convenience of Germany and some other partners.

If we do not acknowledge the debt, we will be kicked out of the markets for a while, and boycotted as far as possible, but we will also save money from the speculation on bonds and save much of the national wealth which is going to large investor groups. For the current year, the interest on the bonds alone is 16,000 million [Euros], the same amount which is dedicated to education and health in Greece.

If we do not acknowledge the debt, then, instead of feeding the speculation, we can address the deficit. We will be able to support the country’s real economy, relieve the pressure on citizens, revitalize trade and promote savings. And. above all, our sacrifices — which will be many — will serve to overthrow an unjust system and build a better one.

And now, coming to the end of these words from Athens, is when I want to ask of you something important. Faced with the abuses of economic globalization, help to globalize the resistance. European society is fast asleep and [unaware of, or indifferent to] the poor political management of their democracies. And yet, citizens urgently need to be progressive in their beliefs and to react decisively before the new coup — effectively, to combat injustice and ignorance, rather than to conceal and promote it according to dark interests.

And this must be done for the good of all, because those who enjoy freedom, welfare and culture more than others have this moral debt to the rest of humanity. Yes, I acknowledge that I am "anti-system," because I do not understand how, in a world where 50 companies accumulate more wealth than a hundred countries, someone who believes in solidarity can still be "pro-system." I think in the times we live in, our "system" needs dissidents more than ever, people willing to think high, to feel deeply and speak out.

Best wishes from Greece!

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, "The Complete Guantánamo Files," a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo" (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.