On the last day of 2011, a headline in The Wall Street Journal read: “Spain Misses Deficit Target, Sets Cuts.” The cruel forces of poor economic logic were at work to welcome in the new year. The European Union has become a vicious circle of burgeoning debt leading to radical austerity measures, which in turn further weaken economic conditions and result in calls for still more damaging cuts in government s ...

Thu, Jan 05 10:38 AM EST By Karolina Tagaris ATHENS (Reuters) - When an Athens taxi driver learned his passenger was the boss of an Istanbul-based company that brings Turkish TV dramas to Greece he reached for his phone, called his wife and put her through to the man sitting in the back seat. "She had to know what happens next," Global Agency chief executive Izzet Pinto said with a laugh. "I was expecting s ...

US ambassador threatened Spain with 'retaliation actions' if the country did not pass tough new Sopa-style internet piracy laws. The US ambassador in Madrid threatened Spain with "retaliation actions" if the country did not pass tough new internet piracy laws, according to leaked documents. The latest revelation comes amid a fierce debate over America's own plans to pass online piracy legislation that criti ...

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history. Debt has b ...

Dear fellow-workers, once more we are witnessing a huge solidarity wave to our struggle that begun on 30/10. On that day, Greek Steelworks SA started the unjustified lay offs in an effort to terrorize us and force us to accept a modification of the collective wage agreement ruling an average  wage reduction of 40%, a reduction of working hours to 5 per day together with the introduction of shift work. The l ...

The woman is young, and slim, and fair. She lies on her back surrounded by four soldiers, two of whom are dragging her by the arms raised above her head. She's unresisting – maybe she's fainted; we can't tell because we can't see her face. She's wearing blue jeans and trainers. But her top half is bare: we can see her torso, her tummy, her blue bra, her bare delicate arms. Surrounding this top half, forming ...

From the massive student strike at OccupyCal in Berkeley to the police crackdown of the OccupyWallStreet movement’s birthplace in New York City and dozens of actions and headlines in between — from coast to coast, last week was an important, up-and-down week for the growing Occupy movement. Where the movement heads in the weeks and months to come, however, will be even more critical to the fate of this peop ...

On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35 per cent of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of ...

The 400 workers of the “GREEK STEELWORKS” (Helliniki Halivourgia) industry, are on strike, united as one fist, for more than three weeks. And they continue! They do not move back, they have chosen the path of honor and dignity, to defend the bread and the future of their children. They do not return to work, in fire and iron, for 500€. They demand, their 34 colleagues, who were laid off, to return to work. ...

While ordinary people fret about austerity and jobs, the eurozone's corridors of power have been undergoing a remarkable transformation.   The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has ...