Upstream - Sneak Peak: Greek Financial Crisis Explained (Maria Scordialos)

Episode Date: June 15, 2016

In this Upstream Sneak Peak, we spoke with Greek activist and co-initiator of The Art of Hosting Maria Scordialos. She will be featured in our upcoming episode on the Solidarity movement and financial crisis in Greece.

You're listening to an Upstream Sneak Peek with Maria Skordialis, a co-initiator of The Art of Hosting and a Greek activist. 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 Eurobank 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 what the roots of our culture were. 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 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 g, 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%. So there's this 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. And what I found with coming at that period 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 for me, 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 in Greece. 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 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..