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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120,000 protest over Irish economy

YouTube-ScarceNews
Over 100,000 people marched through Dublin on Saturday to protest at government cutbacks in the face of a deepening recession and bailouts for the banks.


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Thousands March In Dublin To Protest Irish Austerity Measures

Wall Street Journal

DUBLIN (Dow Jones)--Thousands of people marched through central Dublin Saturday to protest the Irish government's plan to make EUR15 billion in budget cuts over the next four years and urge it to do more to generate growth and jobs in the debt-laden economy.

One of the organizers of the march, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, an umbrella group representing some 800,000 workers across the island of Ireland, said the government still has time to change course before it announces its budget on Dec. 7, where it plans to set out EUR6 billion of budget cuts.

"This is a really important opportunity for the government to be shown visually how people feel about what it is that they are doing," Sally Anne Kinahan, ICTU assistant general secretary, said ahead of the march. "The biggest failure on the part of government...is the fact that they have done nothing to stimulate jobs."

Faced with a debt crisis following the collapse of the country's banking system, Ireland's government is carrying out severe budget cuts and is negotiating a multi-billion euro support package with the International Monetary Fund, European Union, and European Central Bank which is expected is coming days.

On Wednesday it announced details of a four-year plan, including EUR10 billion in expenditure cuts and EUR5 billion in tax measures to slash the country's budget deficit to below the EU limit of 3% of gross domestic product by 2014 from an expected 32% this year.

The measures include lowering the minimum wage, cutting public sector jobs, salaries, and pensions, reducing social welfare spending, increasing sales tax to 23% by 2014 from 21%, and widening the income tax base.

Shay Cody, the general secretary of IMPACT, Ireland's largest public sector union, said the government's four-year plan is driven by an obsession to bail out "zombie banks" rather than the need to stimulate economic activity to create jobs and get the public finances back in balance.

But despite Ireland announcing some of the harshest budget consolidation measures in Europe, the ICTU appears to have little appetite for industrial action of the kind seen in countries like Spain, Portugal, and Greece that have also been subjected to tough austerity measures.

"I don't think the right focus at the moment will be on industrial action, it is on political action looking at the forthcoming general election," Kinahan said. Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen has said a general election will be called in the New Year.

However, some left-leaning groups would like to see Irish unions go further.

"They need to escalate and do strike action rather than just marching people around the town," said Brid Smith, a local government official in a working class suburb west of Dublin for People Before Profit, a small left-wing grass-roots political grouping. "People understand that there is such a thing as collective power, but it has never been mobilized."

She said the government should reverse its austerity measures and introduce heavier taxes on the wealthy people who profited most during the boom years that earned Ireland the name as the Celtic Tiger. She also says bond holders should bare a greater share of the losses.

Irish police said ahead of the march that they were expecting a peaceful protest, but were prepared to deal with any disturbances.

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Student tuition fee protests turn violent as Tory headquarters evacuated

The Telegraph
November 10, 2010

After initially being ejected from the lobby of Millbank by police and security staff, the protestors smashed their way in through windows.

Using sticks and chairs they destroyed CCTV cameras and broke windows from the inside of the office block. Employees had to be evacuated as masked youths rampaged through corridors and onto the roof.

Dozens of police officers stationed outside the entrance were overwhelmed as the crowd of thousands pelted them with rocks and bottles.

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Time Magazine: Prospect Of Civil War In U.S. “Doesn’t Seem That Far Fetched”

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 20, 2010

With protesters in France entering a seventh day of strikes and demonstrations against draconian austerity measures, many political observers in the U.S. are now wondering how long it will be before similar scenes unfold on American streets, with even Time Magazine now conceding that the prospect of a civil war in the States is “not that far fetched”.

To be clear, Stephen Gandel’s article entitled Will the Federal Reserve Cause a Civil War?largely dismisses the possibility that the Fed’s upcoming November 3rd meeting, during which Ben Bernanke is expected to announce a fresh round of money printing, will prompt national uproar, but it doesn’t exactly debunk the notion of longer term social dislocation as a backlash to the crumbling economy, as many are now forecasting.

As we highlighted yesterday in a piece that was later picked up by the Drudge Report, it’s only a matter of time before Americans are hit with almost identical austerity measures to those that have caused the French to set up fuel blockades, stage running battles with riot police, halt air and rail travel, and virtually shut down some areas of the country.

The question remains – how will Americans react if the Obama administration pushes ahead with its plan to seize all private 401(k) pensions, which will be swallowed up by the Social Security Administration under the banner of mandatory Guaranteed Retirement Accounts? How will Americans react to the upcoming announcement that the Federal Reserve will further eviscerate the value of the dollar by purchasing junk assets from big banks at exorbitant prices with money printed out of thin air?

Time Magazine, which as a guardian of the establishment would normally be expected to disparage the potential of mass civil disobedience, actually lends the notion some spotlight bylinking to a Zero Hedge story which paraphrased economic forecaster David Rosenberg, who warns that the Fed’s plan for more quantitative easing, “positions US society one step closer to civil war if not worse.”

The article also features a quote from a Washington’s Blog piece which warns that the Fed’s policies could lead to the very destruction of the republic.

“In a very real sense, Bernanke is throwing Granny and Grandpa down the stairs – on purpose. He is literally threatening those at the lower end of the economic strata, along with all who are retired, with starvation and death, and in a just nation where the rule of law controlled instead of being abused by the kleptocrats he would be facing charges of Seditious Conspiracy, as his policies will inevitably lead to the destruction of our republic.”

Lending the notion credence, Gandel writes, “With the Tea Party gaining followers, the idea of civil war over economic issues doesn’t seem that far-fetched these days.”

Yes, you read that correctly. EvenTime Magazine is now conceding that the current economic course of the nation could lead to outright civil war and revolution.

Gandel finishes the article by leaving the prospect of widespread civil unrest as an open question.

“So it seems clear what the Fed is likely to do,” he writes. “How the economy, the militias and the rest of us react is up in the air. The count down is on. T minus 15 days to Fedamageddon. See you there, hopefully.”

Of course, people like Gerald Celente and a host of other economic forecasters have been predicting civil unrest, food riots and tax rebellions for the past two years, but to have Time Magazine seriously entertain the notion of civil war in the United States is a shocking reminder of just how close to the precipice we now stand.

How Americans will react to what many see as a make or break moment for the US economy, the Fed’s announcement on November 3rd, largely depends on how well they understand the fact that their financial future and that of their children now hangs in the balance like never before.

As the Economic Collapse Blog points out, QE2 represents the biggest bank robbery in history, and is nothing less than another huge transfer of wealth from American taxpayers to big banks. The money Bernanke prints out of thin air, which will further devalue the greenback and every dollar earned or saved by American citizens, will be used to purchase large quantities of “troubled assets” from U.S. banks at well above market price. Small banks will be allowed to wither and die, whereas the huge megaliths will collect mountains of free money at the expense of hard working Americans.

The long term impact of the Fed buying these toxic junk assets with money printed out of thin air will be an inflationary holocaust that does nothing to rescue the US economy but everything to depreciate the very real assets of the American taxpayer.

We are already on the road to serious inflation and the Federal Reserve has not even fired up the money hoses yet. So what is going to happen after they pump trillions more into the economy?

Printing more money and giving it to the banks is not going to solve our economic problems. It is just going to make them worse.

But unfortunately, American voters get no say about any of this. Our national monetary policy is in the hands of an unelected central bank that does pretty much whatever it wants.

If as many Americans were aware of what the Federal Reserve is about to do with their financial future as are knowledgeable about the intricacies of Dancing with the Stars, then the “civil war” that even Time Magazine is now presenting as a justifiable response to the crisis would be a very plausible prospect.

As it stands, according to the majority of voters in our poll on Prison Planet.com, Americans will react to the situation not by organizing fuel blockades, marching in the streets and shutting down the country, but by scratching their butts and flipping the TV channel.

Watch Matt Taibbi’s explanation of what the Fed is about to do with your money. 

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The Neoliberal Experiment and Europe's anti-Austerity Strikes: Governments must Lower Wages or Suffer Financial Blackmail

By Michael Hudson

Global Research, September 30, 2010

While Labor Unions celebrate Anti-Austerity Day in Europe, the European Neoliberals raise the ante: Most of the press has described Wednesday's European-wide labor demonstrations and strikes across in terms of the familiar exercise by transport workers irritating travelers with work slowdowns, and large throngs letting off steam by setting fires. But the story goes much deeper than merely a reaction against unemployment and economic recession conditions. At issue are proposals to drastically change the laws and structures of how European society will function for the next generation. If the anti-labor forces succeed, they will break up Europe, destroy the internal market, and render that continent a backwater. This is how serious the financial coup d'etat has become. And it is going to get much worse - quickly. As John Monks, head of the European Trade Union Confederation, put it: "This is the start of the fight, not the end." Spain has received most of the attention, thanks to its ten-million strong turnout (reportedly half the entire labor force). Holding its first general strike since 2002, Spanish labor protested against its socialist government using the bank crisis (stemming from bad real estate loans and negative mortgage equity, not high labor costs) as an opportunity to change the laws to enable companies and government bodies to fire workers at will, and to scale back their pensions and public social spending in order to pay the banks more. Portugal is doing the same, and it looks like Ireland will follow suit - all this in the countries whose banks have been the most irresponsible lenders. The bankers are demanding that they rebuild their loan reserves at labor's expense, just as in President Obama's program here in the United States but without the sanctimonious pretenses. The problem is Europe-wide and indeed centered in the European Union capital in Brussels. This is why the major protests were staged there. On the same day that the strikers demonstrated, the neoliberal European Commission (EC) outlined a full-fledged war against labor. Fifty to a hundred thousand workers gathered to protest the proposed transformation of social rules by the most anti-labor campaign since the 1930s - even more extreme than the Third World austerity plans imposed by the IMF and World Bank in times past. The neoliberals are fully in control of the bureaucracy, and they are reviving Margaret Thatcher's slogan, TINA: There Is No Alternative. But there is, of course. In the small Baltic economies, pro-labor parties have made it clear that the alternative to government shrinkage is to simply repeal the debts, withdraw from the Euro and break the banks. It is either the banks or labor - and Europe has just realized that this is truly a fight to the economic death. And the first test will come this Saturday, when Latvia holds its national parliamentary elections. The EC is using the mortgage banking crisis - and the needless prohibition against central banks monetizing the government budget deficit - as an opportunity to fine governments and even drive them bankrupt if they do not agree roll back public-sector salaries. Governments are told to borrow at interest from the banks, rather than raising revenue by taxing them as they have done for half-a century following the end of World War II. And if governments are unable to raise the money to pay the interest, they must close down their social programs. And if this close-down shrinks the economy - and hence, government tax revenues - even more, then the government must shut down even more social spending. From Brussels to Latvia, neoliberal planners have expressed the hope is that lower public salaries will spread to the private sector as well. The aim is to shrink their economies to roll back wage levels by 30 percent or more - depression-style levels - in the belief that this will "leave more surplus" available to pay in debt service. Governments are to tax labor - not finance, insurance or real estate (FIRE), but to impose new employment and sales taxes while cutting back public pensions and public spending. Europe is to be turned into a banana republic. This requires dictatorship, and the European Central Bank (ECB) has assumed this power from elected government. It is "independent" of political control - celebrated as the "hallmark of democracy" by today's new financial oligarchy. But as Plato's dialogues explained it, what is oligarchy but the political stage following democracy. We can now await the new power elite making itself hereditary - by abolishing estate taxes, for starters - and turning itself into an outright aristocracy. "Join the fight against labor, or we will destroy you," the EC is telling governments. One can therefore forget the economics of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the Progressive Era, forget Keynes and forget the early 20th-century social democratic traditions. Europe is entering an era either of totalitarian neoliberal rule. This was inevitable since the Chilean dress rehearsal after 1973. After all, one cannot have "free markets" neoliberal style without totalitarian control. This is what Wednesday's strikes and demonstrations were about, after all. Europe's class war is back in business - with a vengeance! This is economic suicide, but the EU is sticking to its demand that Euro-zone governments keep their budget deficits below 3% of GDP - and their total debt below 60% of GDP. They must not raise taxes on the wealthy, but only on labor and what it buys (via sales taxes). Yet at the same time they must slash wages and pensions, cut back public spending and employment, and shrink the economy. When an economic problem is as economically destructive as this, it can only be imposed by economic blackmail. On Wednesday the EU passed a law to fine governments up to 0.2% of GDP for not "fixing" their budget deficits by imposing fiscal austerity. Nations that borrow to engage in countercyclical "Keynesian-style" spending that raises their public debt level 60% of GDP will have to reduce the excess by 5% each year - or else suffer harsh punishment. And unlike central banks elsewhere in the world, Europe's central bank is forbidden from monetizing public-sector governments. These governments must borrow from banks, letting these institutions create their own interest-bearing debt on their own keyboards rather than having their own central bank do it without the cost. The financial privatization and monopoly in credit creation that governments have relinquished to banks is now being made to pay off - at the price of breaking up Europe. The unelected members of the European Central Bank (ECB, independent from democratic politics, not from control by its commercial bank members) has taken over planning power from elected government. Beholden to its constituency, the financial sector, the ECB has had little trouble in convincing the EU commission to back the new oligarchic power grab. It threatens to fine euro-area states up to 0.1% of their GDP for failure to obey its neoliberal recommendations - ostensibly to "correct" these imbalances. But the reality, of course, is that every neoliberal "cure" only makes matters worse. Rather than seeing rising wage levels and living standards as a precondition for higher labor productivity, the EU commission will "monitor" labor costs on the assumption that rising wages impair competitiveness rather than raise it. The broad spectrum of neoliberal junk economics is being brought to bear. If members of the euro cannot depreciate their currencies, then they must fight labor - but not tax real estate, finance or other rentier sectors, not regulate monopolies, and not provide public services that can be privatized at much higher costs. Privatization is not deemed to impair competitiveness - only rising wages, regardless of productivity considerations. This economically destructive policy has been tested above all in the Baltics, using countries such as Latvia as guinea pigs to see how far labor can be depressed before it reacts politically. Latvia gave free reign to neoliberal policies by imposing flat taxes of 51% on employees, while real estate is taxed at only 1%. Public-sector wages have been reduced by 30%. Labor of working age (20 to 35 year-olds) are emigrating in droves. Lifespans are shortening. Disease rates are rising. The internal market is shrinking, and so is Europe's population - as it did in the 1930s, when the "population problem" was a plunge in fertility and birth rates (above all in France). That is what happens in economic depressions. Iceland's looting by its bankers came first, but the big news was Greece. When that nation entered its current fiscal crisis, European Union officials recommended that it emulate Latvia, which stands as the poster child for neoliberal economic devastation. The basic theory is that inasmuch as members of the euro cannot devalue their currency, they must resort to "internal devaluation": slashing wages, pensions and social spending. So while Europe enters recession it is following precisely the opposite of Keynesian policy. It is reducing wages, ostensibly to "free" more income available to pay the enormous debts that Europeans have taken on to buy their homes, to pay for schooling (hitherto provided freely in many countries such as Latvia's Stockholm School of Economics), transportation and other public services that have been privatized (at sharply, drastically increased rates - which the privatizers justify by pointing to the enormously bloated financial fees they had to pay their bankers and underwriters to buy the infrastructure being sold off by governments that the neoliberals blocked from taxing the wealthy). The result is economic shrinkage. Europe is creating economic suicide - and demographic and fiscal suicide too. Every attempt to "solve" the problem of this shrinkage, neoliberal style, only makes things worse. Latvia's public-sector workers have seen their wages cut by 30 percent over the past year, and its central bankers have told me that they are seeking further cuts, in the hope that this will lower wages in the private sector as well. What these cuts are doing, hardly by surprise, is spurring emigration - and also is destroying the real estate market, leading to defaults, foreclosures and a flight of debtors from the country. The emigration is headed by younger workers seeking employment in the shrinking economy. Indeed, Latvia's working conditions also happen to be Europe's most neoliberalized, that is, dangerous, unpleasant and almost neofeudal. For starters in yesterday's Action Day, there was the usual stoppage of transportation and an accompanying honk concert in Latvia's capital city of Riga for 10 minutes at 1 PM to let the public know that something was indeed happening. What is happening most importantly is the national parliamentary elections this Saturday (October 2), where the leading coalition, Harmony Center, is pledged to enact an alternative tax system and economic policy to the neoliberal policies that have reduced labor's wages and workplace standards so sharply - along with public infrastructure - over the past decade. Altogether about 10,000 Latvians attended protest meetings, from the capital in Riga to smaller cities as part of the "Journey into the Crisis." Six independent trade unions and the Harmony Center organized a protest meeting in Riga's Esplanade Park that drew 700 to 800 demonstrators, relatively large for so small a city. Another union protest saw about half that number gather at the Cabinet of Ministers where Latvia's austerity program has been planned and carried out. To highlight the economic issue, a bus tour drove journalists to the victims - schools and hospitals that had been closed down, government buildings whose employees had seen their salaries slashed and the workforce downsized. Crowds were reported to gather, re-igniting the anger expressed early last year in the cold of mid-January when Latvians had demonstrated to protest the start of these cuts. These demonstrations seem to have gained voter sympathy for the more militant unions, headed by the hundred individual unions belonging to the Independent Trade Union Association. The other union group - the Free Trade Unions (LBAS) lost face by acquiescing in June 2009 to the government's proposed 10% pension cuts (and indeed, 70% for working pensioners). Latvia's constitutional court was sufficiently independent to overrule these drastic cuts last December. And if the government does indeed change this Saturday, the conflict between the Neoliberal Revolution and the past few centuries of classical progressive reform will be made clear. The Neoliberal Revolution seeks to achieve in Europe what has been achieved in the United States since 1979, when real wages stopped rising. The aim is to double the relative share of wealth enjoyed by the richest 1%. This involves reduce the population to poverty, breaking union power, and destroying the internal market as a precondition for blaming all this on "Mr. Market," presumably inexorable forces beyond politics, purely "objective" rather than a political power grab. It is not really "the market" that is promoting this destructive economic austerity, of course. Latvia's Harmony Center shows that there is a much easier way to cut the cost of labor in half than by reducing its wages: Simply shift the tax burden off labor onto real estate and monopolies (especially privatized infrastructure). This will leave less of the economic surplus to be capitalized into bank loans, lowering the price of housing accordingly (the major factor in labor's cost of living), as well as the price of public services (by having owners take their returns as a return on equity rather than factoring interest charges into their cost of doing business). The tax deductibility of interest will be repealed - there is nothing intrinsically "market dictated" by this fiscal subsidy for debt leveraging. No doubt many post-Soviet economies will find themselves obliged to withdraw from the euro area rather than see a flight of labor and capital. They remain the most extreme example of the Neoliberal Experiment to see how far a population can have its living standards slashed before it rebels.

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