Greece grinds to a halt as general strike gets underway

Workers across Greece walked off the job on Tuesday, kicking off a crippling 48-hour strike with a mass protest in the capital, Athens, as parliament debated a new austerity plan. Police fired tear gas in clashes with protesters. 

AFP -- France 24

Greece ground to a halt Tuesday as angry workers launched a 48-hour general strike against an austerity drive ordered by its bankruptcy-threatened government in exchange for a European bailout.

Crowds converged early on Syntagma Square, where parliament will vote on sweeping spending cuts as planes, ships and most public transport came to a halt.

Europe's economic tsar Olli Rehn in Brussels warned that Greece faced "a critical juncture" and the austerity programme was the "only way to avoid immediate default."

But that view was not shared by protestors, determined to block passage of the package.

"We don't want your money Europe," Iamando, 36, told AFP on the square where police were already out in force at 11:00 am (0800 GMT). "Leave us alone -- please, please, please."

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IMF urges US Congress to raise debt limit

The US government hit its legal borrowing
limit of $14.29 trillion on May 16
© AFP/File Shawn Thew

AFP

SAO PAULO (AFP) - The International Monetary Fund on Friday joined calls for the US Congress to raise the country's debt limit, warning that failure to act would risk a major global market upheaval.

"For the United States, it is critical to immediately address the debt ceiling and launch a deficit reduction plan that includes entitlement reform and revenue-raising tax reform," the IMF said in an update of its April forecasts issued in Sao Paulo.

The US government hit its legal borrowing limit of $14.29 trillion on May 16. The Treasury has taken extraordinary technical measures to avert a debt default, but says it will run out of maneuvering room by August 2.

The Battle against Neoliberalism: Massive Popular Uprising in Greece

Hundreds of thousands of Greek ‘Indignés’ (‘Outraged’) walk out to wage war against their neoliberal persecutors  

Yorgos Mitralias

Global Research 

Two weeks after it started the Greek movement of ‘outraged’ people has the main squares in all cities overflowing with crowds that shout their anger, and makes the Papandreou government and its local and international supporters tremble. It is now more than just a protest movement or even a massive mobilization against austerity measures. It has turned into a genuine popular uprising that is sweeping over the country. An uprising that makes it know at large its refusal to pay for ‘their crisis’ or ‘their debt’ while vomiting the two big neoliberal parties, if not the whole political world in complete disarray. 

How many were there on Syntagma square (Constitution square) in the centre of Athens, just in front of the Parliament building on Sunday 5 June 2011? Difficult to say since one of the characteristic features of such popular gatherings is that there is no key event (speech or concert) and that people come and go. But according to people in charge of the Athens underground, who know how to assess the numbers of passengers, there were at least 250,000 people converging on Syntagma on that memorable night! Actually several hundreds of thousands of people if we add the ‘historic’ gatherings that took place on the main squares of other Greek cities.

IMF Financial Terrorism

Stephen Lendman, Contributing Writer

Activist Post

In July 1944, the IMF and Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now the World Bank) were established to integrate developing nations into the Global North-dominated world economy in ways other than initially mandated.

Under a new post-war monetary system, the IMF was created to stabilize exchange rates linked to the dollar and bridge temporary payment imbalances. The World Bank was to provide credit to war-torn developing countries. Both bodies, in fact, proved hugely exploitive, using debt entrapment to transfer public wealth to Western bankers and other corporate predators.

On a grander scale today, the scheme destructively obligates indebted nations to take new loans to service old ones, assuring rising indebtedness and structural adjustment harshness, including:

This Spanish Spring is the Real Thing

Giles Dexter
21st Century Wire

It was perhaps inevitable given its long associations with, and geographical proximity to the Maghreb, that Spain should be the first European country to be swept up by the wave known as the “Arab Spring”. Protests have been raging across the country since May 15th, and like previous rumblings in Greece, this Spanish Spring will likely send a new shockwave through the EU.

Indeed, a wave of discontent has arrived this month in Spain. People tend to forget that Spain had its own oppressive dictator, the 30′s Fascist survivor who steered clear of Hitler’s madness and instead ground down and impoverished his people with years of economic stagnation until the late 1970′s – El Caudillo himself, the Generalissimo Franco.

Spanish police fire at peaceful protesters in Barcelona

EN:  As many Americans (Peace activists are already feeling the effects of the American police state) sit back in the comfort of their ever increasing debt, unemployment, and rising prices, the people of Spain are experiencing the brutality of the police state.  It won't be long before the same scenes gain momentum on the streets of America.

Barcelona Police Brutality

Jérôme E. Roos
Roar Mag

Police just cleared the protest camp on the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, firing rubber bullets at protesters and hitting indiscriminately (videos here!).

Information is still sketchy (if you’re in Barcelona, please give us an update!) but it appears that riot police have just cleared the peaceful protest camp at Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona with force.

At least 43 are reported to have been treated for injuries, although actual numbers are likely to be higher.

Video footage shows police beating away indiscriminately at protesters sitting on the ground. Reports say police even fired rubber bullets to disperse a small group of protesters that peacefully resisted eviction.

The Barcelona camp has been the second biggest in Spain, after the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, and had been occupied ever since the national protests on May 15th. Just yesterday, we shared a short documentary that showed the good-natured spirits of the peaceful protest camp.

Watching Shocking Videos Here

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It's ever more obvious, Greece must leave the euro

I've hardly been alone, but that's no excuse. For more than a year now, I've been regularly predicting the euro crisis's final denouement, yet still it hasn't arrived.

Wikimedia Commons Image

Jeremy Warner
Telegraph

So I've been forced to reach a different conclusion; perhaps it never will. Instead, the eurozone has entered a seeming state of permanent crisis. In desperation, European policymakers have adopted a very British characteristic – the hope that they can somehow just muddle through.

But though no one can know the exact timing of the endgame – that's ultimately for the politicians to decide, so no time soon might be a reasonable bet – it's now fairly clear what that endgame must be.

What's presently being played out among the GIPS (Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain) is final proof that you cannot have a monetary union of such size among sovereign nations without compensating fiscal union. That simple underlying truth leaves the euro facing a choice between two equally unappetising outcomes.

Either the richer countries carry on bailing out the poorer ones more or less indefinitely, rather in the manner that Germany subsidises its formerly communist East, or membership of the euro has to be reconstituted on a smaller and more sustainable basis. There's really nothing in between. The longer European policymakers remain in denial about this choice, the worse the situation will become.

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Irish Bombshell: Government Raids PRIVATE Pensions To Pay For Spending

image: Info-Wars Ireland

Joe Weisenthal and Gregory White 
Business Insider

The Irish government plans to institute a tax on private pensions to drive jobs growth, according to its jobs program strategy,delivered today.

Without the ability sell debt due to soaring interest rates, and with severe spending rules in place due to its EU-IMF bailout, Ireland has few ways of spending to stimulate the economy. Today's jobs program includes specific tax increases, including the tax on pensions, aimed at keeping government jobs spending from adding to the national debt.

The tax on private pensions will be 0.6%, and last for four years, according to the report.

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IMF urges US to address debt now

Debt clock/Wikimedia image

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The International Monetary Fund on Monday urged the US to begin addressing its yawning budget deficit this year rather than putting off the pain and missing G20 fiscal targets.

In its semi-annual measure of global economic health, the IMF said the US will likely grow more slowly than originally forecast in January -- 2.75 percent instead of 3.0 percent.

It said that slack domestic demand, high unemployment and still-depressed housing prices will continue to dog the world's largest economy, and that the huge government deficit will limit its ability to address those problems.

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn Calls for New Global Approaches to Post-Crisis World

Editor's Note:  Can anyone say "Problem, Reaction, Solution"?  Clearly the global elites are capitalizing on the Global Political Awakening; in large part, deliberately engineered by them, to make the people of the world beg for a New World Order in the form of a One World Government and Global Currency.  You can certainly plan on the economic crises to worsen significantly before the solution is fully implemented.


“In designing a new macroeconomic framework for a new world”, he stated, “the pendulum will swing—at least a little—from the market to the state."

IMF

In a speech entitled “Global Challenges, Global Solutions” at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. today, Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), called for a new approach to economic policymaking in the wake of the recent global crisis. He singled out three areas for improvement: a new approach to macroeconomic and financial sector policies, a new approach to social cohesion, and a new approach to cooperation and multilateralism.

Discussing the current economic situation, Mr. Strauss-Kahn noted that the global recovery is unbalanced both between and within countries, and the global outlook is still beset by uncertainty. He pointed in particular to the Middle East, noting that it is going through an “historic transformation” as “citizens are seeking greater freedom, and a fairer distribution of economic opportunities and resources”. The immediate challenge for the Middle East, he stated, was “to preserve social cohesion without undermining macroeconomic stability”.

The Collapse of Globalization

Chris Hedges
TruthDig

The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.

We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.

France awaits Eric Cantona's cashpoint bank revolution

The government has criticised the ex-footballer's call for the public to stage a mass cash-withdrawal protest

Eric Cantona calls for mass bank withdrawals to protest

Angelique Chrisafis
Guardian

France is bracing for Eric Cantona's bank-run revolution Tuesday, with the government criticising his call for the public to stage a mass cash-withdrawal and the left questioning whether it would have much effect.

When the former Manchester United footballer gave a video interview in October calling on citizens to stage a cash-point revolution, protest groups against the financial system decided to coordinate a world-wide withdrawal on December 7, the number of Cantona's lucky shirt.


Asked about street demonstrations to protest against government austerity measures, Cantona said: "We have to change the way we do things nowadays. Talking of revolution, I don't mean we are going to pick up guns and go out to kill people. Revolution is very simple to do nowadays," he told the French paper Presse Ocean.

"What's the system? The system revolves around banks. The system is built on the banks' power. So it can be destroyed by the banks. Instead of having three million people going out to demonstrate with a placard, those three million people go to their bank branch, they withdraw their money and the banks crumble." He directed people: "You go to your bank in your village and you withdraw your money." But as tens of thousands of people signed up to the online campaigns led by a Franco-Belgian anti-bank protest group, the French government warned against "Eric Le Rouge" sticking his nose into economics.

Francois Baroin, the budget minister, said: "It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic." FCantona's call to arms was "grotesque" and "not serious". inance minister Christine Lagarde said witheringly: "There are those who play football magnificently, I wouldn't dare to try. I think it's best for everyone to stick to their own speciality." The director general of BNP Paribas deemed Cantona's appeal "ill-founded".

Cantona told the daily Liberation that he would heed his own call to withdraw money. "Given the strange solidarity that has sprung up, yes. On December 7, I'll be at the bank." Online supporters have pledged that they will either definitely or probably withdraw cash. They are aiming for a bank-run like that which hit the UK's Northern Rock in 2008.

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Citizens of Europe Rage Against the Machine
Activism in the Age of Tyranny and Terror 

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IMF urges EU to boost bail-out fund to stem crisis

The International Monetary Fund has called on the EU authorities to boost their rescue fund and step up bond purchases to insure against a fresh financial crisis in the eurozone periphery.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph

“The recovery could still stay the course, but this scenario could now easily be derailed by the renewed financial market turmoil,” the IMF says in a report for eurozone finance ministers today, according to Reuters. “The sovereign and financial market storm affecting the periphery constitutes a severe downside risk.”

The IMF said the EU’s €500bn bail-out machinery was not enough to cope with the magnitude of the threat as Spain and even Italy start to come under pressure.

“There is also a strong case for increasing the resources available for this safety net and making their use more flexible, including for the purpose of providing more effective support to banking systems,” it said.


Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, will present the report on the economy of the 16 countries using the euro at a meeting of eurozone finance ministers and Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank president, on Monday.

The fund said the ECB’s bond purchases should be “expanded” to restore calm. The ECB bought Portuguese and Irish bond markets last week, forcing down spreads dramatically in a “short squeeze” against speculators in small illiquid markets. This merely buys time.

It is does not solve the structural problem that a large part of the eurozone faces a huge financing need yet has lost reliable access to capital markets. The ECB has so far ruled out mass purchases of Spanish and Italian bonds, bowing to a de facto German veto.

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Ireland's Debt Servitude

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph

Stripped to its essentials, the €85bn package imposed on Ireland by the Eurogroup and the European Central Bank is a bail-out for improvident British, German, Dutch, and Belgian bankers and creditors.

The Irish taxpayers carry the full burden, and deplete what remains of their reserve pension fund to cover a quarter of the cost.

This arrangement – I am not going to grace it with the term deal – was announced in Brussels before the elected Taoiseach of Ireland had been able to tell his own people what their fate would be.


The Taoiseach said afterwards that Brussels had squelched any idea of haircuts for senior bondholders: a lack of “political and institutional” support in his polite words: or “they hit the roof”, according to leaks.

One can see why the EU authorities reacted so vehemently. Such a move at this delicate juncture would have set off an even more dramatic chain reaction in the EMU debt markets than the one we are already seeing.
It is harder to justify why the Irish should pay the entire price for upholding the European banking system, and why they should accept ruinous terms.

I might add that if it is really true that a haircut on the senior debt of Anglo Irish, et al, would bring down the entire financial edifice of Europe, then how did any of these European banks pass their stress tests this summer, and how did the EU authorities ever let the matter reach this point? Brussels cannot have it both ways.

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Following Hungary And Ireland, France Is Next To Seize Pension Funds

Bank Looting in Progress

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge

If the recent Hungarian “appropriation” of pension funds, and today’s laughable Irish bailout courtesy of domestic pension funds sourcing 20% of the “new” money was not enough to convince the world just how bankrupt the entire European experiment has become, enter France.Financial News explains how France has “seized” €36 billion worth of pension assets: “Asset managers will have the chance to get billions of euros in mandates in the next few months for the €36bn Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR), the French reserve pension fund, after the French parliament last week passed a law to use its assets to pay off the debts of France’s welfare system. The assets have been transferred into the state’s social debt sinking fund Cades. The FRR will continue to control the assets, but as a third-party manager on behalf of Cades.” FN condemns the action as follows: “The move reflects a willingness by governments to use long-term assets to fill short-term deficits, including Ireland’s announcement last week that it would use the country’s €24bn National Pensions  Reserve Fund “to support the exchequer’s funding programme” and Hungary’s bid to claw $15bn of private pension funds back to the state system.” In other words, with the ECB still unwilling to go into full fiat printing overdrive mode, insolvent governments, France most certainly included, are resorting to whatever piggybanks they can find. Hopefully this is not a harbinger of what Tim Geithner plans to do with the trillions in various 401(k) funds on this side of the Atlantic.

More from FN on how first France, and soon every other socalized pension regime, will continue to plunder a nation’s life saving to fund short-term deficits:

The decision has prompted a radical restructuring of the FRR’s investments. The new strategic investment plan, which will be released in the new year, will see a rapid reduction in its 40% allocation to equities and a shift to cash and short-term government bonds, according to a source close to the situation.

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Default! Say the Irish People

Irish negotiators raised defaulting but 'Europe went completely mad'

Jody Corcoran
Irish Independent

A SUBSTANTIAL majority of the Irish people wants the State to default on debts to bondholders in the country's stricken banks, according to a Sunday Independent/Quantum Research poll.

The finding that 57 per cent favour and 43 per cent oppose default reflects a growing view among policymakers and opinion formers that the State simply cannot support the debt burden it has taken on.

The telephone poll of 500 people nationwide has also found that a majority of around two-thirds opposes the headline measures in the Government's four-year plan.

Following Fianna Fail's loss of the by-election in Donegal last week, the findings will add to political uncertainty as an austerity Budget approaches on December 7.

As Ireland awaited the fine details of the international bailout, which are expected tonight, it was learned last night that the Irish delegation negotiating with the EU-IMF last week raised the issue of default.

"The Europeans went completely mad," a senior government source said.

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Italian students storm Tower of Pisa, Colosseum

(Reuters) - Italian students stormed the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Rome's Colosseum and blocked roads and railways Thursday in protest against university reform planned by Silvio Berlusconi's struggling government.

The measures, currently before parliament, include spending cuts and time limits on research.

Thousands of students marched in cities around Italy and occupied university buildings. One was injured during clashes with police in Florence, news agencies reported, but demonstrations were largely peaceful.

"We will block this reform," students chanted outside parliament buildings, waving smoke flares and banners.

They breached security at the Tower of Pisa, flying banners from the summit, and jumped over entrance turnstiles at the Colosseum.

The protest was the latest in a wave of demonstrations against austerity measures in Europe. In London, thousands of people rallied Wednesday against a rise in university fees.

The unrest is a further blow for Berlusconi's troubled government, already undermined by a weak economy and a succession of scandals, and facing two confidence votes in parliament on December 14 that could trigger early elections.

Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini says the reforms, which are aimed at saving several billion euros by the end of 2012, will create a more merit-based system.

But opponents say universities already have a funding shortfall of 1.35 billion euros next year and the planned cuts will further weaken Italy's higher education system.

The government was defeated in a parliamentary vote on Thursday on an amendment to the reform. Berlusconi no longer has a built-in majority in the lower house of parliament because of coalition infighting.

Gelmini said the amendment would be of little significance, but said she may withdraw the reform, due for a final vote on November 30, if more substantive modifications are passed.

Pier Luigi Bersani, leader of the main center-left opposition Democratic Party called for it to be scrapped immediately.

"Let's start discussing how we can correct the distortions of this law and how we can find resources to support the right to study and research," he said.

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