FireDogLake - Senior Greek Official: “We may have an uprising in the making”

Post by Jeff Kaye at FireDogLake - Senior Greek Official: “We may have an uprising in the making”

By Jeff Kaye

What if three million protesters poured into the streets of American cities, and with a general strike shut down all transportation, closing government offices, and setting banks and office buildings ablaze?

If one takes into account the size of Greece, a proportionate amount of the Greek population did just that on May 5. Over 100,000 protesters took took to the streets. But this was not your ordinary European mass rally. World markets, including Wall Street, felt the tremor from these demonstrations. The protests are against onerous economic cutbacks in the wake of a € 110 billion Euro ($145 billion) bailout for a near-bankrupt economy. But a large percentage of the Greek population doesn’t see itself paying for a generation for the corruption of their own officials, and the economic shock therapy dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and German bankers.

From the UK Guardian:

"All of us are angry, very, very angry," bellowed Stella Stamou, a civil servant standing on a street corner, screaming herself hoarse, a block away from where the bank had been set alight.

"You write that – angry, angry, angry, angry," she said, after participating in one of the biggest ever rallies to rock the capital since the return of democracy in 1974. "Angry with our own politicians, angry with the IMF, angry with the EU, angry that we have lost income, angry that we have never been told the truth."

Continued . . .