Europe's striking warning to US that austerity is no solution to fiscal cliff

As Obama opens the debate on the US's fiscal cliff, Europe is brought to a standstill by protests at cuts to the social safety net

Amy Goodman
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 November 2012 12.07 EST
Amaia Engana didn't wait to be evicted from her home. On 9 November, in the town of Barakaldo, a suburb of Bilbao in Spain's Basque country, officials from the local judiciary were on their way to serve her eviction papers. Amaia threw herself out of her fifth-floor apartment window, dying instantly on impact on the sidewalk below. She was the second person in two weeks in Spain to commit suicide as a result of an impending foreclosure action.

Her suicide has added gravity to this week's general strike radiating from the streets of Madrid to across all of Europe. As resistance to so-called austerity in Europe becomes increasingly transnational and coordinated, President Barack Obama and the House Republicans begin their debate to avert the "fiscal cliff". The fight is over fair tax rates, budget priorities and whether we as a society will sustain the social safety net built during the past 80 years.