The following appeal for solidarity was today made in a letter to the Guardian. It can be signed here.
The people of Greece face an unprecedented economic and political crisis (Violence grips Athens, 13 February). They are being driven to poverty and mass unemployment by the demands of the so-called Troika. Hospitals in Greece are running out of medicines, nearly half of all young people are unemployed, workers in some sectors have not been paid for months, the living conditions of pensioners are being severely attacked, and many people are forced to resort to soup kitchens or scavenge from rubbish dumps. Continue reading
My next scheduled visit to Athens is only four months away, and I guess the city will still look pretty much the way it did last time I was there, its skyline dominated as ever by the Parthenon and the Acropolis. But in social and political terms, Greece is going to feel very different. Such are the stakes in the wave of social unrest currently gripping the country. 
The take-up by the eurozone banks of €489bn from the European Central Bank (ECB) ought to be good news as a sign that the ECB is now at last, having refused to do so in 2011, ensuring eurozone banks can fund themselves adequately next year. The ECB believes they will need €720bn of loans in the first quarter of 2012. 
I’m sure Milton Friedman would have appreciated the irony. The neoclassical economic prescriptions developed by him and others in the name of competition and freedom of choice is about to be awarded a continent-wide ideological monopoly, by force of state decree.
The outcome of the EU summit has widely been hailed in the British media as a triumph for David Cameron. It is rare that a complete rupture and isolation in multi-party negotiations is regarded as a triumph – but this is a function of the dominant and still growing xenophobia of the British press. 