Upstream - Documentary #3: Betrayal & Solidarity In Greece

Episode Date: October 1, 2016

Greece was all over the news in 2014 and 2015. You might remember hearing about the new radical left party Syriza, the referendum, the violence in the streets, the German banks, the flamboyant finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. So what happened? Mistrusting the mainstream narrative coming from western media outlets, and suspicious of the abrupt end of most news coverage we decided we'd travel to Athens and see for ourselves what was going on in the aftermath of the tumultuous events which have been building up over the last few years in Greece.  From the streets of Athens with our host Yianni Litovchenko from Alternative Tours of Athens, to the apartment of the Greek activist Maria Scordialos, to the economic analysis of James K. Galbraith, to the Refugee Accommodation and Solidarity Space City Plaza. Join us. Featuring: ​ Maria Scordialos - Greek activist and co-founder of The Living Wholeness Institute James Galbraith - American economist,  founding DiEM25 member, and advisor to Yannis Varoufakis Yianni Litovchenko - Member of the Alternative Tours of Athens cooperative Margarita - Volunteer at the Refugee Accommodation & Solidarity Space City Plaza ​ Music: ​ The Rembetika Hipsters A. Kostis  (Thanks to Olvido Records)  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Imagine that you're standing at the bank of a river when you notice someone float by who's drowning. You immediately jump in to save them, but as soon as you pull them to safety, you notice another person who's also drowning. Pretty soon, the river is full of drowning people floating towards you. You yell for help and you get other people to jump in with you to save them. But at some point, when the drowning people keep coming, one of you has got to say,

you know, I'm going to go upstream to find out why all these people are falling in in the first place. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A radio documentary series that is part of the Economics for Transition project. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

Join us as we journey upstream to the heart of our economic system and discover collineage stories of game-changing solutions based on connection, resilience and prosperity for all. Yeah, hide your microphone. Welcome to Exarchia, the anarchist neighborhood in Athens, Greece. A procession of masked demonstrators, dressed in all black, are making their way down the street, leaving freshly pasted posters along their way,

and chanting loudly as they pass, terrorists and robbers are the governments and capitalists. What are they doing now? Why are they all like this? I think they're standing here and they want to be in the main point of the traffic, coming through traffic so they can see them. So let's say a police car is probably going to pull them out. Oh, that police car would be bad luck. Really? They'd probably smash the police car, pull the policeman out, give him a little good kicking.

The policeman would run off and they'd light the police car. Even if the police car didn't do anything? Oh no. Yeah, it doesn't matter. They did something by being a policeman and by being here. Oh, yeah. They'd burn the police car. They wouldn't really injure the policeman. They'd give him a nice little beating, let him run away, and then they'd light the police

car on fire. That's what would happen. Literally, in this situation right now. You know what the young teenagers do here they sit in between parked cars and narrow streets they'll sit in between parked cars the baseball bats or those sticks and because police are so paranoid if they do drive through here they drive through on motorcycles but it'll always be like three motorcycles with two police on each motorcycle the kids sit in between the parked cars, and when the three motorcycles drive by,

they jump out and they whack the policeman off the last motorcycle. And by the time the policeman in front sees that the last policeman got whacked off and fell off their motorcycle, they turn around, the kids have disappeared. They've died. Okay, maybe we should explain. We traveled to Greece because we wanted to see what was going on in the aftermath of the financial crisis

and the deep recession that has rocked this country over the last few years. We got caught up in the demonstration while we were on a walking tour hosted by Yanni Litovchenko of Alternative Tours of Athens. The Exarchia neighborhood is known for its radical, anti-authoritarian politics, as well as for being a neighborhood where the police are simply not welcome. Demonstrations occur here regularly and are a part of the neighborhood's vibrant culture. We'll hear a lot more from Yanni, as well as many others from the streets of Athens, to help explain what exactly happened here and what is currently taking place. The modern-day state of Greece, which was created in 1882,

oh no, 86, sorry. This is Maria Skordialis. It was created as a state by the superpowers of the time. England, France, Germany. And there's a part of us Greeks that have never really felt independent. We're a pawn for these superpowers. And even what we're living now is we're just living the next chapter of that. The 2008 financial collapse left the Greek economy in turmoil.

After years of unwise borrowing and predatory lending, which fueled an unsustainable amount of growth and development, Greece entered into an economic depression known as the debt crisis. In the attempt to pay back their lenders, the Greek government entered into negotiations for bailout packages, whose terms subjected the Greek society to wave after wave of government cutbacks known as austerity, which resulted in rocketing unemployment. After living all over the world, Maria returned to her Hellenic roots when she moved to Greece just before the collapse to set up a learning and retreat center called Akhleditsa.

In 2007, when I arrived, we were still in what I call the bubble years. We were still in that period of unsustainable boom. We had come into the euro from 2000. And with the euro, what arrived in Greece was a completely different financial system with the euro bank and the banks behind it that were giving very, very low interest loans, which created the bubble that we were affluent. And so I came in at the period right at the end of that, when people were getting mortgages, getting car loans, getting holiday loans. And there was this fake euphoria in the country, hyper consumerism,

in what people were buying and what they were doing. I actually found the first couple of years that I was here difficult to relate to people because I felt there was an inauthenticity to the way they were relating to their lives, very much through money and very much through the notion of consuming, which is not in the depth of the roots of our culture. We're actually very, very sustainable people. So I found it quite difficult when I first came. And of course, there were banks that were trying to seduce us to get loans and to develop Akhladitsa and to build hotels and to do, and it's very full of nature at Akhladitsa. And thankfully, the seduction didn't work. And by 2009-10, it's when the crack started to happen, which of course happened with the international monetary

organizations that tell a country whether they're actually credit worthy or whether they're in debt, which is what happened to Greece. Overnight, Moody, one of those companies, marked us down from being an A-credit country to being a D-debt country. And so the story began to unravel that we were actually in a country that was facing national bankruptcy and that we were going to go under, basically. And the story that is told in Europe and by the Troika, as we call them, which is the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, the European Union, and the European Bank, the Central European Bank, which is what we call the Troika because there's the three of them. The story that was told, and is still being told,

is that Europe came to save Greece from bankruptcy. As a Greek citizen, I always felt that that story is a little bit fake. Of course we were a country that was always on the brink of bankruptcy. We should never have gone into the euro, but they needed the quorum, a certain number of countries to be able to carry a unitary monetary fund. And so they included countries like Greece,

like Spain, like Portugal, which they never should have, according to mainstream economics, because we were always at a debt level that was beyond. But the books were cooked to make it look like we weren't. So you had to have a percentage of debt that was below 12. We were always at 16 or 17 or 18 percent. So there's a narrative that is not true. And so the narrative of Europe coming to save Greece with the bailout deals, as a Greek citizen, felt fake to me. And what we now have are studies that are coming out

that are showing that something like 95% of the debt relief that is given to Greece by the partners, as they're now called, goes into the banks. It doesn't go into the Greek state. So when you think of it from a different point of view, for me, it's a great way for the saving of the banking system to have happened, which was after the crash of 2008, which was not just isolated in the United States, it became worldwide. And Greece was a very, very good case in which to create that kind of debt. So Greece, we went into what is now known as the crisis. And we've been living in that since 2010. Amidst all of this, the Greek people turned to a new radical left party running on an

anti-austerity platform known as Syriza, which was voted into power in early 2015. There certainly was an incredible sense of taking our lives in our hands when we voted in Syriza. And what that has to do is not so much about a left government or to the center government to the right. It has more to do with a feeling that we were voting in a party that had never been in power, because Greece has politics of these kind of dynasty families that are in particular political parties. And so Syriza was a party that was kind of came from the far left, and then build up its momentum over the recent years. But to actually vote in a new, young, he's 40 years old, 41 years old, Tsipras, was almost like a symbol of us wanting to move into a new era, of breaking away from these elite families that had been kind of running our country.

And so there was a symbol of hope that we were taking our lives in our own hands. Of course, as 2015 progressed, you did see that initial negotiation process that Tsipras got into, and also our rather flamboyant finance minister, Varoufakis, who really caught the medias because, you know, he wore t-shirts and he rode his motorbike to parliament, and he was extremely outspoken. The guy was not a politician. He just spoke what was there, and most of the other European finance ministers thought he was a bozo because they couldn't really understand where he was coming from. So there was this initial negotiation period. And the stance of CEDESA was very much, we don't want another bailout.

We don't want all these guys coming into our ministries and running our country. We want our sovereignty back. And of course, that initial first phase of negotiations led to the referendum. It might seem strange that this new Greek government wanted to stop receiving bailouts, but these bailouts were actually being forced onto the Greek people. The finance minister at the time, Yanis Varoufakis, likened the process of the bailouts to that of a drug addict craving their next dose. So who was actually benefiting? Most of the money given to Greece was going to pay back the European lenders, with conditions on the loans demanding more and more austerity. Eventually, these negotiations led to a referendum. We asked James Galbraith, an economist and advisor to Verifocus, to explain.

The government that came in in January, the government of Syriza, the coalition of the parties of the radical left, set out to attempt to modify the terms and conditions that had been attached to what was called the financial assistance package but was in fact a bailout of the European banking system that passed through the Greek government and which as a consequence of that had led to the imposition on the Greeks of very draconian economic policy terms, especially very, very tight fiscal posture, which was contracting their economy dramatically, as well as radical deregulation and privatization, which was not having any effect on economic growth, leading progressively to the impoverishment

of the Greek people. And when the left government came in, they attempted to renegotiate. The discussions were carried on at multiple levels with the creditor institutions, between the finance ministers and between the heads of government from the end of January through the end of June, during which time essentially no progress was made on any significant points. was made on any significant points. And out of frustration and an effort to try and break the impasse at the end of June, Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, called a referendum on the terms that were being offered Greece. And Greek people resoundingly rejected the terms. At that point, it was the case, nevertheless, and in many ways, unfortunately, that the decision makers around the prime minister and the prime minister himself had resigned themselves to a capitulation to the terms that were being demanded, in part because the alternative threat at that time was

the complete destruction of the Greek banking system, which would have meant the loss of the bank deposits of the entire Greek population. And so under that rather draconian threat, they capitulated. And now in the situation in which the Greeks are living under a government which is effectively being dictated from the outside, there's essentially no significant degree of autonomy left to the Greek state. It belongs to the European institutions and therefore more or less indirectly to the German government. What it means in practical terms is that the creditor institutions tell the Greek government what legal steps it needs to take in order, for example, to accelerate bankruptcies of Greek businesses or closures on mortgages. There is

a privatization commission, which has just been appointed, whose chair and controlling members are appointed by the creditors, not by the Greek state. So effective control over policymaking has passed from Athens to the creditors. And, of course, they still engage in discussions and they negotiate details, but there's a caricature of an independent European state at this point. What is happening now, I feel, is that there has been a huge disappointment

in the Syriza government in that there's a feeling that we got a worse bailout after the referendum. Although there are rumors that Tsipras was really put under difficulty by the European partners. And he came back and he spoke that I had like two evils in front of me. One is that we leave Europe because basically that's what they were going to do. And we're not ready to leave Europe. We don't have a currency. We would have huge poverty, more than we realized. We'd have no meds. We'd have nothing. We would go, like, are we ready to go into that level of poverty? And the second was accept this bailout.

And I chose the bailout because I don't think I could have taken my country to that. How authentic he was, one never knows. But what I feel is that there's a massive disappointment. I think there's a huge anti-Sidiza campaign from the other parties that is very much supported externally as well. And I feel people are like in a depression. It's an individual and a societal depression. And I'm not just talking about an economic depression, where they're really trying to understand what the hell is going on. Because the measures that are being brought in, which is the demands for the debt, are shifting a lot of the fundamentals of our system,

our national insurance system, our tax system, the selling of most of our public commons. And I think people are trying to figure out, the ones that voted for Syriza, who are we? And the ones that didn't vote for Syriza, how the hell are we going to get back to economic growth? The current policy is basically a land grab. It's a policy of liquidation, dispossession, forcing people out of their homes, out of their businesses, and dumping the assets of the Greek state, including, by the way, the beaches, which is, I think, a crime against Europe, onto the public marketplace.

That's a policy that is not going to generate any significant benefits for the Greek people. Instead, it really is basically a policy of forcing many of them out of the country and certainly out of the position of having an active role in their own economy. So that's the existing situation. Is there a way out? Well, the first thing that has to happen is a change in the policies that are being imposed on Greece. And just to take one key example, the Greek government is nominally committed to an impossible target of a three and a half percent so-called primary surplus. And the IMF itself is fully aware that this is implausible and is arguing for a much more realistic target of one and a half percent, which was essentially the position that was on offer by the Greek

government a year ago. And so there's not a lot of doubt that the program itself is utterly unrealistic and that changing it would have at least modest positive effects. Beyond that, then the debt does have to be dealt with, not necessarily immediately because there's significant haircuts in the deferrals and so forth. And so my understanding is that payments on a cash flow basis in the current situation are manageable up until 2022. But ultimately, that debt acts as a block to investment, a block to economic activity. You always have risk that you're going to have taxes raised even more in order to cover it when the time comes, which means that someone thinking about building a business is going to say, well, build a business, then it will all be taxed away to pay the old debt pretty well blocks up the investment channels. So those things do have to be dealt with.

And a change of ideas and a change of policy would have, I think, at this stage, potentially dramatic effects. Getting that requires some massive change in the mindset of the European creditor classes, in the mindset of the European creditor classes, institutions, and governments, which is difficult because they are caught up in the game of enforcing the same general policies on everybody else. The Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French, the East Europeans are doing it enthusiastically to their own peoples. So Greece is being used here as a kind of exemplar for policies that are intended for everybody, and that makes it extremely difficult to persuade the creditors to accept a change simply because everybody agrees that the change would be a good idea for Greece.

An unpleasant reality of coordinated imposition of austerity policy. During CEDISA, the taxes have gotten much worse in the last year due to new austerity measures. Here's Yanni again from Alternative Tours of Athens. For everything and everybody, from the milk you buy, I mean, they've even raised taxes on things like condoms and tampons like no seriously it's bad and income tax is the worst because it's up because um i don't know the exact numbers right now i'm scared to exaggerate because i don't really the numbers seem so high i can't really believe many people when they say how much income tax they're paying because what they did is you're obligated to pay income tax like always but they integrated also

additionally to the income tax you're obligated to pay a pension tax fee and a health insurance fee and those three to get things together amount to I probably won't be exaggerating gift to over 50% of your income so basically but the situation that brought see it is in a sense was that people turned around and looked and said late whoa whoa whoa whoa what the the um um what do you call it the big rich families of green the ship owners the big ship owner owning families they were always exempt from tax so they pay no income tax the big ship owners. The big international companies, like German companies, like Siemens, they have really lax tax.

Banks pay 10% income tax. Private, commercial foreign banks pay 10% income tax. The church pays 20% income tax. And a freelancer, 25 year old programmer who's just supposedly getting on his feet, is paying 45%

income tax. Are you not going to be upset and disappointed with capitalism after that i mean what do you expect or they said one of the things of cd's has said during the negotiations last spring cd's says we want to put an additional income tax on big companies and corporations that make a net profit of over 1 million. They said, no, that's going to cause tax evasion. So what are we going to do instead? We're going to raise by 20% the income tax of the freelancers. That's not going to cause tax evasion. Did they do that?

Yeah. So Syriza did that? No, the European Union said, Syriza, do this. I said, yes, sir, because what if I was just out of the picture? Yeah, so after this kind of situation, what do you expect? Wow. Because you see this discrimination. I mean, it doesn't take much of a person, much intelligence or political views, certain political views to understand if, you know, a bank, a private commercial bank is paying 10% income tax

and you're paying 45% income tax and you're making under 50 grand a year, of course you're going to be upset. So this is another artist, Eno. This is that one artist who was painting a mural what is this symbolist i don't know i think that's a coin and then that's like one hand like one person trying to pull another person out of some you know deep abyss but that person is so blinded that instead of reaching grabbing onto his savior's hand he's trying to grab the coin that's falling out of the savior's hand that the savior dropped to save him no

no that's my first i don't know what the artist said so there there's literally a regressive taxation going on and you buy like something you buy like units for your mobile phone and it's like 23 percent tax on that. With that. For units on the mobile phone or a piece of bread. And that's what the whole debate between CEDIS and the EU was last spring. Was why this is the third time, this is our third round of austerity measures and why for the third time in a row we keep on going after the little people when come on, we know none of the big people are paying any tax in general.

Like they're tax exempt, literally. And to put a little tax on them on their millions, it's not gonna hurt anybody. But putting an additional 5% tax on some poor person, that's gonna hurt people. So when the Greek people saw this, no matter how the mass media was lying about the situation, showing empty supermarket shelves and stuff,

people started revolving. But the most beautiful thing that happened was that one of these points that Syriza wanted to do was put additional tax on the private TV channels. So the private Greek TV channels were the first ones to wage war on Syriza. And of course, they got all the international mass media to wage war on Syriza. And so you would think in such a situation, there's no way getting out of it but then the this backfired because the international mass media started instead of doing like propaganda and having their own agenda they started opening lying so hardcore that any stupid person in greece could see these open lies about me about greece so that really pissed them

off and i think that's what's really stimulated the greek people to vote no a lot of the people voted no i think we're stimulated by just that one moment, which happened in the last couple of days before the vote. Because when you're sitting here at home enjoying life, and you're watching CNN and they're openly lying, like they're telling you you're green when you're blue, is no, they're telling you you're green when you're no color, when you're invisible. You might recall that Greece was all over the news in 2015,

but these days you hardly hear much at all. Here's Maria. We're not so much in the news because we do have a government line now that is going with the European partners. So there's no need for the media to create fear in other countries. Do you see what I mean? There's a feeling that Greece's government has come into line. What is in fact happened is very cynical relaxation of the austerity mandate, for example, on Spain, simply because the Spanish government

is a right-wing government. And it became clear that if they continued to drive the Spanish economy deep into the ground, that government would fall and you'd get a left-wing government. But the object of the last year or so has been to give the Spaniards considerably more budget leeway without imposing on them the kind of sanctions that were imposed on the Greeks and without removing the support, the quantitative easing support for Spanish bonds, which the Greeks don't enjoy. So you're getting a kind of cynical manipulation of political climate country by country, depending

upon who the European creditors would like to see remain in power. That gives you a sense of where things stand in the political culture of the continent at the moment. Okay, so this is Syndigma Square, which is basically the main square of Athens, which is the capital of Greece, so basically the main square of Greece, of the country. This square is where most political demonstrations and protests and events take place, being located right in front of the Parliament building. Syndigma in Greek means constitution, so basically it's Constitution Square. One of the more interesting and different political events that take place here in recent years was in May of 2011.

That spring we saw a lot of anti-authoritarian movements and demonstrations happening both in Spain and in Greece. And so in May of 2011, this event differentiated itself from most average political demonstrations here in Sindigma Square because, first of all, it was the first time that mass media, such as Facebook, was used at a very massive scale to organize and get people involved. Second of all, because it was a lot of different political movements involved with one common goal, anti-austerity measures.

So normally political events have some political agenda associated with some kind of political movement, some kind of political ideology, or some kind of political group. Whereas here we had a situation where it was all different movements united under one cause. And the third and most interesting moment was that its form was not the form of a protest, a demonstration, or a march, but it was in the form of an occupation. So the whole square was occupied by tents. It became a tent city for about a month and it functioned in a way through volunteers as a mini autonomous democracy, direct autonomous democracy you can say in a sense. So from the beginning they had organized themselves into different groups. So you had a soup kitchen, serving people food every day.

You had a tent with military personnel volunteering 24 7. You had a soup kitchen. I was serving people food every day. You had a tent with military personnel volunteering 24-7. You had a group of lawyers that were always volunteering on hand to resolve any legal issues that might arise with, say, I don't know, local shop owners or the police or city workers. You even had a group of people that were always volunteering that were responsible to keep the square clean and tidy. And of course there was a, this is Greece, we had to have a stage with musicians that were playing loud music through microphones, which is quite interesting because they play

on average from noon till 2am. And this is right in front of one of the fanciest big hotels in Athens. So unfortunately the VIP guests of this hotel must have had a hard time sleeping for a month. And they organized a forum in the middle part of the square where there was a lottery system. People would take turns to speak about their political opinions. And after a certain point, it was evicted by the police in early June,

probably due to the tourist season coming, being worried about our image to the outsiders and the foreigners. So an interesting moment was during the eviction, you could still find this video on YouTube, is the stage was like a meter and a half higher than the floor level that everybody else was at. And so there's musicians playing up on the stage and that day there was it was a hot afternoon it was like probably 3 4 p.m so the sun is still really bright but it's it's hot and the musicians are playing and these were cretan musicians and music from the cretan mountains is very like warrior and polemic type of music very upbeat very fast intense kind of music and as they're playing this music,

that's when the riot police start running into the square and people are jumping through tents. It's just chaos. There's tear gas. There's smoke bombs going off. There's those, what do you call those, stun grenades, bam, bam, bam. And in the video, you could see that

there's all this commotion and chaos happening around the stage, but a little bit above all the smoke and chaos are the musicians and they wouldn't stop playing they just continued playing they just start playing more intense and more louder and more upbeat as the riot police were running around them what do you think was the uh the effect the outcome of the protest this specific occupation was probably in a sense one of the first big steps towards the political situation where we ended up today in the sense that it was the first stepping stone which probably resulted in the end of the election of the Syriza party. Because it's probably one of the moments that people started really thinking, where people were really agitated by the whole system of these austerity measures, let's put it this way,

and they started really thinking that it is a possibility to go in a different political direction than our comfortable central moderate left, central moderate right, this is our comfort bubble, our comfort zone, and people actually started considering about voting or thinking about outside of the bubble zone and which altogether this almost must be a process that also had effect on like um you know uh left-wing politics becoming more at least the idea becoming more acceptable by today in countries like spain and britain and as we see recently in the united states at least

it's up for discussion something that even 10 years ago was never on the table of discussion. The events at Syndigma Square helped to create the atmosphere of resistance and solidarity, which has begun to reappear in Greek society. Demonstrations like the one we heard at the beginning of this episode in the anarchist neighborhood of Exarchia happen quite regularly. Yanni also told us about another important event which took place not long after the Syntigma Square occupation. This is one of the buildings of the Ministry of Finances. That building over there is the main building with the little tree on the corner of the roof, the white big building. That's where Vodafone's office was during all the commotion last year. This is the second building of the Ministry of Finances.

So the thing was, after the second austerity measures, one of the main obligations, the first obligations of the Greek government at that time to fill out the plan of the austerity measures was to fire a lot of those government workers. But they had to begin with the workers that had the lowest wages. So one of the first big groups of people to get fired were cleaning personnel, which were cleaning ladies basically. And these were cleaning ladies

that worked in various government buildings and ministries and so forth. And when they were fired, a group of them, 509 of them refused to accept their on that they were fired They refused to accept their severance pay and so they went on strike and they occupied this arcade here And they stayed here in occupation for 18 months So for a year and a half they were receiving no salary and they weren't obviously receiving their severance pay So this is one of the things you guys asked me and what came out of May

2011 and syndic my I think this was gained a lot of this specific strike gained a lot of support and empowerment because of that so it's like a basis and for Greek society was a very confusing situation and another reason why they gained a lot of support because first of all you fire people with the lowest wages instead of cutting back like on high expenses like limousines for the mps second of all um you hire um it was all ladies so it's like almost a gender issue it was all mostly ladies of an older age it was ladies who predominantly had no higher education and um the worst thing of all of it was that once they fired the cleaning ladies, they had to give out tenders to private companies

who would clean the government buildings, which actually cost more money in the end, because, you know, somebody's got to clean them. So due to this reason, they gained a lot of support, and that's why they were able to hang on here for 18 months. So during the pre-election campaign of Syriza, one of the first promises they said is that, you know, if we win the elections, we're going to hire these cleaning ladies back because they kind of became like a symbol of this anti-austerity

struggle. And when they did win the election, it was one of the few things they did accomplish to do in the beginning out of what their goals were and in which direction they were headed. So they hired them back. And after they won for a long time, there's a big poster hanging here, which was an image of a cleaning spray bottle. And because there's 509 cleaning ladies, it says, we recommend 509 super active, supposedly the Windex, against the stains of hypocrisy. So it's very typical for like political slogans here to be a little like sarcastic poetic at the same time. This form of resistance is still happening all over Greece. In fact, there was a strike going on while we were there.

So today the transportation workers are on strike? Yeah, they are. What's going on with that? Most of them are protesting against the potential possibility of the privatization of the urban transportation infrastructure. How potential is it? The way things are going, I think it's almost guaranteed it's a matter of time. We don't make up the rules here anymore.

And that would be the rail, the rail and the buses? Metro, suburban railways, buses, trams and trolleys. May I have your attention please? We inform that the morgue in lines 1, 2, 3 and 3 from 12 o'clock at noon until 4 o'clock in the afternoon due to a strike of the employees. Thank you. These past five, six years, they're very difficult. People live in a lot of financial hardship, psychological hardship as well, primarily because there is very little opportunity to express oneself's creativity through work, because we're in full depression now. However, on the flip side of that, it's been a time of immense reemergence of our humanity. And that's what I have been living. What I found is that I actually saw an authenticity beginning to emerge in us,

a humanity of starting to help one another, a neighborliness starting to actually watch out what is happening, even going down for the peaceful protests, which were always turned into violent ones, primarily by our police, not by the citizens, became acts of solidarity and acts of connection or reconnection, which we had lost with the bubble years of when I kind of entered here. So now this place here, this was basically six years ago. There was no trees here. The only trees here six years ago were the ones along the big fence, which used to be like commercial shields, big billboards. So the only trees here were these big trees on the edge. All the trees

you see inside here, there was nothing here because this was a parking lot so this is a parking lot that belonged to one government institution and this government institution was going to trade it with another government institution the other government institute institution wanted to build their offices here but in the meantime it was a parking lot that was rented out to all the private offices here so it only worked on monday through friday on saturday sunday it was closed and a couple of times the residents of Exadha neighborhood, because it's very dense and there's not a lot of greenery, made petitions for the municipality to make this some kind of public green space. And of course they never got an answer. So at one point it was winter on a Saturday and

it was a cold winter that year. A bunch of activists in the neighborhood got together and they just came here early in the morning with those big circular saws that you cut asphalt in the street. And they just started cutting out in the morning with those big circular saws that you cut asphalt in the street and they just started cutting out the asphalt of the parking lot and planting trees and then the old ladies from the round building started saying this so they started bringing food down to the young activist eating like yeah bravo bravo come on i did like a truck showed up by evening early evening and dumped like two tons of gravel and brought trees and like who's this from they're like oh no we can't you know it doesn't matter you guys are doing something awesome so in order not to get

evicted from the beginning so basically this is like um this is not a social garden this is an occupation it's a squat but it's a green open air squat and like all the other squats they have the general assembly once a week once a week they have movie nights so you'll see over there there's like an amphitheater with a little like makeshift amphitheater and a lot of screen thing there's a big container there that some architectural students with their design project for their diploma once they were finished they donated it here so that space that container opens up as a bar canteen whenever there's a movie night or a dj night or a live music concert here on the in that corner also they created a children's area where they have on usually on Saturday

mornings they have like children's events you know like little for the local children of the neighborhood so basically from the beginning when they occupied the space um even though it's winter is really cold they created the system in order not to be evicted by the police is every night at least like 20 30 people take turns spending the night here with like fires to keep warm so that if the police did come, they'd right away each person could call two more people and within half an hour you have enough like quantity of people to physically resist the police. So they were never evicted from here as often happens with other places in the beginning.

Can anyone join the General Assembly or is it like a specific group? No, that's the whole the whole idea about these organizations that are housed in squats and are grassroots and no finances involved and only volunteers. The whole idea is that it's open to the whole public, to anybody. So it's free access to all public. And that's why I was trying to differentiate it from the squats in the West. Because when you go to a squat in Amsterdam, they're like, well, well we'll see why don't you hang out with us if we like you you know if all of us like you and you like us and we get along then maybe you could hang out with us type of thing or in Christiana which Christiana Copenhagen is the only kind of place that might

be in some sense kind of comparable to Exatia but Christiana again if you want to live there you know everybody who's been living there for over I don't know six years. They have to like agree and time. Yeah. Yeah, you could live here. That's okay Or no, you can't like we don't like you So it's this like, you know filtration and this basically a bounce in a club and that's like anti the whole concept of these places which are about being open and accessible to everybody no matter what social class or Financial class or political ideology. So that's their whole idea is they all have publicly announced which day of the week is their General Assembly and anybody comes and then joins.

And then about a couple of weeks ago near Victoria Square there was a hotel. It was one of those hotels that got like government funding to be refurbished right before the Olympic Games and blah blah blah but then after Olympic Games and the economic crisis to burn through because it wasn't it wasn't the exactly perfect neighborhood where a tourist wants to stay this hotel was called City Plaza so what happened was this hotel went bankrupt and ended up not paying the last salary to all of their employees so the employees were really upset that they didn't get their last salaries and they basically the owners of the hotel. So the employees were really upset that they didn't get their last salaries.

And they basically, the owners of the hotel locked up the hotel as it was, with all the beds, all the sheets, all the equipment, refrigerators. And the employees were telling the owners of the hotel, why don't you sell at least part of the furniture and equipment just to cover our salaries? And the owners were like, no, no, no, no, we're not going to do that so when the um the organizations from this place again here they went in a couple weeks ago to occupy this hotel to turn it into a hospitality center the ex-employees who never got their last paycheck they're actually supporting the activists to take over the hotel and it was one of the most beautiful and successful um occupations for hospitality center because first of all it's a hotel so it's a design for people to live in it

and second of all um friends who were there that day when they went in they told me they got in there by like 11 noon midday and by evening they're already cooking in the kitchen because all the equipment was still in good condition they just needed a light cleaning and boom by evening they're already cooking dinner and it's like a real more hospitable center so that place is also now hospitality center it was a more recent one. City Plaza, yeah, just three weeks ago maybe at the most. It's one of the most discussed recent projects related to the refugee crisis and to this kind of activism here in Athens. Okay, so what is your name?

My name is Margareta. Margareta. And where are we right now? We are at City Plaza. We are here with a lot of refugees and they stay here. We asked Margarita to take us on a tour of the City Plaza Hotel. So here was the bar. The bar is held by the volunteers here.

And this is where people eat they all the meals of the day the breakfast the lunch everything do people have to pay for meals no I know only the coffees that we make because we want to raise money for the building. So, no, the food is for free. Food is for free. And, yes, for the immigrants and for the volunteers as well. So, how are things paid for here? I think mostly of the people who bring food and try to help in this way. And this used που φέρνει φαγητό και προσπαθεί να βοηθήσει. Αυτή ήταν η παραγωγή για τους παιδιούς. Υπάρχει πανί όπου καινούργιος.

Αυτή είναι η θέση που μπορούμε να βλέπουμε τη νύχτα όταν τα πράγματα είναι καλά εδώ. Είναι πολύ ωραία εδώ. Εδώ βλέπουμε τους παιδιούς που παίζουν με τους παιδιούς. Things are calmer here. It's really nice here. And here we see people playing with the keys. How long has it been going for? I think it's over a month, but I don't know exactly. And have there been any problems from the police or anything? Up until now, no, we don't have a lot of problems.

We had some problems with the owner. But this building is in a... It's not really clear. The ownership isn't totally clear right now. So it's being contested in court. Yes, and also the people that used to work here, because they don't have their money. When the hotel closed, the money didn't... They didn't get paid for their wages.

Yes. They came here and they told us that they want us to keep going in this building and that they like the way this building is used. So how many beds are there? I think up until now there are 300 beds. 300 people. 300 people. Yes.

There are a lot of people here, a lot of people. I think there are about 200 kids. Wow, so 200 kids and about 100 adults. Yes, it's crazy. Every hour of the day there are children playing everywhere. You can't stop them. Wow. But it's really nice.

So why did you particularly get involved in this activity? I think right now it was something you could do to help a lot of people because there are a lot of places like this that refugees can stay in, Είναι πολύ ωραία να βοηθήσεις πολλούς ανθρώπους, γιατί υπάρχουν πολλές μέρη όπου οι νεοφυλάκες μπορούν να μένουν, αλλά συνήθως είναι μικρές και μπορείς να μένεις για μία μήνυμα, ένα μήνα, μια εβδομάδα, δεν ξέρω. Εδώ προσπαθούμε να φτιάξουν αυτό το hotel με το σπίτι τους. Και νομίζω ότι είναι πολύ ωραίο να δούμε ανθρώπους που δεν έχουν κανένα πράγμα στον κόσμο, να χαλαρώσουν, να προσπαθούν να κερδίζουν τα ζωή τους και όλοι εδώ, όλες οι ευκαιρίες, βοηθούν με την κλίνιση, με το φα with the cleaning, with the food, with everything. So it's not like we are helping them.

It's like we are living together to make this hotel a beautiful place to stay for them. Squats like the City Plaza Hotel have been popping up all over Athens. They are largely based off of anti-authoritarian anarchist principles of self-organization and horizontality. For example, there's no one in charge at the City Plaza Hotel. We asked Yanni to tell us a little bit more about how squats in Athens work. how squats in Athens work. So how many of the Occupy groups then become non-profits, like functioning non-profits? Well, they're all non-profits. They all, they all.

And they all keep their structure. Yes, and they all mostly have no cash flow. The only exception is that all of these places, even though they're like the head, basically headquarters of an activism movement, they all, of course, being Greeks, they all have a little bar inside. Like, basically, it's the dive bar in any neighborhood if you have one of these places. So it's very cheap, but that's the only cash

flow they have. So it covers, like, their basic needs of, like, I don't know, glasses, soap, and more beer. So people don't get paid? No, no. There's a totally self-worth... There's no capital involved in general, except for the sustainable cycle of buying more beer and selling beer, buying beer and selling beer to keep the thirst down.

Other than that, there's no money really involved. It's just volunteerism and donations. So do people need to work outside? Yeah. Yeah. No, this is um totally because um no they don't get paid and it has no legal structure it's a squat they're connected to the electricity illegally they're connected to the water legally the water company comes by once a year cuts them off and they connect again it's literally a squat

so there's no like legal structure for like you said we're employing people there's and the thing of involving money especially for employment is totally against their whole concept also here i have to explain one thing that you know when we in the west we say the word squat and that's why i try to use the word occupation more often but squat so when in the west we say squat we perceive this um word more as like, you know, an abandoned building where a bunch of people live because they could live there for free and they just party and have a good time and they'll pay the bills. Generally in Greece, about 90% of squats are not residential, but are actually housing for some kind of social

grassroots organization, basically. So basically it kind of works along the same framework most of the time. First of all, they always occupy, they try to occupy abandoned government public property versus occupying a private owned property, usually. And second of all, each organization is dedicated to a certain field of activism. One will be dedicated refugees, the other one to be like, I don't know, political prisoners and so forth. And third of all, they always function in the same way once a week on a certain publicly known day of the week. On this squad it could be on a Monday, on the other squad it could be a Wednesday. At a certain time in the evening they have a general assembly which is open to all the public. So if you want to participate

in the activism of the squad, you just come to the assembly and introduce yourself and start participating so it's again that system of regularly assemblies where everybody's on one level democratic level and no hierarchy and another very important factor that I must say also is that all they usually when the situation arises they always refuse to cooperate and collaborate with, say, example, NGOs, because they believe that NGOs work on like, they do like philanthropy, in a sense, which is more hierarchical. And they believe in solidarity, which is non-hierarchical, again, on the same level. I don't help you because I'm in a better situation, you're in a worse situation, but we, no matter which situation we're in, we work together to create something better.

So traditionally, creating squats has been a highly political act. But this is starting to change. Okay, here it was done by, like, you know, basically ideological, anti-authoritarian, grassroots, solidarity movements, anarchism, most political ideology, anti-capitalism, blah, blah, blah. But this has now created a trend, and now that they've closed all the borders and at the moment we know that we have at least 53,000, 55,000 refugees

stuck in limbo in Greece, now it kind of became a trend. And you see basically housewives in suburbs or small towns going and taking over abandoned buildings and turning them into hospitality centers. And now in the last two weeks we see a new thing happening where people are saying, but wait, most of these families have children and especially these hospitality centers and nobody knows how long these people are going to spend here in Greece. And so after food and a roof, next thing children need is schools. And so they're organizing now all these self-organized inoccupied buildings um daycares and schools for the syrian children because it's too complicated

for them from a hospital center to get integrated into the public schooling system here especially since they're like temporary refugees but temporary refugee you know our experience tells us could last years and for small five six year old children to lose a couple years school is a big thing so now that's like the next step is creating schools outside of the system so it's about you know it's always about community organizing and doing

things themselves instead of expecting things to come from elsewhere from the system it's like initiative on a local level but if the bigger system keeps crashing and keeps having huge problems and isn't addressed or isn't, you know, then there's going to be increasing pressure on the local systems and the communities.

No, because if a local community, a local system is decently sustainable enough, even if the whole big system comes crashing around, they'll be fine compared to everybody else generally speaking now yeah so it's more kind of a if if there's a good support system if everyone's supporting each other if there's solidarity then it doesn't really matter so much with the bigger system yeah that's what i mean like that's what i said earlier that even though there's this crisis here in Greece, you don't really have hungry and homeless people

due to what you just said right now. Because the local support system is so decent, whereas under normal circumstances, you should be expecting a lot more homeless people, a lot more hungry people, a lot more people in dire situations. There's a lot less in reality. I don't know if you know what the word crisis means in

Greek. It means crisis in Greek. Crisis, when you do your PhD, you go for your viva. We call it a crisis, which it really means is you take a stand. You decide where your stake is. You decide where your stand is or your position is. So actually, for me, that's the kind of crisis we're having here. As citizens, we have to decide where we stand. Do we stand with the old system that's dying? Or do we stand with a new system that we have to birth and be the midwives for. It's amazing to birth and be your own midwife. So it's actually a very sacred time in our country. What we call here a bit of a mess is on the other hand this typical Mediterranean chaos which you also get in like southern Italy for example or in Turkey which is a regional cultural element that's part of the whole thing.

You can't pluck out specific elements and leave what you want. You can't pluck out the Greek chaos but then leave in the Greek relaxed and joy life. It's one deal. You get the whole package. So you want the German package where everybody's up tight and eats a sandwich for dinner at 7 p.m. but you've got perfect roads and everybody follows the rules or you want the mediterranean package where you have dinner from 9 p.m till 1 a.m with your friends and but then you have a bit of a mess nobody really follows the rule because what are the rules about are the rules for the people are the people for the rules you know kind of like there's a reasonable um interpretation of

rules so there's blind following so these are things that belong either belongs to this package or that package now you want this happy meal yes or you want the other one but you can't choose the chicken nuggets from the one happy meal and then the toy from the other happy meal it doesn't happen that way A big thank you to all of our guests, as well as the Rambetica Hipsters, Olvido Records, and A. Costis for the music that you heard on today's show. For more from Upstream, please visit upstreampodcast.org.