Activists surround eurozone bankers
Friday 31 May 2013
German anti-capitalists blocked the roads surrounding the European Central Bank in Frankfurt today in protest at its obsession with inflicting damaging austerity on the continent.
The “Blockupy” protest took place as statistics agency Eurostat said the eurozone jobless rate had hit a record 12.2 per cent in April.
At that pace, more than 20 million people across the 17-country bloc will be out of work by the end of the year.
A bank spokesman said it was still working despite the 3,000 protesters linking arms and ringing the building in the howling wind and rain.
Police escorted some bankers through the metal barricades they had erected and others worked from home.
But Blockupy hailed the protest as a success.
“We wanted to blockade the ECB and we did that with more than 3,000 people,” said spokesman Roland Suess.
The group said it wanted to underline the ECB role in promoting austerity alongside the European Commission and the IMF.
The so-called troika has been at the centre of the crippling spending cuts that EU capitalists claim are to intended to tackle “out-of-control” government deficits.
Their main success has been in putting people out of work.
The sharpest rise was in Cyprus, which saw unemployment leap nearly a whole point to 15.6 per cent.
The island was plunged further into crisis when EU financiers tried to plunder people’s savings in return for a bailout loan.

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