By Clara Weiss - 16 April 2012

As has been done in countries around the world, the Russian government is using the global economic crisis to deepen its attack on the working class...The austerity program being prepared by the Kremlin, which is supported by all factions of the ruling elite, will fuel social tensions. The Russian population has already experienced a significant decline in its living standards in the past three years alone.

America's economy is headed for further decline.

Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and Spain replicate Greece in slow motion, gain speed, and head toward a similar train wreck. France, the Netherlands, and other troubled European Union economies follow close behind.

By Alejandro López - 3 April 2012

On Friday, Spain’s Popular Party government announced €27.3 billion (US$36.4 billion) in cuts to the 2012 budget. With cuts equivalent to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the budget is the most austere since the fascist dictatorship...The latest measures come on top of the €15 billion in cuts pushed through by the social democrat Spanish Socialist Workers Party government of José Zapatero in May 2010.

By Ellen Hodgson Brown - Dissident Voice

The debt curve that began its exponential rise in 1974 tilted toward the vertical in 1981, when interest rates were raised by the U.S. Federal Reserve to 20%...Canadian rates went as high as 22% during that period. Canada has now paid over a trillion Canadian dollars in interest on its federal debt — nearly twice the debt itself. If it had been borrowing from its own bank all along, it could be not only debt-free but sporting a hefty budget surplus today. That is true for other countries as well.

By Bruce Campbell - rabble.ca

The 2012 federal budget, which purports to deliver "jobs, growth and long-term prosperity," does nothing of the kind. Make no mistake, this is an austerity budget -- spending cuts out-pace new measures 7:1 -- that worsens income and inter-generational inequality, destroys jobs and locks in a slow growth, high unemployment future.

Fall 2007 began the onset of America's greatest Depression. Europe's in deep trouble. Reckoning day's delayed by bailing out insolvent banks and throwing money at markets like confetti.

By Paul Mitchell - 23 March 2012

Portugal was paralyzed by a general strike yesterday, as workers demonstrated against austerity measures and labour reforms...The Lisbon metro...stayed closed. Train, bus and ferry companies in the capital and the second-largest city, Porto, ran few services. Many schools, hospitals, courts, government offices, post offices, libraries, museums, refuse collection services and ports were also affected.

By Kellie Tranter - Znet

It's most instructive to read carefully the Stratfor emails WikiLeaks released recently...Their language and tone are alarming: both brutal and ruthless, in my view they reflect all that is wrong with a world now programmed to a rampant neo-liberal economic model that is underpinned by Machiavelli's philosophy of power...Machiavelli's philosophy is now found in the boardroom as well as on the battlefield and in government.

By Mike Head - WSWS

According to one estimate...the government will face a deficit this year approaching $50 billion...This inevitably means drastic reductions in social spending, services and public sector jobs, wages and conditions, on top of those inflicted in last year’s budget. That budget contained savings of $22 billion over four years, featuring cuts to welfare entitlements for the unemployed, disabled and single parents.

Americans have been impoverished to pay bankers and wage imperial wars.

By Michael Laxer - rabble.ca

One has to hand it to the neo-liberal ideologues and the neo-conservative political movement in Canada; they have managed to get all political parties, the mainstream media and most of the population on board the "tax relief" train. To one degree or another, they kneel at the alter of this ultimate false god...And in the wake of round-after-round of federal and provincial income, sales and corporate tax cuts, the threat of severe austerity measures grows as each year passes.

By Murray Dobbin - February 27, 2012

You can say one thing for the powers that be in the banking industry. They've got a lot of nerve...This past week, our own finance minister, Jim Flaherty, along with Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, came out strongly in opposition to a modest proposal to regulate the U.S. banking system...Their interventions followed a concerted effort by American bank lobbyists to spark international opposition to U.S. regulatory reforms.

By Edwin Black - Znet

Newly-released documents expose more explicitly the details of IBM's pivotal role in the Holocaust - all six phases: identification, expulsion from society, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination. Moreover, the documents portray with crystal clarity the personal involvement and micro-management of IBM president Thomas J. Watson in the company's co-planning and co-organizing of Hitler's campaign to destroy the Jews.

Greece is being systematically raped, pillaged and destroyed. Bankers demand it. What they want, they get, no matter the human toll and economic ruin.