European protests 2011-12

Exactly one year ago today, on September 17, 2011, activists began camping out in New York’s Zuccotti Park, the spearhead of a new movement that soon spread around the world. Known as Occupy Wall Street, and inspiring a movement that became known as the Occupy movement, the New York encampment was inspired by an Adbusters [...]

There was a point, during yesterday’s Occupy protest in the City of London, with hundreds of people flowing down High Viaduct from Holborn Circus, high above Farringdon Street, and heading towards Newgate Street, Cheapside and the Bank of England, when there was a real power to the message that protestors around the world are sending [...]

After returning to the streets en masse on May 1, the global Occupy movement will be active in towns and cities worldwide from Saturday May 12 to Tuesday May 15, as the next phase of what Occupy supporters, and those in other allied movements, are calling the “Global Spring.” Below is an introduction to the [...]

On Wednesday, the coalition government delivered a dud Queen’s Speech demonstrating that they have run out of ideas, apart from insisting, like deranged automata, that their inflexibility and lack of vision is actually helpful. In the House of Commons, David Cameron claimed that the Queen’s Speech was “about a government taking the tough, long-term decisions [...]

So what’s happening in Europe? Voters in France and Greece delivered huge swings to Socialists at the weekend, with François Hollande replacing Nicolas Sarkozy as the French President, and an alliance of left-wing parties taking second place in the Parliamentary elections in Greece, and breaking the long-established hold on power of New Democracy and Pasok. [...]

I’ve known about the Occupy movement’s May Day General Strike for ages, ever since a good friend, an activist in Denver, posted an excellent promotional poster back in the middle of February (see the bottom of this article), and while I didn’t need any reminding about the date, as I’ve been a May Day supporter [...]

“Despair has enveloped Greece. This weekend the bankrupt nation, for that is what it is, began negotiating the latest act of a drama that many fear will end in catastrophe — financially, socially and politically.” These are the opening words of an article for the Observer by Helena Smith, who has reported from Athens for [...]

As the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) delivered some “chilling words on the euro debt crisis” (as the Daily Telegraph described it), warning that policy makers around the world must “be prepared to face the worst,” and that the “euro area crisis represents the key risk to the world economy at present,” and [...]

Delighted though I am to see the back of Silvio Berlusconi, no one should be reassured that his replacement, the unelected technocrat and former EU commissioner Mario Monti — or another unelected technocrat, Lucas Papademos, a former vice-president of the European Central Bank., who has taken over in Greece from former Prime Minister George Papandreou [...]

In response to the ongoing Greek financial crisis, which I discussed in my article on Saturday, Crisis in Greece: Experts Call for Return of the Drachma, As Prime Minister Cancels Bailout Referendum, I was directed by my friend George Kenneth Berger to a video of the Spanish author and professor Pedro Olalla, who has been [...]