Occupy Wall Street in Greece: From Protest to Rebellion

The 'Occupy Wall Street' in Greece movement is only part of a series of protests and general resentment towards the Greek government, on the part of its citizens. While countries like the USA, the UK and Greenland were hit hard in the banking and financial sectors by the 2008 economic crisis, Greece's problems were multiplied by their government's apparent mismanagement of funds and falsification of critical statistics to the organizations they borrowed money from.

The fallout from the combined internal financial crisis in Greece, and the European and American Recession, caused a massive number of job losses, people losing their homes and businesses, with all of this resulting in several violent protests. The resentment of the protesters is towards their own government, as foreign financial organizations, such as the IMF.

It is alleged that many of these large banks purposefully lend huge amounts of money to countries that have infrastructure and natural resources that can be acquired. When the country defaults on the loans, mainly because of the ridiculous amount of interest that is charged, the assets that are coveted by the financial institutions that lend the money, are bought foe a fraction of their real value.

This is one of the reasons that the 'Occupy Greece' protestors are so anti-IMF, and plan to blockade key buildings from IMF inspector access. The Greek government is trying to pay back the loans they made. The funding for this is coming from the sale of the country's assets, and the impact is being felt by the poor and the struggling middle class.

It is the opinion of the Occupy Greece' protestors, that much of this debt is 'fictitious', due to the lenders (many of them being US based) giving much more credit to the Greek government than the loans were actually worth. The actual money being payed back, is real - it is being repaid at the cost of people's mortgages, pensions, schooling and social welfare benefits.

With much of Greece's economy based on tourism, agriculture and mining, the world-wide economic crisis has increased the difficulty in getting the country back on track.

The 'Occupy Greece' movement is still very active, and there are plans for mass protests in May 2012.