So it has been a long while since my traumatic post of Spring 2014 on being incarcerated. That unfortunate experience has led to much interest in our totally fucked up incareral state, which I’ll blog about soon. But also I am currently very interested and worried about the neoliberal austerity measures that are destroying much of southern europe, including my own country of Greece. I’m writng about this and have recently been in correspondence with the social scientist Lefteris Kretsos. Hence this reblog.
Over the past four years, Greece has been “rescued” on countless occasions. Over the past four years, state legislators across the country and supranational institutions have launched an unprecedented series of reforms aimed at lowering labor standards, weakening trade unions, and eroding workplace and welfare protections. The country has become almost a byword for “structural adjustment” and drastic labour market reforms across Europe. Financial support from the Troika and especially the IMF has been conditional on reductions in public deficits and public spending, initiating drastic labour market reform and a welfare state retrenchment unprecedented in the post war period. Structural reforms and labour market restructuring policies have been undertaken in line with the loan agreements based on the Troika’s premise that labour market regulation and social protection in Greece constituted a significant barrier to growth and a main driver of public debt.
The rest of the summary is here…
View original post 6 more words
gonepublic: philosophy, politics, & public life 