Greek Crisis: 120,000 Euros for a Champagne Bottle in Mykonos

[Starry Messenger]

http://greece.greekreporter.com/2012/08/04/greek-crisis-120000-euros-for-a-champagne-bottle-in-mykonos/

It seems that the rich crowds visiting the “island of the winds,” as the locals often call Mykonos, are willing to pay 120,000 euros for a bottle of champagne in the famous beach-bar and restaurant Nammos, located in Psarou, one of the most popular beaches of the beautiful Aegean Island.

With 120,000 euros that the Armand De Brignac Methouselah Midas bottle costs somebody could easily buy an apartment in many areas of Greece and the world. In other countries the most expensive price for the same bottle was found in Miami where it was sold for 120,000 US dollars.

Since the beginning of the summer season nobody has dared to consume the most expensive champagne bottle in Greece; however, it is rumored that this past week a rich Arab ordered the bottle which had been kept in a locker at the Nammos bar.

The incredible price of 120,000 euros for a champagne bottle is a great example of the financial and social differences in Greece, the crisis-hit country where many people live with a minimum wage which was recently lowered to under 586 euros per month.

Meanwhile...

The cruelty of strangers

The distribution this week by Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party of free food on Syntagma Square was a turning point in society’s moral and spiritual decline. The offer was limited to card-carrying Greek citizens and only after they had submitted important personal information including their blood type.

Even by the contemporary standards of this crisis-hit country, a Greek person can only feel shame in seeing volunteers from a neo-fascist party, all of them dressed in black t-shirts, distribute packs of pasta and other foodstuff after inspecting, as it were, the blood of the needy.

One can only feel shame because this brutally racist event was organized right in front of a symbol of democracy, the House of Parliament.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/world/europe/as-golden-dawn-rises-in-greece-anti-immigrant-violence-follows.html?pagewanted=all

Greek Far Right Hangs a Target on Immigrants

<snip>

Since the election, an abundance of anecdotal evidence has indicated a marked rise in violence and intimidation against immigrants by members of Golden Dawn and its sympathizers. They are emboldened, rights groups say, by political support for their anti-immigrant ideology amid the worst economic crisis to hit Greece in a decade.

<snip>

At a high school blocks from where the episode occurred, students and teachers said Golden Dawn had reached into schools. Recently, several male students sympathetic to the group left their classrooms and beat a passing dark-skinned mail carrier, said Elena Siozou, 16, a student. “Planting violence in young people is the worst thing someone can do,” she said.

Back in Nikaia, Mr. Irfan, the hair salon owner, said immigrants were thinking of ways to protect themselves and their families. “I love this country,” he said. “But I don’t want someone to kill me.”

He is thinking of leaving if the situation worsens. “But even if every immigrant were kicked out, would that solve Greece’s economic problems, create jobs or bring higher salaries or pensions for Greeks?” he said. “It’s the crisis that’s destroying jobs, but we are getting the blame.”

[socialist_n_TN]

1. The Greek left better get their shit together and start..........

organizing some armed militias. This is how the fascists ALWAYS start. With the MOST disenfranchised. Then they move on to their other enemies.

[Starry Messenger]

2. Especially since the cops are in it up to their eyeballs.

I read one news story that said there have been some anti-fascist neighborhood groups starting up. I'm trying to find anything concrete about them. Evidently the government is just completely out to lunch on this--in fact 41 members of parliament voted to confirm a Golden Dawn position as deputy speaker. Mind-blowing.

[socialist_n_TN]

4. Yeah, they're going to have to do it themselves........

The cops will be NO help whatsoever. As you've noted several times, they're supporters of the fascists for the most part.

I'll also echo wolf's proposal about Syriza. If they want to be serious about being a player, this is where they need to start. And KKE needs to get back to their Bolsheviki roots and start organizing some of these defense committees.

They better get it going because they're next.

[srjmsbnd]

18. Thanks for the Fear Mongering and Spreading Lies

"The cops will be NO help whatsoever. As you've noted several times, they're supporters of the fascists for the most part." and how would you two idiots know that?

Are you in the CIA NSA or simply in the Secret Squirrel Fan Club as Girl Scouts?

[srjmsbnd]

19. Thanks for the Fear Mongering and Spreading Lies

"The cops will be NO help whatsoever. As you've noted several times, they're supporters of the fascists for the most part." and how would you two idiots know that?

Are you in the CIA NSA or simply in the Secret Squirrel Fan Club as Girl Scouts?

[Starry Messenger]

21. Oh, and just for the record:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/26/golden-dawn-greece-far-right

Legitimised by democracy and by the media, Golden Dawn is opening branches in towns all over Greece and regularly coming third in national opinion polls. Its black-shirted vigilantes have been beating up immigrants for more than three years, unmolested by the police; lately they've taken to attacking Greeks they suspect of being gay or on the left. MPs participate proudly in the violence. In September, three of them led gangs of black-shirted heavies through street fairs in the towns of Rafina and Messolonghi, smashing up immigrant traders' stalls with Greek flags on thick poles.

Such attacks are almost never prosecuted or punished. Ask Kayu Ligopora, of the Athens Tanzanian Community Association, whose premises were vandalised by around 80 "local residents" on 25 September after police walked away. He's lived in Greece for 20 years; for the first time, he says, he's thinking about leaving. Or Hussain Ahulam, 22, who told me how four men with dogs and a metal crowbar left him bleeding and unconscious by the side of the road as he walked home one day. Or 21-year-old HH, a Greek citizen of Egyptian origin, who was beaten on 12 October by three men with chains as he stepped off the trolley bus, and whose sight may be damaged for good.

It's hard to measure just how deeply Golden Dawn has penetrated the police. In Athens wards where the police vote in large numbers, the party polled 19-24% last summer; Panagiotaros crows that 50-60% of the force is now with the movement. What's obvious is that rightwing violence almost always goes unchecked, even when it happens under officers' noses or on camera. Early in October, anti-fascist protesters told me they had been tortured in the Athens police headquarters: burned with a cigarette lighter; forced to strip naked, bend over and spread their buttocks; filmed by officers who said they'd give the pictures to Golden Dawn. As I tried to interview some of them in a public lobby of the Athens courthouse, an officer grabbed me by the arm and pulled me roughly away. A police spokesperson denied the protesters' allegations

Signed, Head Secret Squirrel

[Democracyinkind]

26. Well, Clem, you might wanna learn to use the google!

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/oct2012/dawn-o09.shtml

Enjoy your stay, you nitwit.

[tama]

22. Sons of Anarchy

Antifascist motorcycle patrols, after a clash with nazis several arrested and tortured by police.

http://anarchistnews.org/content/meet-real-sons-anarchy-%E2%80%94-greek-anti-fascist-motorcycle-club-confronts-neo-nazis
http://libcom.org/blog/anti-fascist-patrols-01102012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/09/greek-antifascist-protesters-torture-police
http://www.prisonplanet.com/greek-anti-fascist-protesters-tortured-by-police-after-golden-dawn-clash.html

[Starry Messenger]

20. And now you won't have to, I've blocked you.

Last edited Sat Nov 10, 2012, 09:40 PM - Edit history (1)

I don't want to know people like you right now, and I rather die than have to listen to you as you are #$%^&*()__)(*&^%$# amazing.

We'll just have to limp along without your stellar personal qualities.

Cheers MIRT, thank you!

[HiPointDem]

23. lol.

[white_wolf]

3. Come on, Syriza this is your chance to do something.

Either prove yourselves worthy of the people's trust and the name Radical Left or get out of the way and let someone else take your place.

[socialist_n_TN]

5. I saw a brief mention in an article on L5I British section site........

where some of REVO were going to Greece to try and help out.

[Starry Messenger]

6. I have a feeling it's not going to be Syriza.

When I read the accounts of the rise of fascism before WW2, I'm always amazed at how everyone sort of stared like deer in the headlights and wondered how such a thing could happen. I'm not really wondering anymore.

The only thing comforting me at the moment is that the Greek Fascists don't have access to things like tanks.

[socialist_n_TN]

7. They don't have access to tanks........

yet, you mean.

[Starry Messenger]

8. Yep.

Having access to the police force is already a head start. Found this the other day--a picture of bobbies helping Mosley's blackshirts by breaking down barricades to stop them in 1936.

[HiPointDem]

9. i wondered the same thing, as a kid. we were almost encouraged to wonder, as we were told

about how freedom-loving americans were and how they stood up to fascism, etc etc etc. we were told about german authoritarian anti-semetic culture etc etc etc.

it's increasingly apparent that most americans wouldn't stand up either.

[Starry Messenger]

10. Several in the US were openly fascist.

They don't teach that in school anymore, if they ever did. Charles Lindburgh, Henry Ford, the Silver Shirts, Klan was huge in the 1930's. Hearst was personal buddies with Hitler. The more I look at it, we're lucky we mustered enough people to actually stand up.

I just watched a documentary called "Verita$" about Harvard, that actually traced the connection of Nazi race "science" back to eugenics "studies" that came out of Harvard. Fascism and its origins has been a lot on my mind recently.

[white_wolf]

11. Speaking of Eugenics...

I've heard that in the late 1800s early 1900s it had some influence among the left too, because socialism was more of a purely economic doctrine that was more easily adapted by people of any political persuasion. Not sure how accurate that is, it's just something I've heard mentioned before.

[Starry Messenger]

12. I'd honestly never heard that.

If it was, it was a perversion of Marx and Engels. They weren't all the way on all forms of social justice we recognize today, but they generally wrote that the conditions of Blacks, women and other marginalized groups had to be considered as a class component too.

In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 7, pg.329 Karl Marx

[BOG PERSON]

15. i think i've heard something similar

about the second international socialdemocrats. george bernard shaw and those types.

[BOG PERSON]

16. marx was also a true believer in phrenology

but whatever. its not like that was his life's calling. marx repped really hard for "darwinism" too which is all about Order Without Design (the complete opposite of eugenics) and that's how marx thought history / economy operated too.

[HiPointDem]

24. Mentions of phrenology in marx's writings & letters are sparse & none, so far as

I can tell, support the contention that he was a "true believer".

For example, in a letter to Ludwig Kugleman:

"One of my friends here who dabbles in phrenology said yesterday when looking at a portrait of your wife, 'A great deal of wit.' So you see, phrenology is not the baseless art Hegel imagined."

The remark has no further context. It's just a throwaway humorous aside in the letter, a postscript, not indicative of a 'true believer.'

I think there are about three other mentions of phrenology in marx's writings and letters (according to another source), though a search of the marx-engels archives gives only two in total.

http://www.google.com/search?as_sitesearch=www.marxists.org%2Farchive%2Fmarx%2F&hl=en&ie=8859-1&oe=8859-1&as_occt=any&num=30&btnG=Google+Search!&as_epq=phrenology&as_occt=all&as_q=&as_oq=&as_eq=

Either way, no indication he either believes in phrenology or is obsessed by it, both indications of 'true belief'.

Passing interest might be more to the point.

I'd guess this is yet another fake story spread to discredit marx.

[BOG PERSON]

25. true believer might be an exaggeration

but in wilhelm liebknecht's biography of marx (http://books.google.com/books?id=kEYv3uqzDvsC&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=family%20of%20marx&f=false) he writes

I found the family of Marx at a summer picnic of the Communist Laborers’ Educational Club, somewhere near London, I don’t remember whether in Green­wich or in Hampton Court. ‘ Pere Marx,’ whom I saw for the first time, began at once to subject me to a rigid examination, looked straight into my eyes and Inspected my head rather minutely–an operation to which I was accustomed through my friend Gustav Struve, who, obstinately doubting my “moral hold,” had made me the specially favored victim of his phrenological studies. However, I safely passed the examination, sustaining the look of that lion-head, with the coal-black lion’s mane. . . . Marx endeavored to make sure of his men and to secure them for himself. He was not such a zealous devotee of phrenology as Gustav Struve, but he believed in it to some extent, and when I first met him–I have already mentioned it–he not only examined me with questions, but also with his fingers, making them dance over my skull in a connoisseur’s style. Later on he arranged for a regular investigation by the phrenologist of the party, the good old painter, Karl Pfaender, one of the “oldest,” who helped to found the Communist Alliance, and was present in that memorable council to whom the Communist Manifesto was submitted, and by whom it was discussed and accepted in due form. . . . Well, my skull was officially inspected by Karl Pfaender and nothing was found that would have prevented my admission into the Holiest of Holies of the Communist Alliance.

[Democracyinkind]

27. Episodic anecdote.

I have read 4 biographies of Marx (+2 of Engels) and there is no evidence that Marx was a consistent believer in Phrenology. I'm not sure about the timing of your quote, but if Liebknecht is the one telling the story, mentioning seeing Mohr for the first time, then this takes place somewhere in the 50's latest, I guess.

I've yet to find any outright endorsment of Phrenology in Marx' writings.

[Democracyinkind]

28. Pleae quote Marx on (you must mean "social") Darwinism...

Many people have interpreted Marx as saying that classes, not individuals, behave according to the rules of vulgar Darwinism. I'm not sure that this is a fair deduction - granted, it is not hard to construct a vulgar Darwinist viewpoint from any binary description of humanity (good and evil, rich and poor, etc.) but I think this is misunderstanding Marx and conflating his thinking with some popular themes of his times.

Also, there is absolutely no evidence that Marx was a "true believer" in Phrenology. He dabbled in pseudo-science just as much as any other scientist of the 20th century did. Just episodic anecdotal tales - going from that, I could just as well proclaim Marx to be a "true believer" in Christianity....

[BOG PERSON]

30. no thanks

thanksgiving is depressing enough as it is w/out me having to defend a three month old post. there ought to be a statute of limitations on these thigns.

[Democracyinkind]

31. OK

I'll just consider this another one of your unproven claims. No problem.

I think you're just confused about Darwinism and social or "vulgar" Darwinism.

edited the snark out. No offense taken, I hope, if read before the edit.

[AndyTiedye]

13. And Prescott Bush was Hitler's Banker

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president
George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

[Starry Messenger]

14. Great article, AndyTiedye

Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m - a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler's rise to power.

The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.

Thyssen's partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.

Flick's plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while "American interests" held the rest.

[Shuhered]

29. Golden Dawn = Santorum & Pat Buchanon

The food for the (Greek) Needy is such a disgusting display. Don't bother helping people if you are going to pick and choose who you deem qualified to receive compassion.