How the world sees Greece
 Kathimerini | Greece takes up fiscal multipliers case, eyes concessions from troika Kathimerini European finance ministers agreed on Tuesday to examine Greece's case regarding a possible adjustment to its fiscal consolidation program after the International Monetary Fund admitted that it had underestimated the impact that austerity would have on ... |
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 Greek Reporter | Greek prosecutors bring corruption charges over state hospital deals with DePuy Fox News ATHENS, Greece – Greek prosecutors have brought criminal corruption charges related to state hospital purchases from DePuy, a subsidiary of U.S. healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson. Court officials said Tuesday that five DePuy officials have been ... US Execs Face Greek Bribery Probe |
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Greek prosecutors bring charges over DePuy deals U.S. News & World Report ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greek prosecutors have brought criminal corruption charges related to state hospital purchases from DePuy, a subsidiary of U.S. healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson. Court officials said Tuesday that five DePuy officials have been ... |
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 Middle East Online | Egypt in footsteps of bankrupt Greece: Moody's downgrades Cairo bond ratings Middle East Online ... Published: 2013-02-12. Egypt in footsteps of bankrupt Greece: Moody's downgrades Cairo bond ratings. Credit-ratings agency Moody's downgrades Egypt's government bond ratings, citing civil unrest, sliding foreign exchange reserves. Middle East ... |
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TICKET TO DINING: Zesty's — a 'hot' Greek restaurant in Manayunk Montgomery Newspapers That was Onassis, in 1975, seven years after he arrived in America from Greece and six years after he opened his first restaurant (non-Greek) in the site where Liberty Place now stands. Located in the 1700 block of Sansom Street between Neil Stein's ... |
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 Spiegel Online | Chief Greek Statistician Threatened with Jail Spiegel Online When Georgiou decided in the summer of 2010 to take over leadership of the revamped, newly independent Greek statistics service ELSTAT, he never imagined that the position could land him a jail sentence. But at the end of January, felony charges were ... |
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Samaras seeks foreign investment for Greece Southeast European Times It won't be easy to convince investors skeptical of Greece's economic crisis, political infighting, corruption that is ranked the worst in the EU, and with the country ranked last among 38 countries in the 2013 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index. Samaras' Next Targets: Strikers, Workers |
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TEXT-Fitch Q4 Greek mortgage market index: RMBS outperforms market Reuters Feb 12 - Link to Fitch Ratings' Report: Mortgage Market Index - Greece Q4 2012Feb 12 - The Greek mortgage pools that back the RMBS transactions rated by Fitch Ratings show stronger performance than the overall Greek market, according to Fitch's latest ... |
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 Tampabay.com | [WILL VRAGOVIC | Times] Tampabay.com Yana Kappis was born to wait tables at a warm, homey Greek restaurant. She comes from a Greek restaurant family, her folks owning and working in restaurants here and in Tennessee. She knows this food cold —the difference between haloumi and graviera ... |
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 Monthly Review | Golden Dawn: The Development of Greek Fascism Monthly Review As was the case in 1930s Germany, Greek liberalism has revealed itself to be politically spent. In dealing with the austerity measures imposed upon the country from outside by an international troika consisting of the IMF, European Commission, and ... |
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PPC renewables seeks bids for Greece's largest solar projects Kathimerini Public Power Corp., Greece's biggest power company, started its second tender in a month seeking developers to build large-scale solar parks. The company's renewables unit will accept bids for two 15- megawatt photovoltaic projects in Kozani, Macedonia ... |
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 The International | Soap Opera Diplomacy: Turkish TV in Greece The International “There are only a handful of new domestically-produced serials in Greece, since a single episode of a Greek production costs around €70,000–80,000, whereas each part of a Turkish serial costs merely €7000–8000,” says Tunç, speaking to The International. |
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 Kathimerini | Stournaras seeks clarification from IMF on fiscal multipliers and Greek program Kathimerini Greek Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras has indicated he will ask for clarifications from the International Monetary Fund on what impact errors in its calculations have had on the country's fiscal adjustment program. "I will ask the IMF to inform us ... |
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UNL Greek system leaders soaks up knowledge at Midwest conference Daily Nebraskan Leaders of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Greek system returned this week from the annual Association for Fraternal Leadership & Values conference in Indianapolis. The conference brought about 2,800 Greek representatives from all over the Midwest ... |
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The French Communist party has dropped the symbol of workers and peasants that has become tainted by association
The news that the French Communist party has abandoned the hammer and sickle as its insignia in favour of a five-pointed star is about more than historical embarrassment. For the PCF, traditionally one of the most cravenly Stalinist of communist parties, scrubbing the sign from the membership card is obviously going to have a traumatic emotional impact. "Everyone in the party is shocked," according to the PCF's Paris secretary. What sort of a symbol is it that they are abandoning, and does it matter?
The hammer and sickle is the symbol of communism, but didn't exist in Marx's time. It was gradually adopted after the Russian revolution, first on demonstrations and by the Red Army, and was adopted as the official symbol of the Soviet Union in 1922. Its symbolism is extremely simple – a hammer, to represent the industrial workers; a sickle, to represent the peasantry.
The alleged ruling classes in the "workers and peasants republic" could see the main tool of their labour as the insignia of their country and their movement. It may have represented a lie, but a lie to which the symbol served as a constant reproach. And as a symbol it was clearly a smart choice – memorable and easily scrawled on walls, as any visitor to Naples or Athens can still attest. It also serves as a useful reproach to the idea that communism and nazism were fundamentally identical. The swastika, the Nazis' own version, dates from the same time, and was used first in 1919 by the Freikorps, the far-right mercenaries that the German Social Democrats used to suppress their communist opponents. The swastika literally represents very little. Hinduism maybe, to esoterics like Himmler; an image of sexual sublimation for Wilhelm Reich, who saw intertwined legs as its hidden meaning. But about nazism and its political programme, the swastika said nothing. But the hammer and sickle said, unambiguously, that workers and peasants should rule.
It was also perhaps the first truly international political symbol since the tricolour and its permutations, or maybe more pertinently, since the Christian cross. Communist parties from Maerdy to Moldova to Kerala all use the hammer and sickle, as if to declare their adherence to a creed that aimed to abolish nations altogether. Some measure of its success can be garnered by the way that organisations to the right of it used similar symbols – until the 1980s, Labour used an oddly familiar symbol that featured a crossed quill and spade, with "LIBERTY" behind it to quash any doubts. So why would anyone want to abandon such a powerful and self-explanatory symbol?
Why indeed. For many, and entirely unsurprisingly, the hammer and sickle represents one thing – the one-party states that ruled several countries from 1917 to 1991, and that still rule a few – including, of course, the second-largest economy in the world. So, the PCF's reformers might well think, why should communists in the 21st century want to march under the banner used by the regime that starved and shot millions in the 1930s USSR, who declared Year Zero in Phnom Penh, or who declare that "to get rich is glorious" in contemporary Beijing? That's if communists today are even allowed to use the symbol – it is sometimes banned outright. This applies even in countries where communism still has an electoral appeal – the Czech Communist party, which came second in last year's regional elections, is forced to use a bunch of red cherries, as limp an image as Labour's red rose.
The defenders of the hammer and sickle, however, have a case. The POUM, the unorthodox communists who were ruthlessly crushed by the NKVD in the Spanish civil war, fought Stalinism under the hammer and sickle. The youth who spray the symbol today in Italy or Greece are not doing so to evoke the show trials, but to evoke class conflict and egalitarianism, and to do so as simply and quickly as possible. But what does the actual hammer and the actual sickle symbolise today? Unlike the cross, the hammer and sickle is limited in its technological application. Not much work in factories is done with hammers; and since the green revolution, sickles aren't much in evidence in agricultural production either. A smart leftist party somewhere ought to start a competition for the new equivalent – and when they do so, they will find themselves up against the problem of visualising the new workforce of neoliberal capitalism. The phone and mouthpiece of the call centre worker over the protective mask of the Chinese factory labourer? The high-vis jacket and the JSA card? Define it, and the scrawlable symbol may follow.
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Research and Markets: Greece Hospital Supplies Investment Opportunities ... Fort Mills Times Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/9srhpj/greece_hospital) has announced the addition of Global Markets Direct's new report "Greece Hospital Supplies Investment Opportunities, Analysis and Forecasts to 2018" to their ... |
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Greece sells 1.3 bln eur 3-month T-Bills, yield eases Reuters ATHENS Feb 12 (Reuters) - Greece sold 1.3 billion euros ($1.74 billion) of three-month T-bills on Tuesday to roll over a previous issue that comes due on Feb. 15, its debt agency (PDMA) said. The T-bills were priced to yield 4.05 percent, two basis ... |
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Former Greek Life director Paolo charged with embezzlement at Rhode Island ... Tufts Daily Paolo assumed her position as the head of Greek life on the Hill in the summer of 2010, and Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman confirmed her abrupt departure a few months later in Feb. 2011. Paolo's exit from Tufts had no connection with the charges ... |
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Greek life encourages members with GPA expectations Iowa State Daily Greek life is a curious concept to those who are not themselves greek. The student body's perception of the greek lifestyle varies drastically. However, the greek community at Iowa State has shown that being in a fraternity or sorority can be ... |
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 Press TV | Farmers block highways across Greece Press TV The angry farmers blocked highways mostly in central and northern Greece consisting of the country's main road artery on Monday at 2:00 p.m. local time (1200 GMT) for an hour, directly increasing journey lengths on the first day of the week. The ... Greece: Deep cuts keep budget on target, spur protests; farmers block highways Greece cuts investments to hit Jan budget target Tax revenues down but Greece produced January budget surplus |
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