On Monday 15th February, a group of comrades attacked the central building of OASA (Athens Public Transport), at Metsovou st. in Exarchia. We focused our action at the fine collection office, by destroying the mechanical equipment and stealing the block of infringement notices, while we didn’t miss the chance to trash the office of the OASA’s manager, who validates the raise of ticket fares with his signature.
The reality in the city forces us to use the transport throughout, to go to work, to university, to school or just to socialize. Public transport is what we’d call an “inelastic cost”. You can’t live without transport in this city of at least 5 million people and of a several hundred square kilometers area. Every euro that’s being spent for transportation, from our already diminished wages is just an added cost to our already suffocating life expenses.
And as if this wasn’t enough, at the same time the transport fare prices are rising, there have been many attempts to intensify the ticket inspections and surveillance during the everyday life in public transportations. With having new CCTVs inside the bullet trains, ticket barriers inside the buses, and a constant presence of ticket inspectors, they’re trying to victimize everyone who doesn’t have enough money, or doesn’t want to spend any money on purchasing a ticket. The highlight was that they wanted to turn the non-possession of a ticket into a flagrant crime. During the times where state and power are attacking with any means necessary the poor and lower social backgrounds, the claim of basic needs is and always will be a radical imperative. From obstructing the 5 euro fare in hospitals, to reconnecting electricity in neighborhoods, from struggling against the 5month programs of slavery of the Manpower Employment Organization (OAED), to finally refusing the raise of ticket fares.
During the last months, many barriers have been removed, while many headhunters-ticket inspectors have been hunted (like what happened in Omonoia station, where the workers of public transports proceeded to strike). We would like to inform them, that they have nothing to fear if they support the oppressed and struggling people, and don’t act like snitches and cops, like they usually do.
We do not forget the death of Thanasis Kanaoutis, who was killed because he was being hunted by a ticket inspector due to non-possession of ticket.
We should realize our collective power
We should organize and fight back
FREE TRANSPORTATION FOR EVERYONE!
DON’T BUY TICKETS, SMACK THE TICKET INSPECTORS!
Comrades
P.S During the last months we witnessed a journalistic propaganda of brinkmanship that wants us to believe that the transient decommission of team Delta “allowed anarchists to roam freely in Exarchia” and that as a divine intervention of praetorians they will recover the order. As if our memory is as short as theirs and as if we deleted from our memory several incidents of action and resistance that took place in Exarchia since 2010(when the team Delta was formed).
We already took action from the first week of the re-drafting of team Delta, to prove that with, or without them, our actions against the reign of power in Exarchia and every neighborhood in the city, will have a continuation in both place and time.
(via Athens Indymedia)
