I don’t pay, you don’t pay, he doesn’t pay.
I don’t pay, you don’t pay, he doesn’t pay. Groups of people just looking for a free ride or a movement of civil disobedience?
There must be some kind of mathematical formula representing the way in which a violent or non-conformist event is perceived as justifiable if not commendable according to distance in space and time. In that context riots in Parisian suburbs are considered a sample of social discontent whereas riots in Greece are presented as hooliganism or at least political quackery.
This formula could help us understand how government and mainstream media addressed the “I don’t pay” movement spreading across the country. The same people (especially those with socialist roots) if asked to comment on the equivalent movement that gave the final blow to Margaret Thatcher’s government, would speak of “society teaching a lesson to the excesses of Thatcher’s neoliberalism”.
In Greece, of course, the movement is treated by the rulers as provincial and “Third World” vagrancy. The same governmental and state apparatus withholding the VAT refunds (among other things) for a year, dares to shake its finger and demand imprisonment and public shaming of any kind of economic offenders.
This of course raises the question of the proportionality of the penalties imposed. If not paying a few euros on public transportation is treated as a misdemeanor (which theoretically means the power to detain the offender from three to 30 days), non-payment of a VAT refund amounting to several thousand euros should lead at least to death penalty, if not torture for life. The penalty should increase when the politicians in charge make sure to pay back to the last penny their debts to foreign banks and any other major creditors.
Therefore, we accept the challenge. Let those that owe the most get around in tar and feathers. We guess that you gentlemen Ministers don’t have a problem with that.
A.C.
This formula could help us understand how government and mainstream media addressed the “I don’t pay” movement spreading across the country. The same people (especially those with socialist roots) if asked to comment on the equivalent movement that gave the final blow to Margaret Thatcher’s government, would speak of “society teaching a lesson to the excesses of Thatcher’s neoliberalism”.
In Greece, of course, the movement is treated by the rulers as provincial and “Third World” vagrancy. The same governmental and state apparatus withholding the VAT refunds (among other things) for a year, dares to shake its finger and demand imprisonment and public shaming of any kind of economic offenders.
This of course raises the question of the proportionality of the penalties imposed. If not paying a few euros on public transportation is treated as a misdemeanor (which theoretically means the power to detain the offender from three to 30 days), non-payment of a VAT refund amounting to several thousand euros should lead at least to death penalty, if not torture for life. The penalty should increase when the politicians in charge make sure to pay back to the last penny their debts to foreign banks and any other major creditors.
Therefore, we accept the challenge. Let those that owe the most get around in tar and feathers. We guess that you gentlemen Ministers don’t have a problem with that.
A.C.