Maria Lucia Fattorelli discursa na abertura da Comissão de Auditoria da Dívida Grega
Maria Lucia Fattorelli discursa na abertura da Comissão de Auditoria da Dívida Grega no Parlamento Helênico, em 4 de Abril de 2015.
Discurso de Fattorelli durante a instalação da Comissão de Auditoria da Dívida no Parlamento Helênico em 4 de abril de 2015
Good afternoon!
It is a very great honor for me to be here with you, participating of this historical moment. I thank Mrs. President Of Greek Parliament, Zoe Konstantopoulou, for the invitation to participate on the Comission to audit the Greek Debt.
I come from the floor, from civil society in South America, Brazil, and for 15 years have been coordinating a citizen debt audit, fighting for a debt audit in our country: one of the richest country – 7th major world economy, but also where we have the saddest inequality. And in the last decades, the main responsible for this has been the debt; that is why we must fight for the audit.
So, first of all, I must congratulate – in the persons of 2 women Zoe Konstantopoulou and Sofia Sakorafa, congratulate Greece for what you are starting here today:
- Installing a debt audit commission from the Parliament (as representatives of the people), with the declared support from the main authorities of the Executive, and with the participation of national and international civil society. Congratulations!
From these 15 years working on citizen audit initiatives, and also in the official initiative in Ecuador and a parliamentarian investigation initiative in my country, we got to the conclusion that debt is not an isolated issue.
It is part of a very well articulated system that is functioning to transfer public resources towards the financial sector.
We are calling it DEBT SYSTEM. It operates after a generation of debt that do no come from actual inflows of resources, as the common sense lead us to think. In fact, the DEBT SYSTEM generate it by the use of a range of financial mechanisms, economic plans or programs, and other measures pushed by international financial organizations.
That is, debts are generated without any goods, services, or public benefit provided in return. Worse, these debts rise as a consequence of excessive costs, abusive terms, and successive refinancing – among other strategies that lead to a continuous and self-generating accumulation of new debt. This, in turn, requires that funds be constantly allocated to pay for high levels of interest, commissions and costs – while the debt stock itself continues to rise.
Plus, this is happening in a moment of financialization of the economies, like the ministry of finances just spoke, evident by the colossal power of the global financial sector.
This power has been entrenched through the excessive and unscrupulous use of financial instruments (derivatives, that the ministry of finance also mentioned: 11 times the world GDP). These are based largely on “debts assets”, bond issues, currency, and un-backed securities, commonly known as toxic assets.
The ministry of finance also mentioned the problem with these anonymous transactions. But, in the case of debt bonds, somebody know who have those, otherwise, who are we paying the interests to?
Debt assets became a great business for private financial sector. The complex formulas about its sustainability occupy the minds of the students in the best universities of economy over the world, and don’t let them think about the basic thing: what debt is that?
So we got to a point where us – normal citizen who pay the debt in many ways – thru taxes that go high and high; thru the lack of social services we should be receiving and do not receive – have no idea about what we are paying for.
Speeches about this are no longer useful.
We need to act.
And the tool to document, to prove the fraud the debt system is doing to our world is the audit.
The installation of this initiative today in Athens is a real step towards knowing the truth and giving answers to the ones who are paying this debt with sacrifice and, in many times, even with their lives, like Mr. Christoulas (exacly 3 years ago), and the other thousands of Greeks and world citizens in despair dying everyday, because of this Debt System. It’s for you that we are here and will do our best to present an report that can be useful for the government, parliament, and mainly to the society.
Thank you very much!
Maria Lucia Fattorelli
