A peaceful protest against budget cuts in education in Valencia, Spain on Tuesday ended in bloody police repression. Conjuring up memories of Franco’s brutal dictatorship, squads of riot police violently assaulted a group of some 300 students, arresting at least 26 and leaving scores injured. Tuesday’s demonstrations, which come a day after over a million Spaniards took to the streets to contest the government’s labor reforms, marked the fourth straight day of student protests in Spain’s third largest city. The images coming out of Valencia have already caused widespread indignation on social media and in the Spanish press, and are likely to feed into further protests in the days ahead. Solidarity demonstrations have been called in Madrid and Barcelona. As we previously pointed out after the crackdowns in Barcelona, New York and Oakland, this type of police violence will, in the end, only further reinvigorate resistance…
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Filed under: New World Order Politics Video money
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The annual Munich Security Conference is regularly the scene for the complaints of American official and semiofficial participants deploring Europe’s failure “to pull its weight” in defense, “free-riding” on American efforts, and failing to spend more money on trans-Atlantic arms purchases. Instead they spend money on their own-make arms and military aircraft, such as the French Rafale and EADS’ Eurofighter, which they sell to such overseas markets as India that might otherwise buy American.
Courtesy restrains the European participants from asking what the threat is, against which Europe is being defended by the United States. The complaint reasonable Americans usually make in this matter is that the U.S. is massively over-armed against any existing or plausible future threat to the United States itself.
Surely 11 nuclear carrier groups with accompanying support is not required to fight the remnants of al-Qaida, nor have they proven decisive against the Taliban in Afghanistan….
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Filed under: Military/War Politics
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