France's new labor law allows a race to the bottom as employers take advantage of a fragmented workforce whose ability to call on the solidarity of workers elsewhere will be strictly controlled.
Even though the right-wing Forward Portugal lost the election—it garnered only 38 percent of the votes—Silva allowed its leader, former Prime Minister Passos Coelho, to form a government. That maneuver lasted just 11 days. Coelho introduced a budget loaded with austerity measures and privatization. In the face of growing outrage and a threatened general strike Silva finally asked Socialist Party leader Antonio Costa to form a government.
The EU's belt-tightening measures are cutting holes in Europe's social-safety net. Austerity as an economic strategy is more than just throwing a scare into countries that, exhausted by years of cutbacks and high unemployment, are thinking of changing course. It's laying the groundwork for the triumph of multinational corporate capitalism - undermining the social contract between labor and capital that's characterized much of Europe for the past two generations.
The recently published Roadmap for the Future of the Economic and Monetary Union, signed by five “presidents” — of the European Council, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Central Bank and the Eurogroup — it doesn’t contain much that’s strikingly new, but what it does do is systematise and confirm the abolition of national democracy.
The Euro Summit statement (or Terms of Greece's Surrender - as it will go down in history) follows, annotated by yours truly. The original text is untouched with my notes confined to square brackets (and in red). Read and weep.
The social savagery called austerity could never produce the result it was ostensibly intended to deliver because the negotiations were never about economics, but about regime change. So stated the International Union of Food and Allied Workers in a statement issued prior to the successful "no ' vote on Sunday. IUF called for increased union solidarity for Syriza and the Greek people.
The future demands a proud Greece within the Eurozone and at the heart of Europe. This future demands that Greeks say a big NO on Sunday, that we stay in the Euro Area, and that, with the power vested upon us by that NO, we renegotiate Greece's public debt as well as the distribution of burdens between the haves and the have nots.
An austerity crisis continues to be imposed by European bankers on Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, among others. A catastrophe on the scale of the Great Depression has been forced upon Greece for over five years under the deceptive description of a bailout. Now the banks are demanding even more, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel saying that Germany will not be blackmailed by Greece, demanding a deal before financial markets reopen next Monday.
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Announcement - Celebration of Danny Schechter's Life
The Hellenic Parliament established the Truth Committee on Public Debt mandating the investigation into the creation and growth of public debt, and the impact the conditionalities attached to the loans have had on the economy and the population. All the evidence we present shows Greece not only does not have the ability to pay this debt, but also should not pay this debt because the debt is a direct infringement on the fundamental human rights of the residents of Greece
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