Europe Watch

Greeks Take to the Street, Some Violently, in a Strike Over Austerity.

Published October 19th, 2012

On October 18th, the very recent and second largest strike in Athens happened, bringing the country to a near standstill. Demonstrations began peacefully, but as has been seen before, they quickly became violent. Protesters, Greek citizens, broke free of the crowd around Syntagma Square just outside Parliament, and threw firebombs, bottles and rocks. The police were called in and responded with tear gas, detaining 103 demonstrators.  The majority of the protesters were a mixture of both common, middle class, citizens and recent college graduates of Greece, fed up with the lack of jobs, unemployment, high taxes and the fact that Greece is still borrowing money from other countries.  This seems to put them more and more into debt instead of getting them out of it and putting more jobs on the market. they wanted the Government to fix these problems, give them more jobs and less dept.

These protests have been going on since the financial crisis happened, which was about five years ago, going on six. Before the economy crashed, Greece had been spending and borrowing more money than they were making. This has been going on for about a decade or more. Also, rigid labor laws keep prospective workers from getting jobs. However, the people who already have jobs don’t want to compete with other people for those jobs. For many workers in Greece, they need connections and to pay bribes to get a job, more than talent or qualifications, which further weakened the economy. This growing practice of bribing for jobs hit recent college graduates the hardest because they have very little connections and usually don’t have a lot of money to spare.  Many of these people have been the ones to protest on the streets of Greece these past few years.

To fix this:

1) Get twenty five different people to look at the blog

2) Teach something new to fifteen people about what is going on in Europe

3) Show how what is going on in Europe may be affecting other around the world