Tipping point economic, “threatening stability of the entire eurozone” [Update: London police brutally "kettle" children]

From Dateline Zero -

Original post: Nov 22. Last update: Nov 26. (Updates follow original post)

Here in the United States, many people find it maddening, outrageous, and even dangerous when Washington DC finds it all-too-easy to simply bailout huge companies and banks. The reasoning behind these Washington bailouts is to maintain a steady and predictable American economy — something I think is frankly impossible; and further, intervention only makes things worse.

What is happening in Europe right now is possibly even more insane than in the US. Britain is apparently ready to bailout entire countries! Ireland was only the latest, as Britain talks about also bailing out Portugal and Spain. This is an effort to prevent country-wide economic collapse that would trigger something awful in Europe.

Again, I think this is not only impossible — but government intervention only exasperates the problems, rather than healing them.

Protesters break through front gate of PM’s office…

Who will we have to bail out next? Britain pays out as Ireland implodes

■ Chancellor George Osborne faced dissent from his own back benches as he insisted loans and guarantees of up to £10billion to Ireland were simply helping a ‘friend in need’.
■ Banking shares crashed.
■ The euro sank as the bailout failed to ease fears about the debt contagion.
■ Demonstrators took to the streets of Dublin and Ireland’s coalition government appeared to be imploding.

Experts warned that the joint European and International Monetary Fund bailout package might have to be postponed, threatening the stability of the entire eurozone, after a snap general election was called in Ireland.

Prime minister Brian Cowen, who at one stage had appeared on the brink of quitting, was instead forced to announce a poll early next year after his Green Party coalition partners effectively pulled the plug on the government.
…
In Dublin, police had to eject a number of protesters, some from Sinn Féin, who forced their way into government buildings.

In Westminster, Mr Osborne told MPs it was “overwhelmingly in Britain’s national interest” to support a major trading partner with which it had an ‘interconnected’ banking system. “Ireland is a friend in need and we are here to help,” the Chancellor declared.

Rescue Would Dwarf Greek Bailout…

Portugal on the brink…

Spain Will Be ‘the Biggie’…

IMF faces questions over Irish bailout…

UPDATE: Nov 26

This is damn stunning; and I think it evidences a badly deteriorating situation in England.

London police brutally kettle children marching for education.

Cory Doctorow’s comments from Boing Boing:

Writing in the New Statesman, Laurie Penny documents the brutal, savage treatment dealt to the London demonstrators who marched against cuts to education and found themselves “kettled” (detained without arrest, toilet, shelter, or charge) for eight hours in freezing weather; many of those kettled were children and young teens, as well as pregnant women.

From the article Doctorow was commenting on:

Laurie Penny

Take a protest, one whose premise is uncomfortable for the administration – say, yesterday’s protest, with thousands of teenagers from all over London walking out of lessons and marching spontaneously on Westminster to voice their anger at government cuts to education funding which will prevent thousands from attending college and university. Toss in hundreds of police officers with riot shields, batons, dogs, armoured horses and meat wagons, then block the protesters into an area of open space with no toilets, food or shelter, for hours. If anyone tries to leave, shout at them and hit them with sticks. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s effective.

I didn’t understand quite how bad things had become in this country until I saw armoured cops being deployed against schoolchildren in the middle of Whitehall.
…
The chant goes up: “what do we want? The right to protest!” At first, the cops give curt answers to the kids demanding to know why they can’t get through. Then they all seem to get some sort of signal, because suddenly the polite copper in front of me is screaming in my face, shoving me hard in the back of the head, raising his baton, and the protesters around me are yelling and running back. Some of them have started to shake down a set of iron railings to get out, and the cops storm forward, pushing us right through those railings, leaving twenty of us sprawling in the rubble of road works with cracked knees.

When they realised that they are trapped, the young protesters panic. The crush of bodies is suddenly painful – my scarf is ripped away from me and I can hear my friend Clare calling for her son – and as I watch the second line of police advance, with horses following behind them, as I watch a surge of teenagers carrying a rack of iron railings towards the riot guard and howling to be released, I realise they’re not going to stop, and the monkey instinct kicks in. I scramble up a set of traffic lights, just in time to see a member of the Metropolitan police grab a young protester by the neck and hurl him back into the crowd…

As darkness falls and we realise we’re not going anywhere, the protesters start to light fires to keep warm. First, they burn their placards, the words ‘rich parents for all!’ going up in flames, with a speed and efficiency gleaned from recent CV-boosting outdoor camping activities. Then, as the temperature drops below freezing, they start looking for anything else to burn, notebooks and snack wrappers – although one young man in an anarchist scarf steps in to stop me tossing an awful historical novel onto the pyre. “You can’t burn books,” he says, “we’re not Nazis.”
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The point of a police kettle is to make you feel small and scared, to strike at the childish part of every person that’s frightened of getting in trouble. You and I know, however, that we’re already in trouble. All we get to decide is what kind of trouble we want to be in. Yesterday, the children of Britain made their decision, and we should be bloody proud of them today.

–New Statesman, “Inside the Whitehall Kettle.”

Read Laurie Penny’s account of the original student protests, where dozens of students attacked the Conservative party’s HQ here. You can follow her on Twitter here.