The bank holiday in Cyprus that was supposed to end Thursday has been extended again which has done little to ease the anxiety of Cypriots desperate to withdraw their savings for fear of having them taxed. Unrest has been breaking out around banks with people protesting for “dignity” and voicing opposition against any plans to tax deposits to pay for a bailout.

Across Europe, the economic crisis is driving communities to deep desperation, and the people who were always at the margins are getting pushed straight off the edge.

Under misguided austerity policies, unemployment has reached devastating levels in the euro zone–reaching 12 percent across the region and topping 50 percent for youth in Spain and Greece. But some communities are sinking faster than others. Struggling migrant communities–both economic immigrants and refugees–are more neglected by the state’s social infrastructure than ever, while their native-born neighbors turn against them in a rash of xenophobic scapegoating.

Austerity has created a nation no longer on the road to ruin, but taking up residence there.

And we peons are not going to be allowed to peak behind the curtain to discover how the world banking system helped take down the global economy.

Greece’s international creditors have delivered a minor lifeline to the ruined country, extending the deadline for when they must meet EU budget targets by two years. However, at the same time, the Eurozone finance ministers delayed the releast of a new tranche of bailout funds from Greece, worth 31.5 billion euro.

There are riots in Greece precisely because they have engaged in long-term austerity measures, the equivalent of, I don’t know, cutting $4-5 trillion from the budget over ten years. In particular, the Greek rioters object to raising the retirement age, an exact parallel for the potential grand bargain measure of raising the Medicare eligibility age.

The problem is that nations and their citizens owe a lot of money to the hyper-rich bastards who try to steal elections and keep us stupid so we won’t notice the oceans crashing into our cities or ask how the financial crisis happened. They want control so they can force us to repay those loans.

Just once, I’d like to hear a politician point out that there is an easy way to pay those debts: we tax the hell out of the plutocrats and use that money to “shore up the banks and pay off loans”.

Well now the Greek’s Conservative Party run government can get the economic aid they were promised by the Germans and others. And it is sad that they had to do that to their people — to make so many suffer — but I’m sure they had no choice…

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2012 has been awarded to the European Union, in what the Nobel Committee describes as a kind of lifetime achievement award for keeping Europe mostly out of war with one another since 1945.

“The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2012 is to be awarded to the European Union (EU). The union and its forerunners have for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.”

The Greek government submitted a draft budget for next year that would only further increase the pain and suffering directed at the population, despite depression conditions. But the European leaders determining whether the fresh austerity plan is good enough to meet their conditions want even more pain, in the form of deeper wage cuts.