The BBC has decided not to play “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead,” even though it’s soared to the top of the charts and the BBC has a tradition of playing top-of-the-charts music.
But there’s plenty of other music [ht: tm] to mark the Iron Lady’s time in power.
The motto of the Portuguese government of Pedro Passos Coelho appears to be, if at first you don’t succeed in imposing austerity—because the Constitutional Court struck down more than $1.3 billion in austerity measures—then try, try again—by cutting social security, health, education, and public enterprises.
“Today, we are still not out of the financial emergency which placed us in this painful crisis,” [Coelho] said.
“After this decision by the Constitutional Court, it’s not just the government’s life that will become more difficult, it is the life of the Portuguese that will become more difficult and make the success of our national economic recovery more problematic.”
As Alison Roberts explains,
The drive to cut spending on welfare comes as ever more people in Portugal are relying on it.
Unemployment is at a record high and the government does not see it peaking – at around 19% – until late this year.
It is not as though the areas now being targeted are not being squeezed already.
In health, for example – seen as one of Portugal’s success stories since its 1974 revolution – patients have long had to pay a small fee for check-ups and tests in the SNS, the national health service, unless they fall into one of several categories of exemption. The fees were raised sharply last year.
Meanwhile, as elsewhere in Europe, technological advances and an ageing population are pushing health spending up.
The recession has also seen many people who once had private insurance going public, adding to the burden. The health minister – one of the most respected in the government – had even said that no further cuts were possible.
Opposition parties accuse the prime minister of using the court ruling as an excuse to press ahead with an ideologically-driven plan to roll back the state.
Austerity has repeatedly provoked mass protests, so some of those who celebrated Friday’s court ruling may soon be demonstrating against the government’s proposed replacement measures.
Greek seamen and farmers continued their protests against austerity measures imposed to satisfy international lenders.
The Greek government is holding talks with the protesters but refuses to budge on any demands that might undermine its deficit cutting efforts, a condition of bailout funds and debt relief from the European Union and International Monetary Fund.
Greece last month invoked rarely used emergency powers to break a strike of subway workers, serving military-style orders instructing them to return to work or face arrest.
Greece’s biggest labor union has called a general 24-hour strike for 20 February.
Workers are participating in anti-austerity strikes and protests across Europe—in France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and Britain—as part of the European Day of Action and Solidarity.
While unemployment in Greece soars above 24 percent, and pensioners are occupying the Health Ministry, the coalition government is hammering out a new ($14.4 billion) austerity package for 2013-14, demanded by rescue creditors from other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund.
The new cuts, though not yet finalized, are likely to see further cuts to benefits as well as pensions and several groups of employees on the state payroll, including the police, as well as an increase in the private-sector work week to six days.
And this is going to get Greece out of the current mess how?
Protests are spreading to other mines in South Africa, and more miners shot by police, while the murder charges against the original group of miners at Lonmin have been temporarily withdrawn and debate continues to rage over what happened on the day of the Lonmin massacre.
Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, the mayor of a small town in rural Andalusia, led farm laborers into supermarkets to expropriate basic living supplies.
“Utopias aren’t chimeras, they are the most noble dreams that people have. The dream of equality; the dream that housing should belong to everyone, because you are a person, and not a piece of merchandise to be speculated with; the dream that natural resources – for instance energy – shouldn’t be in the service of multinationals, but in the service of the people. All those dreams are the dreams we’d like to turn into realities. First, in the place where we live, with the knowledge that we’re surrounded by capitalism everywhere; and later, in Andalusia, and the world.”
Richard Seymour and the commentators on his essay mention many other examples of civil disobedience, from the “flying squadrons” of pickets during the U.S. textile strike of 1934 to the Blockupation of Frankfurt.
In each of these examples, the key question is neither violence nor non-violence, neither legality, nor illegality; it is disruption. Popular movements are engaged in civil disobedience whenever they recognise the society’s dependence on their co-operation, cease co-operating, and actively disrupt its smooth functioning. This moves politicians to spittle-lathered furore. It is the way in which progress is made.
Not surprisingly, given the right-wing policies and causes he’s advocated, I’ve had occasion to refer to and comment on Paul Ryan over the course of the last few years.
Here are some examples:
Starve the beast—and the poor and the elderly—and feed the rich, Gilding the new gilded age, and It’s cheap and easy to screw the poor (on Ryan’s budget plan, the so-called “Path to Prosperity”)
The blame game (on Ryan’s applauding of Standard & Poor’s downgrading of U.S. debt)
Taxing our Galtian overlords (on Ryan’s love affair with Arthur Brooks and Ayn Rand)
Cairo has come out in support of Wisconsin workers and Cairo has come to Wisconsin? (on Ryan’s support of Wisconsin’s Scott Walker)
And, now that he’s Romney’s pick for vice-president, I’m sure there will be more to come. . .
Firefighters of the Mieres Fire Station in Asturias, northern Spain, pose with a sign reading ”From so many cuts we have been left naked,” to protest against new austerity measures.
Tens of thousands of protesters across 80 cities demonstrated against the $80 billion austerity package approved by parliament, which includes pay cuts for civil workers, an increase in sales taxes, benefits cuts, and a rise in the retirement age.
A valuable reminder of the need to move beyond shopping to save the world—to go green or to replace capitalist exploitation. . .
