Tag Archives: Austerity

Falls mainly on the 99 per cent.

The woman, 33, said that she had once worked at the post office but that her unemployment benefits had run out and she was living now on 400 euros a month, about $520. She was squatting with some friends in a building that still had water and electricity, while collecting “a little of everything” from the garbage after stores closed and the streets were dark and quiet.

Such survival tactics are becoming increasingly commonplace here, with an unemployment rate over 50 percent among young people and more and more households having adults without jobs. So pervasive is the problem of scavenging that one Spanish city has resorted to installing locks on supermarket trash bins as a public health precaution.

 

Austerity, que?

Spain Recoils as Its Hungry Forage Trash Bins for a Next Meal (Suzanne Daley, New York Times)

(Samuel Aranda/NYT)

New Democracy: 29.7 percent – 129 seats
Syriza: 26.9 percent – 71 seats
Pasok: 12.3 percent – 33 seats
Independent Greeks: 7.5 percent – 20 seats

World leaders have welcomed the narrow election victory of Greece’s broadly pro-bailout New Democracy party and urged Athens to form a cabinet quickly. The eurozone group said reforms were Greece’s “best guarantee” to overcome tough economic and social challenges. The US stressed that it was in everyone’s interests “for Greece to remain in the euro area”. The Syriza party, which rejected the bailout terms and came a close second, said it would lead the opposition.

 

Greece Poll: Pro-bailout Party’s Narrow Win Hailed (BBC)

Seumas Milne writes:

Meanwhile, the Irish are getting similar treatment [to the Greeks], as the country’s elites try to scare voters into backing the EU’s permanent austerity treaty in a referendum later this month.

Crucial to the campaign has been the threat that Ireland will be denied future emergency bailout funds for its own shrinking economy if the treaty is rejected.

…But in both cases, the threats are phoney. The legal basis of the treaty clause the Irish government is claiming would cut off future bailout funds is strongly contested and the prospect unrealistic.

…There is now a strong likelihood that [Greece] will end up leaving the euro, whichever way it turns – and that may well offer Greece the most realistic chance of eventual recovery. But it’s not what parties such as Syriza are demanding. Instead, its leader Alexis Tsipras has been in Paris and Berlin this week calling for a halt to Greece’s debt repayments, and negotiations with Europe’s leaders on a new deal.

The stronger the vote for anti-austerity parties, the better the chance that those negotiations could produce more than cosmetic results. That’s because the threat of a disorderly Greek default – which could still take place inside the euro – has the potential to trigger a cascade of bank runs and knock-on crises across the eurozone whose impact could dwarf the Lehmans crash of 2008.

 

In Or Out Of The Eurozone, We Must Ditch This Failed Model (Seumas Milne, The Guardian)

(Laura Hutton/Photocall Ireland)

Director of The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre, Anthony Coughlan and Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan in Buswell’s Hotel this afternoon launching the ‘Farmers for No’ campaign, which is composed of past and present Officers of both the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) and the Irish Cattle and Sheepfarmers Association.

And also at Buswell’s:

From left Sinn Fein’s Eoin O Broin, Pearse Doherty and Senator Kathryn Reilly addressing elements of the Treaty designed to enforce stringent debt and deficit rules.

(Laura Hutton/Photocall Ireland)