Tag: strike

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Dan Wang: Report Back from WI

second report on the wisconsin movement by Dan S. Wang February 23, 2011

‘I tell the story from where I left off. That was last Friday afternoon, February 19.’ http://prop-press.typepad.com/blog/2011/02/second-report-on-the-wisconsin-movement.html

The situation at that moment: Madison public schools shut down for three days due to student walk-outs and teacher sick-outs. From Tuesday on, there had been big turnouts of union workers, high school students, university students, graduate students, nurses, firefighters, teachers, a great many public school parents, police, and all manner of supporters. Senate Democrats were still out of state, denying Walker a quorum. Jesse Jackson spoke to a crowd of thousands at the evening rally, marking the beginning of a procession of national figures to descend on Madison.

The word all that day and into the night was that the first organized Scott Walker support rally was scheduled for the next day, Saturday, from noon to three on the square. The rally for conservatives was being put together by tiny but well-heeled right-wing groups Americans for Prosperity, the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty, some small Tea Party groups, and who knows who else. The conservatives were already using the event as infowar—bloggers and event announcers described the Saturday counter-demo as showing the world Wisconsin’s real majority. This was a direct challenge to the six day-old movement on the level of visible numbers, bodies in the street and in the Capitol. With no new development from the governor’s office or the legislators, Saturday’s rallies would be the next chapter in the unfolding story.

The Friday evening messages flying around the part of the anti-Walker universe that is visible to me made a single point: Saturday’s turnout had to be massive. The Wisconsin movement had to write the narrative by outnumbering the conservatives 10-1 or 20-1, precluding any possibility for the story to be told without mentioning the crushing imbalance, especially given that the national media were by this day fully engaged.

The pro-labor/pro-education forces met the test. By the time we got there at noon the entire paved area of the square was filled with anti-Walker people, the inner sidewalks and the outer (more sparsely), and some of the lawn areas, plus, we cannot forget, the several thousand (still!) inside the Capitol. The rally for conservatives, organized under the banner I Stand With Walker, by contrast, gathered in the interior part of the square, well inside the corner of Main and Pinckney, and didn’t even fill it.  Even inside the mass of bodies assembled in front of the Tea Party stage, there were anti-Walker and pro-education/pro-worker signs visible. The right wing turnout would be generously granted at a thousand. The progressive side had to have been at least 70,000, and that was the estimate of the police. The space filled by bodies was more than twice that of Thursday and Friday, when estimates were at 30,000.

To give you a sense of the difference, see this video that Ben Manski shared on social media. As he says, the stationary crowd standing in front of the stage is the Tea Party rally, but there were conspicuous anti-Walker sign holders in there, too. The rest of the square, all the way around, and packing the other three corners are all us. On this day the Wisconsin movement transcended protest and became a phenomenon, something that draws attention just because one wants to see for themselves what this thing is. In this case the point of curiosity centers around whether this assemblage is as mainstream as the images depict it. Saturday proved that you don’t get 70,000 people together in the street in Wisconsin without it being a picture of America.

Later on Saturday the rumor circulated that some doctors from UW Health had made it known that they were willing to sign illness excuse forms for teachers who continued to demonstrate. Slate reports that over the weekend one or more doctors actually set up a station near the square to write doctor’s notes for any demonstrator who asked for one. Because of the dishonesty involved and the standards of integrity doctors are held to, the episode attracted a fair bit of shaming by right wing observers and prompted calls for an investigation. I prefer to interpret the action as a continuation of the domino-effect of different groups and constituencies taking the initiative to share risk, in support of one another, in real solidarity. And it is not a stretch. The doctors know that Badger Care and Medicaid are in line on the chopping block, which greatly hurting their poorest patients, not to mention the public school cuts that will hurt their own children.

Sunday turned out to be a day of rest, relatively. The weather was crummy, all day and night, cold sleet and freezing rain. Though rallies were announced, there were many fewer demonstrators. But for those who showed up, there was the Capitol, so for another day and night, the rotunda was kept occupied with people and energy. Medea Benjamin, having just returned from visiting Tahrir Square in Cairo during the crucial last days of the movement that toppled Mubarak, spent the night with demonstrators in the Capitol and reports on it here, especially the echoes of Egypt she sees and hears in Madison. What they portend, and how those echoes reverberate, and who else hears them, are all questions worth considering. My favorite Egypt reference so far: a super minimalist sign that read very simply, 18 DAYS.

On Monday the public school students and teachers returned to class in Madison. In Milwaukee, it was a President’s Day holiday for Milwaukee Public Schools. That and the fact that Monday was a state worker furlough day, made bodies available for yet another day. Jesse Jackson walked with Madison East high school students in the morning, leading his preach/chant call-and-response with them (“Say this, I AM!” I am! “Somebody!” Somebody!). Tom Morello played a show for the unions on Monday evening. Reverend Billy Talen was scheduled to appear on Tuesday. While the right wing blogosphere fulminates against the Obama administration for having been the architects of this uprising (needless to day, their imaginations are working overtime), it seems now that the left wing establishment and celebrity pool is trying to catch up with and support this locomotive of dissent, lest they miss it.

Tuesday’s rallies went on as routine, almost. Again, morning and evening, and plenty of milling around in between. Unlike the festive atmosphere of last week, this was quieter but conversational. The square had become a space for political discussion, strangers talking to strangers, looking toward the uncertain future together. I spoke to metal workers from Milwaukee who told me about Walker’s disasterous tenure as county executive there. I spoke with a UW custodian and a retired guy who came down from Menomonie. And then there were these two women, doing their part to change the conversation from the GOP-manufactured budget crisis to what this is really about:

The proliferating solidarities hit at least three more high points from Saturday to today. The first was the viral image of Muhammed Saladin Nasair holding his now famous sign. Wisconsinites lapped up the gift of symbolism and association, but up until this pic circulated there had not been any indication that people in Egypt could hear or see us, or that our fight mattered to them. This image sent a good many demonstrators into elation—it showed us that translocal communication, bringing movements closer together, could happen. This was quickly followed by news of Ian’s Pizza becoming a receiving station for out of town donations—hundreds of orders—to the demonstrators, including a few pies paid for by somebody in Egypt. By Tuesday, the Capitol rotunda is decorated with pizza boxes repurposed into signs.

The second high point followed weekend rumors of the Capitol police possibly readying to execute an order to vacate the building. The word was that Walker is taking right wing heat for not having already cleaned house, for letting the disorder get out of hand. Madison area firefighters, themselves exempt from the provisions in the bill that would strip collective bargaining, responded dramatically to the rumors by coming to camp out with the students on Monday night, nearly sixty of them. Supposedly, they intend to be an overnight protest presence for the duration, thereby setting up the potentially uncomfortable image of police evicting the firefighters should the governor order them out. Whether all the police would even obey the orders might even be a real question. The firefighters are putting their reputations and prestige on the line for the others even though nobody asked them to. It is impressive.

And then there was Tuesday morning. On my way down to the square I checked into WORT’s noontime discussion on, of course, the movement. Lena Taylor, one of the fourteen absent Democratic senators, was on the phone from somewhere in Illinois. While on the air, she said that she had just received a text confirming that the House Democrats of the Indiana legislature had, like the Wisconsin 14, fled to Illinois in order to deny the Republican majority a quorum. The radio host and studio guests let out a cheer. There’s only one thing better than solidarity. Contagion.

Observations:

1)   On the “echoes of Egypt” question—yes, it is real. Scott Walker’s bill was a carefully coordinated effort, as evidenced by the fact that supportive television ads aimed at demonizing the unions were aired the day the bill was unveiled. Clearly, the frontal assault was planned in advance. Nonetheless, he and his masters, for all their money and tactical thinking, have showed their almost unbelievable blind spots, chief among them, having made their opening attack on the SAME day that Hosni Mubarak resigns. You don’t openly threaten a Wisconsin workforce with the National Guard in the very moment that a three-decade-old dictatorship in a big country (that the world media has been following for more than two weeks) goes down unless you’re practically daring people to make the association—or you are completely oblivious. However substantive are the parallels between the Madison and Cairo movements, from that moment on, the narrative opened up in a way that continues to be advantageous to the demonstrators, in terms of how we see ourselves, and how we think of ourselves as having a world audience. Walker’s blind spot hearkens back to Debord, where he says the spectacle, for all its tendencies to accumulate possibilities and thereby curtail them, loses it ability to think strategically.

2)   The battle of bodies is over. For the moment, the opposition has conceded the point. All the websites that promoted the counter demo have erased their reporting on it, in other words, have chalked it up as a loss and moved on. From there they moved to the arena of pranking, dirty tricks, and unapologetic meddling. The call for trouble makers and the out of state-driven effort to recall Democratic state senators fall into these categories. But even here the progressives have scored the first point. Today, Wednesday, by mid-morning the news broke that Scott Walker has been caught on tape in a conversation with an activist posing as billionaire conservative donor David Koch. We don’t know where this will lead in the news cycle of the next few days, but already it is big. There are calls from public interest groups for a full investigation into the relationship between Walker and the Koch empire, and journalists smell blood.

3)   While the beating heart of the movement continues to be the capitol rotunda, which during waking hours ranges from very loud to super loud (see any youtube video of the rotunda demonstrations), the movement is at a turning point. Walker is dug in, he’s made that clear. The unions are, as well. Their opening gambit of conceding all demands for employee contributions in exchange for the basic right of collective bargaining paid off handsomely in the form of a mass movement and popular support. But now they cannot concede anything else. The language of strike is in the air. When and how is the question. Before the bill gets rammed through, or only after? The workers and students must think through, must imagine what an effective strike will look like—how to maintain the beauty and love that has been communicated so well by the demonstrations, but in the form of a strike, ie a measured, targeted, well-articulated, and loving withdrawal of labor. The demonstrations have been disruptive, true, but that has not been the main story precisely because the evidence of self-organization, creativity, sincerity, and novel forms of sociality has taken over the storyline, to the point of drawing in participants who want to help author it. When Walker carries out his threat to start firing workers, which may begin as early as the end of this week, the question of a strike will move front and center. Then, for supporters from afar, the situation will also change.

4)   How to place this movement? Not only in relation to current worldwide unrest, but also in comparison to the UC campus strikes of last year, and the Republic Doors and Windows occupation that happened in Chicago in late 2008, the last two instances of real disobedience to come out of an American student or worker left? Compared to those recent American campaigns, here the worker-student divide has been successfully bridged from the inception, and the space of demonstration has been utilized very well, framing the rallies under the gravitas of the Capitol building. No complete thoughts, as everything continues to move here, but the questions of historical significance creep in. Especially when you see signs like this:

There is much more to say, particularly about under-surface tensions within the movement, and how demands beyond that of preserving collective bargaining rights might get articulated in a complementary way. The unity is strong for the moment, but attempts to break it apart unceasing, including a growing security presence at the Capitol, shrinking the public’s hold on space, especially overnight. My guess is that rotunda will remain loud during the day but that the sleepovers will end this week. That will not be counted as a defeat, only a natural progression to the next sphere of contestation. On the local level, somehow I keep going back to high school students who catalyzed the movement in the first few days. Multi-hued, multi-lingual, multi-racial—they are the picture of the future, a different one than the (adorable and loving!) older mostly white workers, teachers, and parents. The young of Madison, nearly 50% of color in a traditionally white town, are usually a source of anxiety here—crime, achievement gaps, curfews, etc, etc. But now they’ve show a bit of their minds and hearts, and it gave strength to the rest of us right when we needed it, early. This will be their world, what will they do to shape it, given the chance?

To finish (for now), a short tour of the sign gallery that is the Capitol rotunda, from Tuesday afternoon, Week Two.

http://www.defendwisconsin.org/

Check the Wisconsin AFSCME website for updates on planned actions, especially now that action is being organized outside Madison, in other parts of Wisconsin: http://www.wiafscme.org/

For in town, check the Madison Activist Calendar: http://lists.madimc.org/~infoshop/activistcalendar.html

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Labour protests heat up a week after president steps down

Last week, on Thursday, 10 February 2011, bus drivers and public transport workers in Cairo joined thousands of downtrodden public sector workers on strike. Days before, factory workers in Helwan, estimated to have reached 10,000, undertook a series of sit-ins in cement, coal and wheat factories – amongst others. The impact these strikes had on the regime cannot be diminished. Within days of the strikes, Mubarak finally stepped down.

When transportation workers joined in spreading labour unrest, they effectively invigorated Egypt’s wave of anti-government protests.

On Monday, 14 February 2011, these transit authority workers gathered en masse in front of the State TV station (Maspiro) waving pay stubs and chanting the very same slogans used in Tahrir Square, though not seeking the same political demands: they had come for the basic right to live and support their families.

Bus drivers, ticket-takers, mechanics and other transport workers showed every and any reporter or interested party their pay stubs as they highlighted their shockingly low pay, ranging from 300-600 at the most, and the insurance deductions which according to enraged demonstrators went into the pockets of their employers. Health care was not being provided to any of these labourers. Many of the transportation workers stressed that a few hundred pounds was not enough to pay rent, feed their children and take care of ageing parents let alone provide for the cost of education and cover health care and hospital charges.

At 4:00pm on Tuesday, union workers belonging to Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions began gathering around the union’s headquarters on Galaa Street. Using the same slogans and chants that galvanised millions around Egypt since 25 January. They union workers were asking for the head of the federation to step down and for the 53 year old federation to detach itself from the arms of the regime and become an autonomous and independent union which could better represent Egypt’s work force.

Not long after the protest began peacefully, violence broke out as protests attempted to march into their workplace.  Those who had made their way into the building were met with belts, chairs and other projectiles. Soon a full-scale struggle began as both sides began to throw rocks and objects, shattering the glass doors. Security guards and thugs used fire extinguishers at least two times to push protesters back from the entrance.

Then, shortly after, glass bottles began raining down from above as men, standing on the fifth or sixth floor hurled Pepsi-cola and 7-Up bottles at the protesters and anyone holding a camera. At least four people were injured by these volleys.

The military police eventually arrived, but soon left without giving any indication of whether they would return and whether they intended to restore calm. Protesters on the ground yelled and cursed at those inside the entrance and those peering down from the windows, but were soon reunited and resumed their peaceful chants. The day ended with the arrival of the military who requested that three protesters make their way up to the official management of the union in order to set out demands.

Strikes had also erupted in a range of sectors, including railway workers, state electricity staff, Suez Canal service technicians and hospitals. The banking sector also saw a series of strikes on Sunday, 13 February. Banks have since been closed as the Central Bank of Egypt seeks to create avenues for dialogue and conflict resolution. Nevertheless bank staff have expressed their distrust and disdain towards the CBE as it puts off decision making.

A source within a prominent agricultural bank which offers micro-loans to farmers among other services, confirmed that the CBE had asked all banks to form committees of 20 persons and send them to meet with them at given times to discuss grievances, requests and possible resolutions. If demands are not met, bank staff have threatened more drastic measures. Among their demands are higher pay and the resignation of bank managers who are accused of incompetence, abusive policies towards bank staff and bank customers and unlawful appropriation and use of bank funds.

Today, Wednesday, 16 February 2011 has seen thousands gather after yesterday’s lull in protests. According to a prominent Egyptian blogger, 20,000 protesters have gathered at Ghazl el-Mahalla on strike. Teachers are also gathered around the education ministry.

Telecommunications workers, postal staff and state electricity staff have all been on strike and continue their protests, though none have lifted their services. It seems clear that strikers are holding back, hoping that the government will get the message and respond with haste. They are not trying to jeopardise the stability of their country as they have shown restraint in the past weeks. Though the interim government and military council are visibly shaken, they have not announced any steps or plans to  bring the necessary justice these workers require.

Protests can and will only continue with many cards as yet left unplayed. The importance of labour in coming days cannot be overestimated, it is incumbent on all those concerned with the future and present of this revolution to recognise this and support workers’ rights as workers and their right to protest generally. Connecting workers’ movements with the claims of other participants in this revolution may not be immediately easy, but in the current climate it seems possible just as it is necessary.

source: Labour protests heat up a week after president steps down | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=345

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Mobilizing the Jobless: Frances Fox Piven

Mobilizing the Jobless
Frances Fox Piven

http://www.thenation.com/article/157292/mobilizing-jobless

As 2011 begins, nearly 15 million people are officially unemployed in the United States and another 11.5 million have either settled for part-time work or simply given up the search for a job. To regain the 5 percent unemployment level of December 2007, about 300,000 jobs would have to be created each month for several years. There are no signs that this is likely to happen soon. And joblessness now hits people harder because it follows in the wake of decades of stagnating worker earnings, high consumer indebtedness, eviscerated retirement funds and rollbacks of the social safety net.

So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?

It is not that there are no policy solutions. Left academics may be pondering the end of the American empire and even the end of neoliberal capitalism, and—who knows—in the long run they may be right. But surely there is time before the darkness settles to try to relieve the misery created by the Great Recession with massive investments in public-service programs, and also to use the authority and resources of government to spur big new initiatives in infrastructure and green energy that might, in fact, ward off the darkness.

Nothing like this seems to be on the agenda. Instead the next Congress is going to be fixated on an Alice in Wonderland policy of deficit reduction by means of tax and spending cuts. As for the jobless, right-wing commentators and Congressional Republicans are reviving the old shibboleth that unemployment is caused by generous unemployment benefits that indulge poor work habits and irresponsibility. Meanwhile, in a gesture eerily reminiscent of the blatherings of a panicked Herbert Hoover, President Obama invites corporate executives to a meeting at Blair House to urge them to invest some of their growing cash reserves in economic growth and job creation, in the United States, one hopes, instead of China.

Mass protests might change the president’s posture if they succeeded in pressing him hard from his base, something that hasn’t happened so far in this administration. But there are obstructions to mobilizing the unemployed that would have to be overcome.

First, when people lose their jobs they are dispersed, no longer much connected to their fellow workers or their unions and not easily connected to the unemployed from other workplaces and occupations. By contrast workers and students have the advantage of a common institutional setting, shared grievances and a boss or administrator who personifies those grievances. In fact, despite some modest initiatives—the AFL-CIO’s Working America, which includes the unemployed among their ranks, or the International Association of Machinists’ Ur Union of Unemployed, known as UCubed—most unions do little for their unemployed, who after all no longer pay dues and are likely to be malcontents.

Because layoffs are occurring in all sectors and job grades, the unemployed are also very diverse. This problem of bringing people of different ethnicities or educational levels or races together is the classic organizing problem, and it can sometimes be solved by good organizers and smart tactics, as it repeatedly was in efforts to unionize the mass production industries. Note also that only recently the prisoners in at least seven different facilities in the Georgia state penitentiary system managed to stage coordinated protests using only the cellphones they’d bought from guards. So it remains to be seen whether websites such as 99ers
.et or layofflist.org that have recently been initiated among the unemployed can also become the basis for collective action, as the Internet has in the global justice movement.

The problem of how to bring people together is sometimes made easier by government service centers, as when in the 1960s poor mothers gathered in crowded welfare centers or when the jobless congregated in unemployment centers. But administrators also understand that services create sites for collective action; if they sense trouble brewing, they exert themselves to avoid the long lines and crowded waiting areas that can facilitate organizing, or they simply shift the service nexus to the Internet. Organizers can try to compensate by offering help and advocacy off-site, and at least some small groups of the unemployed have been formed on this basis.

Second, before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant. (Welfare moms in the 1960s did this by naming themselves “mothers” instead of “recipients,” although they were unlucky in doing so at a time when motherhood was losing prestige.) Losing a job is bruising; even when many other people are out of work, most people are still working. So, a kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.

Third, protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones capable of making some kind of response to angry demands. This is, I think, the most difficult of the strategy problems that have to be resolved if a movement of the unemployed is to arise. Protests among the unemployed will inevitably be local, just because that’s where people are and where they construct solidarities. But local and state governments are strapped for funds and are laying off workers. The initiatives that would be responsive to the needs of the unemployed will require federal action. Local protests have to accumulate and spread—and become more disruptive—to create serious pressures on national politicians. An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.

A loose and spontaneous movement of this sort could emerge. It is made more likely because unemployment rates are especially high among younger workers. Protests by the unemployed led by young workers and by students, who face a future of joblessness, just might become large enough and disruptive enough to have an impact in Washington. There is no science that predicts eruption of protest movements. Who expected the angry street mobs in Athens or the protests by British students? Who indeed predicted the strike movement that began in the United States in 1934, or the civil rights demonstrations that spread across the South in the early 1960s? We should hope for another American social movement from the bottom—and then join it.

Frances Fox Piven

Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author, most recently, of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America.

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Puerto Rico: Tense Prelude to the Student Strike

From GlobalVoicesOnline.org:

A 48-hour blockade organized by students from the state-run University of Puerto Rico in protest against a proposed $800 annual fee got off to a tense and violent start early Tuesday morning, as students raising barricades around the Río Piedras campus clashed with private security guards hired by the administration.

The day began as students, many of them masked in order to protect their identities, were photographed by the local press [es] as they built and patrolled their barricades in defiance of the administration’s efforts to undermine the protests. Such administrative measures included taking down several University gates [es] around the main campus in Río Piedras early Monday morning, allegedly as a way of guaranteeing entrance to those students, teachers, and employees who showed up for classes and work; and hiring the private security firm Capitol Security, whose guards have proven to be inexperienced and volatile [es] during the first 24 hour cycle of events.

Violent acts were reported and decried by both students and Capitol Security, with one university student allegedly having been beaten by a team of twelve security guards, and several guards allegedly suffering injuries in skirmishes with students. Students and security guards have since declared a truce, according to news reports [es]. Vandalism to school property has also been reported.  Radio Huelga, a ‘pirate’ radio station and website set up by university students during the two-month long strike last semester was able to capture video of the student beating as it took place.

Read more at GlobalVoicesOnline.org


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No surrender in Greece

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http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/24/no-surrender-in-greece

Antonis Davenellos, a member of International Workers Left (DEA), reports from Athens on the May 20 general strike and workers’ growing radicalization.

WITH A mass general strike on May 20 in the private and the public sector and a large demonstration in Athens and other cities, the workers of Greece continued the struggle to overturn an austerity program imposed by the Greek government, European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Participation in the strike was equally big in the private sector as in the public sector, which is the target of most of the austerity measures.

The strike rally in Athens was somewhat smaller compared to one held during the May 5 general strike, but far larger than union mobilizations of just a month ago. Plus, on May 5, the subway and bus drivers union decided to work between 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. to facilitate attendance at the rally. That wasn’t the case this time.

In fact, the continued mass participation of workers on May 20 put an end to attempts by the government to create a climate of fear and panic. Politicians and the media had attempted to exploit the tragic death of three bank workers, who lost their lives when a bank was set on fire during the May 5 demonstration. As many union leaders emphasized from the stage of the rally, the May 20 protest proved false all the predictions of a climate of violence.

Featured at Socialism

Hear Antonis Davenellos at Socialism 2010 in Chicago, speaking on “Crisis and Response in Greece.” Check out the Socialism 2010 Web site for more details. See you at Socialism!

An atmosphere of self-confidence among striking workers dominated throughout the rally, despite provocations by police. In Athens, for the first time in many years, police carried out “pre-emptive arrests,” mostly of young demonstrators as they were approaching the rally site. Among those arrested were four members of the delegation of the youth section of the French Communist Party, who were here in solidarity with the Greek workers, as well as five members of DEA.

But the campaign to intimidate workers failed miserably. More than 50,000 workers took part in the demonstration.

There were many well-organized contingents: teachers, hospital workers, mass transit workers, municipal workers, and water, electrical and bank workers, along with many union locals from the private sector, marching under their own banners. Also marching were many young workers from sectors most affected by “flexible” work conditions—such as courier services, restaurants, etc.

The chants taken up on the march once again showed the anger and growing politicization of the people: “They talk of profits and losses, we talk of human lives”; “This is not people’s Europe, it is Europe of capital and the bosses”; “From Athens to Brussels, listen to us well, the popular rebellion is already here.”

Again, as during the May 5 demonstration, thousands of angry protesters gathered in front of the parliament, this time behind the banner of the bus drivers union, angrily shouting “thieves, thieves” and other insulting epithets.

This climate continues to put pressure on the union leadership. At the rally, the chairman of the public-sector union federation ADEDY, Spiros Papaspiros, demanded an immediate end to the policy of “supervision” of the Greek economy—and he called for the “troika” (the EU, European Central Bank and the IMF) to be kicked out.

The unions called for another rally May 29, at which workers which will surround the parliament building to demand that their representatives vote down the proposed counter-reform of the new pension plan.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THIS WIDESPREAD popular anger is being fed by successive austerity measures by the government, but also by the sense that the policies are absolutely ineffective.

The cuts will plunge the economy into a deep recession—the shrinkage is estimated to be between 4 to 5 percent this year–resulting in waves of layoffs and widespread misery. But even these drastic cuts in wages and social spending haven’t made a dent in the public debt, which continues to grow. It has already shot up to 130 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or 310 billion euros.

This is the direct result of fierce, unbridled neoliberal policies followed blindly by previous governments of the right wing, as well as the social democratic governments of PASOK, which was voted into office late last year.

One sign of the scale of the crisis was the move by Germany to ban “naked short selling,” the practice among financial capitalists of selling shares or bonds not yet in the seller’s possession in the hope of buying them back later at a lower price, finishing the deal and making a profit. The German government wants to prevent speculators from “shorting” EU government bonds, which have dropped in value as the Greek crisis has driven the euro lower on world markets.

Yet the Bank of Greece allowed naked short selling for an extended period of 10 days, feeding the ruthless clique of speculators. This move led to protests even by members of parliament of the ruling PASOK party.

News like this is sharpening people’s anger against private banks, hedge funds, the stock market and other institutions of neoliberalism that previously had been allowed to carry on with their speculating, away from public attention.

The subject of public debt has emerged at the center of debate. In both the demonstrations of May 5 and May 20, the workers made their views loud and clear: We didn’t benefit from all this debt, we don’t owe a single euro to anybody, and we aren’t going to accept any sacrifice for the well-being of euro.

For some time now, among broad sections of the population, there has been a growing demand for debt cancellation–for not a euro to be paid to rentiers and usurers–and to instead use our resources for the needs of the people. These demands go hand in hand with widespread slogans to nationalize the banks, tax capital heavily and finally end the madness of military spending (Greece is fifth in the world in military spending in conventional weapons!).

Workers, in the course of the struggle to defend wages, pensions, public health and education, are discovering more general “transitional” demands at each successive demonstration. In other words, they are searching for answers and moving in the direction of more general anti-capitalist politics.

Along the same lines, news of large mobilizations in other EU countries like Romania (where 50,000 public workers demonstrated against new wage cuts), Portugal and France–with workers taking up slogans of solidarity with Greek workers in each case–has spread enthusiasm and joy.

The coming months will be of crucial importance for the movement and the left in this small country. The fight here can be a spark for the great struggles needed by the working class of all Europe.