March 6, 2015
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear President Obama:
I am taking the liberty of sending you this full version of an email I sent the other day.
The Greek nation and people are at a critical point. The collapse of the Greek economy has created a humanitarian disaster in a poor country, a country that is of tremendous importance for Europe and for the United States. The bus drivers, teachers and cleaning women who are suffering the worst effects of the crisis did not create it; it was created by an oligarchy and by a political class that since World War II have ruled the country with very little concern for anything but their own profit and survival.
The United States, and the European Union too have their share of blame for this situation, for if successive Greek governments took out loans they could not by any stretch of the imagination ever pay in the name of the Greek people, the bankers that profited by these loans and transgressed ethical and possibly even legal boundaries by creating debt swaps and other financial feats of legerdemain and who have helped to conceal vast sums from Greek tax collectors must certainly have much to answer for.
The newly-elected Greek government has no ties with the old political class. It is in agreement with the European Union on the need to end the cycle of political clientelism, collect taxes that have previously been evaded and return their country to solvency. Yet the E. U. has given this government only four months to begin to cure a disease that has been in the making for over seventy years. Without flexibility and without the ability to return to economic growth the humanitarian disaster will only deepen and Greece’s pauperism will only increase. The European Union, and the “troika” of lenders have essentially turned the beautiful and brave country of Greece into one enormous debtors’ prison with no chance of release.
There are two other elements that should be very disturbing to anyone who sees European unity and cooperation as vitally important. That is the rise of a strong neo-Nazi movement in Greece that will only continue thrive on the despair of the Greek people. Coupled with this is a growing rage against Germany and the Germans, who are seen as holding the key to the Greek debtors’ prison.
I am offering no judgment on the issue of reparations due Greece for the Nazi invasion. But it is an issue for the Greeks, where every village it seems has a wall with the bullet marks of Nazi firing squads or a graveyard where men and women and even children were massacred for daring to resist. Yet I have to say that highly placed members of the German establishment have taken an almost sadistic glee in the distress of the Greeks and their inability to obtain debt relief.
This rankles me as an American. My Greek immigrant grandparents and my parents, both of whom were born in this country, were willing to tax themselves in order to rebuild Germany after the war. I do not know if their hearts were touched by images of Germans in bombed-out cities demonstrating for bread and coal to see them through the winter or whether they feared what a bankrupt and enraged populace would do to the chances for world peace, but they brought the aid to Germany that helped it rebuild and make itself the power that it is today.
You have offered leadership to this country by resisting the neo-liberal myth that only austerity could pull us out of our own terrible recession, and by doing what you could to stimulate an economy that desperately needed it. Events have shown you were right. I urge you to do whatever is in your power to ease austerity noose that continues to strangle Greece.
Sincerely,
[signed]
Zeese Papanikolas