Canaries vs Cats

The Greeks, the Brexiters and, now, millions of Indian workers have taken to the streets.

Coal mine canaries: some dying, some chirping loudly.

Will they stir us slumbering, Trans-Atlantic couch potatoes into action or will the fat cats prevail?

http://in.reuters.com/article/india-strike-idINKCN1180UK?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/tens-millions-worlds-biggest-strike-india-battle-higher-wages-narendra-modi-a7224061.html

And from an ever-inspiring source:

https://electricinthedesert.wordpress.com/2016/09/05/biggest-strike-in-world-india-engulfed-in-red-banners-as-workers-strike-back/

Thank, you, Claire.

If Europe Really Cared…

Acropolis from the Plaka Hotel, October 24, 2011 … Hey, is THIS for sale???

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Europe has never been asked what happened to what they gave Greece. They simply didn’t control it. Why not? Because Germany and France have done good business.

Petros Markaris

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Petros Markaris is a very popular Athens-based, Greek author and playwright who has created a series of novels based on an Athens police detective called Costas Haritos. Markaris was born in 1937 in Istanbul to an Armenian  father and Greek mother. The family moved to Athens when Markaris was 17. He went to university in Vienna and can write in German, Greek and Turkish. He has lived in Athens for four decades. He is a candid lover of Greece and an astute observer of its politics.

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The Greeks Get It

Pynx Hill, behind the Agora’s middle stoa – where Athenians voted 280 to 220 against Socrates in 399 BC

Greeks learn once more the lesson

That Socrates taught

Until his soul was silenced.

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Socrates never wrote anything down, but Plato, his best-known student, attributed the following quote to Socrates when he spoke at his trial on the Pynx Hill, just north of the Agora:

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An unexamined life is not worth living.

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Socrates preferred to drink hemlock rather than face a sentence of exile or enforced silence enforced by the powerful, ignorant and  selfish in an Athens recently humiliated by Sparta.

The vast majority of  21st century humans have absorbed nothing of ethical importance in the 24 centuries since Socrates.

Simon and Garfunkel had it figured out as early as 1966: The Sound of Silence:

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We are praying to a Neon god.

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Smug, we ridicule the Greeks, quoting from neoliberal scripture, while not getting what’s really going on. Being already victimized makes them wiser than us.  So are Palestinians, Southern Sudanese, the Nile fellahin who have been displaced over the past several years from their farmland by the rush to build hotels for the smug, etc. etc. fere ad infinitum.

Why and How Things Got This Bad – A Primer

Sharing a moment of solidarity with health care protesters in Barcelona – April 2011

This post is really an eye-catching introduction to an excellent link on the Topsy-like growth of neoliberalism, now a bane of our, possibly short-term, existence.

A history lesson which everyone born after 1970 should read. It is well worth persevering through and reads very simply.