The financial crisis has devastated Greece. My family, my friends and my neighbours are struggling every day with mass unemployment and homelessness, while young people like me have to leave Greece if we want a future.

This is how ordinary Greeks survive the crisis. Meanwhile, finance giants like Goldman Sachs made close to $450 million Euros off snatching our livelihoods right from under us.

I’ve had enough of big corporations destroying our lives and making money.

Goldman Sachs’ involvement in the crisis started in 2001, when it created complex financial “swaps” that disguised the extent of our debts.

The goal was to get Greece into the Eurozone and it “worked” — Greece was allowed to join the EU after Goldman was involved. However, this also gave Goldman access to billions of Euros in easy credit that our government was unable to pay back.

Now the people of Greece are paying the price — regular middle class Greeks like my family and neighbours have been crushed under the weight of crippling austerity, while Goldman Sachs carries on profiteering from debt with impunity.

It’s sickening that Goldman Sachs earned up to 450 million Euros from the crisis, but this is not surprising behaviour from Goldman Sachs — it’s a world leader in disaster capitalism, with a long history of profiteering from human misery. It inflates bubbles only to profit when they burst. It sells toxic assets and then bets they will crash. From food speculation to global tax evasion, the bank is a symbol of everything that is wrong with capitalism.

“The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi famously wrote, “relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

While Goldman sucks us dry, our schools and hospitals are crumbling, and suicide rates are skyrocketing. 450 million Euros won’t solve all of Greece’s problems, but it will help — and it will go some way to correcting the injustice that allows those who caused the financial crisis to get away scot-free while ordinary people are left to suffer the consequences.

I ask you to stand with the people of Greece and get Goldman Sachs to take responsibility for the Greek crisis.

Goldman made 450 million Euros from crashing the Greek economy. It should return the profits

Not only should Goldman return their criminally made profits but Germany should pay the billions it still owes Greece from WWII!! German soldiers set up a brutal occupation regime. As was usually the case in European nations invaded by the Germans, the high cost of the occupation was borne by the occupied country — and the Greek economy was plundered through forced exports.

“This resulted in galloping inflation and a radically lower standard of living for Greeks. Additionally, the Third Reich forced the Greek National Bank to lend Hitler’s Germany 476 million reichsmarks interest-free.

After Germany’s surrender, the Allied powers organized the Paris Conference on Reparations in the fall of 1945. Greece laid claim to $10 billion, or half the total amount of $20 billion the Soviets suggested that Germany pay.”

This insert is from time.com