Once again, despite its repeated fine words, the European Parliament this afternoon placed the interests of big business before workers' and human rights. It voted overwhelmingly (486 to 147, with 41 abstaining) to consent to the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Colombia and Peru. MEPs have been inundated with emails and reports from NGOs, human rights organisations and activists seeking for them to vote against this report, given the systematic abuses of human rights in Colombia. After all of these emails, we also received one seeking for us to vote in favour – this one came from BusinessEurope, EuroCommerce, the European Spirits Organisation, Diageo and other big business organisations. Guess which had more weight!

On 27 November 2012, the Eurogroup (comprising the Eurozone’s finance ministers) reached a decision on Greece. Its essence is a guarantee that Greece will remain in the Eurozone (and therefore off the Northern European agenda) for another ten to twelve months; at the very least until the German federal political cycle has seen through the election of a new Bundestag. The repercussions of this short-sighted agreement are grave not only for Greece but for the Eurozone, and indeed the European Union, more broadly.

To accomplish the task of taking Greece off the minds of markets and Northern European electorates for this space of time, Eurogroup ministers came to an agreement with the IMF on how to patch up their conflicting agendas on Greece by means of a joint communiqué according to which Greece’s derailed Bailout Mk2 is, supposedly, back on track. The basis of their agreement is twofold:

The great success of societies that are as spectacularly unequal as the US is the indoctrination of the populace into believing that in so far as they are excluded from the wealth of such societies it is because of their own inadequacies. By Vincent Browne.

There is an impulse to dismiss political rhetoric as just so much blather, harmless blather.

But there is much more to it, for very often such rhetoric taps into and works to legitimise certain shared ideas, helping them to achieve the status of unassailable and obvious “truths” that generate power to persuade a populace of the “common sense” of ideas, that persuade people of the necessity to support policies that, manifestly, are against their interests. For instance, of the “necessity” for huge disparities of power, income and wealth.

"Any violence by a large population is not because this people is more violent than any other. It's an alarm, it's a sign, it's a signal; that something is wrong in the treatment of this population." - Occupation 101 (Film embedded as a playlist below)

Street battles broke out and large parts of Europe were paralysed yesterday as millions of workers walked off their jobs in the biggest coordinated EU strike ever. By Jerome Roos.

Europe’s Mediterranean rim trembled on Wednesday as violent clashes broke out following the largest coordinated multinational strike in Europe ever. In the hope of staving off decades of austerity, precarity and unemployment, European labor unions united for the first time since the start of the European debt crisis to organise strikes and protests in a total of 23 EU member states, with millions of workers walking off their jobs and marching on parliament buildings across the continent. Bloody street battles ensued in Spain, Portugal and Italy.

Above: Plaza del Sol, Madrid (via Izquierda Undia).

Approximately 40 trade union organisations from 23 countries are staging a European day of action and solidarity today (14 November) with the aim of calling on Europe's leaders "to demonstrate their determination to really get to grips with the deterioration in employment and to respond to the growing social anxiety felt by Europe’s citizens". 

John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust over the placement of missiles in Cuba which, he acknowledged privately, made no difference to American security. By Vincent Browne.

Today, I want to overlook the great issues of our time: the forthcoming austerity budget; the jailing of one of our foremost business icons; the bank debt that is not ours; the shame of Angela Merkel's commendation that our austerity makes Europe stronger.

I even wish to ignore the outrageously disproportionate 96-week ban imposed by a GAA county board on a conscientious father, who had merely remonstrated with a Newcastle West player for annoying his son, who had been playing for Broadford-Dromcollogher in the Limerick football final championship on 21 October. (The game ended in a draw and Broadford-Drum won the replay, which just proves my point.)

Last week’s unprecedented inundation of New York and, simultaneously, an almost-routine immersion of Venice both highlighted capitalism’s indifference to the fragility of urban life, writes Harry Browne.

My mother, it appeared, was right in the path of the storm. The home Flavia shares with her husband (he is, I’m afraid, really called Sandy) is in a little place called Bridgeton, New Jersey; and in the hours before what we were then calling Frankenstorm made landfall, none other than Bridgeton looked like the first full-fledged town over which its centre was projected to pass. I thought of the big trees that tower over her garden, and the flood-prone river that flows below it, and I worried.

My worry carried extra layers of guilt and affection, because as the storm approached I was preparing to set off with my family on a quick birthday trip to sunny Italy, to the region where my mother fled to give birth to me nearly a half-century ago. (It’s a long story.) By the time we got to Venice, however, I knew she and her rural American town were fine - Sandy, the storm that is, wimped out as it struck land - and the real trouble was further north. My brother’s Brooklyn neighbourhood was convulsed by the deaths of a young couple who picked the wrong time to walk their dog: a falling branch killed them both. My sister-in-law and her family were without power, and would stay that way for days.