Market Watch
October 26, 2011
Things are calmer this week in Syntagma Square after days of violent clashes between hooded protesters and police.
But the remnants of violence are everywhere. The posh hotels on one side of the square have covered over missing steps where protesters removed slabs of marble, smashing them to the pavement to make jagged rocks to hurl at police. Piles of rotting garbage, uncollected for days, are being picked up by municipal workers, who have for now ended their strike.
Greece is a society in turmoil. As with Occupy Wall Street, its protests are widespread with disparate objectives. Some merely seek to preserve the status quo. Judges, opposed to changes in the legal system, have been walking off the job for three hours each afternoon. Lawyers, left in empty courtrooms, are staging multiple one-day work stoppages to protest moves to open up their closed profession. Meanwhile, teachers, tax collectors, air traffic controllers, and doctors have all been protesting against the austerity measures insisted upon by Greece’s foreign creditors.
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