English

OPEN LETTER TO ANGELA MERKEL

Dear chancellor Merkel,

We start by saying we address you only as chancellor of Germany. We did not vote for you and do not acknowledge the existence of a chancellor of Europe. We, the subscribers of this open letter, write to you as free citizens. Citizens of a country you wish to visit on the next 12th of November, as well as citizens in solidarity with all the countries attacked by austerity. Due to the character of the announced visit, those who have to struggle daily with the dire economic and social situation in Portugal, must stress that you are not welcome. You should be considered persona non grata in Portuguese territory because you clearly come to interfere with the Portuguese State’s decisions without being democratically mandated by those who live here. 

Even so, because our government has of late ceased to obide with the laws of this country and its Republican constitution, we address this letter directly to you. The presence of many great businessman in your entourage is an outrage. Under the guise of “foreign investment”, you will bring a group of people that will come to plunder the ruins in which your policies have left the Portuguese economy, as well as those of Greece, Ireland, Italy and Spain. Your delegation is composed not only by those who have coerced the Portuguese state, with the connivance of its government, to privatize it’s property and most valuable assets, but also by the potential beneficiaries of those properties and assets, bought today at fire-sale prices. 

This letter cannot and should not be seen as any sort of nationalist of chauvinist vindication – it’s a direct address to you as the chief promoter of the Neoliberal doctrine which is ruining Europe. We do not address the German people who have all the democratic legitimacy to elect whomever they want for their representative offices. However, in this country where we live, your name was never on any ballot. We did not elect you. As such, we do not recognize you the right to represent us and even less the right to make political decisions on our behalf. 

And we are not alone. On the 14th of November, two days after your announced visit, we will rise with several others in a general strike which will include many European countries. It will be a strike against the governments which have betrayed and still betray the trust the citizens deposited on them, a strike against the austerity applied by them. But do not delude yourself, chancellor. It will be a strike against the austerity imposed by the troika and against all those which intend to transform it into an authoritarian regime. It will be a strike against you, Mme. Merkel. And if we salute the people of Greece, Spain, Italy Cyprus and Malta, we also salute the German people who suffer with us. We know very well that the Wirtschaftswunder, Germany’s “economical miracle”, was built on the basis of successive debt pardons by its main creditors. We know that the supposed current German economic thrust is built on a brutal crackdown on wages for over 10 years and the massive promotion of precarious labour, temporary and low-wage work that afflicts a great part of the German people. That also shows the perspective you, chancellor Merkel, have for your own country. 

It’s very likely that you won’t reply. And it’s probable that the Portuguese government, subservient, weak and feeble, will receive you with flowers and applause. But the truth, chancellor, is that the majority of the Portuguese population blatantly disapproves of this government and the way in which it is destroying the country, supported by the troika and yourself. Even if you choose a secret route and a private airport to get away from the demonstrations against your visit, you have to know that they will occur all around the country. And they will be protests against you and what you represent. Your entourage may try and ignore us. The European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank may try to ignore the streets. But we are more and more, Mme. Merkel. Here and in all countries. Our protests will be stronger and stronger. We become more aware of reality every day. The stories you have all told us were always awkward and now we know they were full-out lies. 

We have awaken, Mme. Merkel. You are an unwelcome guest.




Subscribers

8 comentários:

  1. Dear Mrs Merkel,

    It's all your fault, so stay away. German Money is welcome, though.

    Sincereley,

    The "awakened" lunatic fringe.

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  2. to reply to the comment above, Portugal has plenty of debt. the solution to debt is not to take out more loans from Germany (via the Troika).

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  3. Dear MB,

    We don't want Mrs. Merkel to come here, we don't want the "german money". We believe in an integrated european project. In one word: solidarity.

    We believe that the portuguese people doesn't owe to the state and therefore to its creditors what they say we owe.
    We believe that the debt has specific owners and they should be called to court and pay for what they did to our country. Mismanagement, speculation and embezzelment are punished by law.
    We don't owe the financial hole Oliveira e Costa left at BPN and we certainly do not owe what Cavaco Silva (our President) gained from Oliveira e Costa's frauds.

    We reject the argument that Mrs. Merkel is doing us a favour. Please spare it. She is doing herself a favour. She needs us more than we need her. People just have to realize that there are no "inevitabilities". That we live in a free, democratic country, not a dictactorial colonate from Germany.

    Last but not least I'd like to express my deepest feelings for your thoughts and your behaviour. We have hope one day you'll wake as well. Just hope it's not too late. Just hope you'll never starve as so many of us do right now, even not being unemployed. Just hope you never lose you house, like so many of us are going to - for that will mean that we, the awakened lunatics (that by the way are not a fringe of the society) prevented the worst and we stopped Mrs. Merkel.

    Sincerely yours,

    An "awakened lunatic".

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  4. Well, and when will you take your Barroso back home? We didn't vote for him (actually, nobody did...) and still he comes every little while and says, what we should and shouldn't do in our own country.

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  5. Colander

    The more he comprehends, the more he suffers
    The more he knows, the more disrupted he is.
    But his lucidity is at ease with his sorrow, and his tenacity with his despair.

    The yearnig does not sow nor reap; it is his only successor and kinsman. It does but present as the absolute creditor.

    You young ones, now here, only you understand to say the truth, to draw their first type: the unworried smile.

    One does not circuit, one passes by. One must pass by, one touches the end. The extension of future, whereby the heart has enclosed, has itself folded.

    A murmur of love, a murmur of hatred. He has not yield, but penetrated into the abberation and the invisibility of an abrasively poverty, a martialic secret, for hearing nothing of it again.

    (by Rene Chár)

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  6. Also from Germany very much support. Our hearts are with you. We have filed 8 constitutional complaints with the main goal, to solve the financial crisis by the standard of the basic rights and of the universal human rights (especially to health, to food, to social security) and NOT by the standard of the excessive and systemati- cally people and dignity destroying practice of the IMF.
    http://netzwerkvolksentscheid.de/esm-klage/
    http://netzwerkvolksentscheid.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Solidarisierungsschreiben-englisch.pdf

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  7. Awesome how you discuss all the different ways to get your country out of your misery.

    Even better how you have identified the single source of evil being a foreign leader and not your own country men that wrecked your economy in the first place.

    And still I wish you well and success. You know why? Because I don't want my taxes to go abroad just like you don't want my chancellor in your country.

    Tell me, how will the Portuguese bootstrap their economy? And if they can't do it on their own, why don't you think that those that invest money should have a say? If you invest a substantial amount in a company, you damn well want to influence what they do with it, so it succeeds. Because that is the only way you get your money back.

    Taking money makes you dependent.

    Portugal once spearheaded the Age of Discovery as a great and prosper nation. I wish the Portuguese people well and success. But to succeed, you should identify the real problem.

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  8. I have gone through the list until about position 130.
    J.A. Leal

    I have failed so far to recognize any name of relevance with respect to economics.

    May some of the originators of this racist anti-german slander point out here, who of the signatories understands at least some tiny bit of the relevant issues ?

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