Podemos

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves – Spain Officially Becomes a Police State

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On July 1st, 2015, Spain officially became a police state. There’s simply no other way to put it. The “gag law” passed late last year went into effect on that date, and if you still have any doubt about how extreme and oppressive these laws are, let’s take a quick look at a summary published by The Local:

1) Fines for protesting

Under the new law, anyone who organizes or takes part in an “unauthorized protest” could be fined between €30,000 and €600,000 if the protest takes part near institutions such as the Spanish parliament.

2) Distrupting public events

Disrupting events such as public speeches, sports events or religious ceremonies could face fines of between €600 and €300,000.

3) Botellón

The Spanish tradition of getting together with mates for outdoor drinking sessions looks to be officially over – drinking in public will be hit with fines of €600 under the new law. And teenagers won’t escape – Parents will be held responsible for the payment of their offsprings’ fines.

4) Social media activism

Using Twitter, Facebook or Instagram to call on people to protest will be fined under the new law, an attempt to put paid to the spontaneous protests that have proved very powerful in building the indignado movement.

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Is Greece About to Play its Geopolitical Trump Card and Ignite a Chain Reaction Across Europe?

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If the EMU powers persist mechanically with their stale demands – even reverting to terms that the previous pro-EMU government in Athens rejected in December – they risk setting off a political chain-reaction that can only eviscerate the EU Project as a motivating ideology in Europe. 

Forced Grexit would entrench a pervasive suspicion that EU bodies are ultimately agents of creditor enforcement. It would expose the Project’s post-war creed of solidarity as so much humbug.

Greece could not plausibly remain in Nato if ejected from EMU in acrimonious circumstances. It would drift into the Russian orbit, where Hungary’s Viktor Orban already lies. The southeastern flank of Europe’s security system would fall apart.

Mr Tsipras is now playing the Russian card with an icy ruthlessness, more or less threatening to veto fresh EU measures against the Kremlin as the old set expires. “We disagree with sanctions. The new European security architecture must include Russia,” he told the TASS news agency. 

He offered to turn Greece into a strategic bridge, linking the two Orthodox nations. “Russian-Greek relations have very deep roots in history,” he said, hitting all the right notes before his trip to Moscow next week.

– From Ambrose Evans Pritchard’s article in the Telegraph: Greek Defiance Mounts as Alexis Tsipras Turns to Russia and China.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve at times been a strong critic of Greek leadership’s seeming unwillingness to demonstrate the courage necessary to flip the bird to EU bureaucrats and usher in paradigm level change for the long suffering nation. At the core of the problem seems the be the mandate under which Syriza was elected — namely to end austerity, but remain in the euro.

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