By Dean Andromidas,
The Schiller Institute
March 8, 2013 EIR Economics 27
Sanofi, have stopped shipments of drugs to Greece because of nonpayment. The country’s social
insurance funds and hospitals owe pharmaceutical companies EU1.9 billion, going back to 2011. In turn,
the government owes Greek hospitals and the insurance fund EU3 billion. The shortages include medications
for arthritis, hepatitis C, and hypertension, cholesterol-lowering agents, anti-psychotics, antibiotics,
anesthetics, and immunomodulators used to treat bowel disease.
Dimitris Karageorgiou, secretary general of the Pan-Hellenic Pharmaceutical Association, said, “I
would say supplies are down by 90%. The companies are ensuring that they come in dribs and drabs to avoid
prosecution. Everyone is really frightened. Customers tell me they are afraid of losing access to medication
altogether.” He said many are also worried that insurance coverage will dry up.
“Around 300 drugs are in very short supply and they include innovative drugs, medications for cancer patients
and people suffering from clinical depression,” said Karageorgiou. “It’s a disgrace. The government is
panic-stricken and the multinationals only think about themselves and the issue of parallel trade, because
wholesalers can legally sell them to other European nations at a higher price.” “Lines will form in the early morning or late at night when you’re on duty,” said Karageorgiou, who is based in Thessaloniki. “And when the drugs aren’t available, which is often the case, people get very aggressive. I’m on duty tonight and know
there will be screaming and shouting, but in the circumstances, I also understand. We have reached a tragic point.” Under the orders of the Troika, the government has cut the pharmaceutical budget from EU3.7 billion in 2011 to EU2.44 billion in 2012, and now the Troika is expected to demand that it be cut to EU2 billion in 2013.
Leonidas Chrysanthopoulous, a retired Greek ambassador who held senior positions in the Foreign Ministry, sent a scathing open letter Feb. 14 to European Commission vice president Olli Rehn, denouncing the EU policy as “wrong and ineffective . . . from the time it was first adopted in 2010.” He charged that the policy had led directly to the “increase of unemployment from around 16% in 2009 to 28% today, increase of the debt, increase of poverty, creation of food lines, increased suicides, unburied dead, etc.; nothing was done by the EU, IMF and the European Central Bank to correct the situation.
Austerity can no longer work on a population that can no longer afford to pay taxes to a State that cannot
give anything in exchange. And we are speaking about a member-state of the EU, which is being destroyed in
order to be saved.”
Charging that the policy has violated the EU’s own Lisbon Treaty, which calls for protecting “human dignity,
freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights,”he concluded that the
“solution can only be one. That is to zero the Greek debt, which is about 3% of the EU’s GDP, and allow
Greece, through a program of reform, to achieve growth.”
A Social Explosion
With the economy set to collapse even further this year, warnings of an imminent“social explosion” are
being heard from very senior Greek policy circles. In reality, the explosion has already begun. Since the first
of this year, strikes and demonstrations have been taking place throughout Greece. One day it is a group of
doctors protesting the fact they haven’t been paid in
Courtesy of George D. Vardangalos
A general strike in Athens’Syntagma Square on Feb. 20. Analysts see larger social explosions on the horizon.
28 Economics EIR March 8, 2013
months and that cuts health are making it impossible for them to save people’s lives. On another it is teachers,
the disabled, pensioners, or students.
Earlier this month the two big trade union federations held a 24-hour nationwide general strike, bringing
100,000 demonstrators to a rally in front of the Greek Parliament. The farm unions staged a month-long protest
in February. After talks broke down between farmers and the government, because it has all but ignored
their demands, they called for a rally in Athens on March 5. On Feb. 25, the opposition party Independent
Greeks spokesman Panos Kammenos called on the Greek people to “send a message of resistance” against
the austerity policies of the government, which has been “faithfully following the dictates of a foreign
junta,” meaning the Troika. The question is when with these protests will turn
Zepp-LaRouche to Hellada
In her interview to Dr. Nicolas Laos of the national
daily Hellada published Feb. 25, Helga Zepp-
LaRouche pointed to the paradigm shift, especially
in the trans-Atlantic world,“away from production
based on scientific and technological progress,
toward monetarism and the idea that ‘money makes
money,’ after President Nixon’s abolition of the Bretton
Woods System, the creation of unregulated offshore
markets, and the adoption of floating exchange
rates.” Since then, “a completely unregulated derivative
market of virtual assets has mushroomed,” exceeding
the real economy by orders of magnitude.
As for Europe, she said: “The imposition of the
euro system as the ‘price to pay for German unification’
was never done with the intention of a creating
a prosperous European economy, but rather to have
Europe revert to a feudal, deindustrialized state under
a supranational dictatorship, as various admissions
by Giuliano Amato, Jacques Attali, or Claude Juncker
confirm. The present crisis in the Eurozone is not an
accident of a well-intended policy, but the result of an
intended ‘regime change,’ away from sovereign nation-
states, toward feudal dictatorship, in which the
EU became the junior partner of an Anglo-Americandominated
empire, which is just another way of
saying ‘globalisation.’ All European peoples have
become the victims of this policy. The Greek people
were obviously the hardest hit, but Germany is also
being destroyed.”
As for the economic policy to be implemented,
Zepp-LaRouche called for immediate Glass-Steagalltype
reform: complete separation of commercial
from investment banking, with toxic assets being
written off rather than paid by the taxpayers. That
must be followed, she said, with the creation of a
credit system, and the“buildup of the real economy
through well-defined great projects, such as
NAWAPA for Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, and the
“Development Program for Southern Europe, the
Mediterranean, and Africa,”elaborated by the Schiller
Institute.
Laos’s second question elicited comments on the
“asymmetric expansion of so-called financial capitalism
vis-ΰ-vis the real economy” and the need for
technological breakthroughs to revolutionize the
economy. Here, Zepp-LaRouche expanded on the intention
of both “Helicopter Ben”Bernanke of the
Federal Reserve and Mario Draghi of the European
Central Bank to go for a hyperinflationary policy, as
a means of paying off private speculative debts at the
expense of the population, a policy that must be
stopped immediately.
Zepp-LaRouche referred to the recent meteorite
explosion over Russia and the asteroid flyby, which
delivered a wake-up call to all, since impacts of large
asteroids or comets could wipe out the population of
Earth. “Human beings, however, are the only species
capable of creativity and of understanding the physical
principles of the universe at large. Therefore we
can meet these challenges in principle, if we change
our present policy course. Space exploration and
manned space travel are not an option; they are mandatory
in order to solve the problems we face. The
recent landing of the Mars rover Curiosity gives us
every reason for optimism, and to believe that we are
only at the beginning of the age of space colonization.”
March 8, 2013 EIR Economics 29
into a mass revolt that could lead to the collapse of the
government. In an interview to the New Statesman, the
above-mentioned Ambassador Chrysanthopoulos
warned, “At a certain moment, quite soon, there will be
an explosion of social unrest. It will be very unpleasant.”
Referring to recent fire-bombings and attacks on
offices of the ruling New Democracy party, he again
warned that when new, retroactive (unpayable) taxes
come due in the coming months,“there will be further
increases in armed actions. There will be bloody demonstrations.
These actions are condemnable, of course,
but I feel that this sort of armed activity will increase as
long as the government continues to impose oppressive
measures against the Greek people.”
Chrysanthopoulos revealed that the government has
hired private security companies, because “the Greek
government does not trust the police, whose salaries
have also been cut.”
Seeing the potential for a military coup, Chrysanthopoulos
said that the government has sought assurances
from the military that it would not intervene in
case of a social explosion.
Another senior Greek security specialist, Tassos Symenidis,
academic advisor to the Athens-based Research
Institute for European and American Studies,
also warned that the social unrest could lead to “spontaneous
combustion,” painting a scenario in which “mass
demonstrations overwhelm police truncheons and tear
gas and succeed in sacking government buildings,
threaten politicians, and even lay siege to Parliament.
Shots by retreating police kill demonstrators.” This
could lead to disintegration of the government, since it
would not be able to rely on the Armed Forces for help,
because they too have become victims of the austerity.
The resulting anarchy would be the direct consequence
of Greece having “reverted to a stage of underdevelopment,
deprivation, and pauperization through
the means of asymmetrical economic warfare conducted
by lenders. . . .”
The catastrophe facing Greece is the same that
awaits all of Europe, unless, as Zepp-LaRouche stated
in her interview, a Glass-Steagall reform is immediately
implemented and a new credit system created to
make the LaRouche “Program for an Economic Miracle
in Southern Europe, the Mediterranean Region, and
Afria” a reality.
There Is Life After the Euro!
Program for an Economic Miracle in
Southern Europe, the Mediterranean
Region, and Africa
AN EIR SPECIAL REPORT
CONTENTS
• Introduction by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
• Greece, and a Marshall Plan for the
Mediterranean Basin
• Spain: Bridge to African Development
• The Rebirth of Italy’s Mezzogiorno
• Africa Pass
• The Transaqua Project
• North Africa: The Blue Revolution
• What Europe Can Learn from Argentina
• A German Economic Miracle for Europe
http://www.larouchepub.com/special_report/2012/spec_rpt_program_medit.pdf
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