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Arabica Robusta

The Corporate Assault on Latin American Democracy » CounterPunch: Tells the F... - 0 views

  • In recent years, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia have withdrawn from the ICSID Convention, all for similar reasons. These governments cling to the quaint notion that their societies’ resources ought to belong to the people who live there, and they view the ICSID as a way to grease the skids for the continued pillaging of said resources (which is usually accompanied, of course, by environmental degradation).
  • In any case, a withdrawal from the ICSID is not a shield from claims by private interests, and states like Venezuela and Ecuador are still staring at billions of dollars in potential compensatory payments stemming from a number of cases over the last decade. States cannot simply ignore these judgments, as it would be viewed like a sovereign default, with all the economic risk that entails.
  • As a recent McClatchy piece on a high-profile dispute between Oceana Gold Corp. and the government of El Salvador put it, “international investment laws are empowering corporations to act against foreign governments that curtail their future profits, “ and the ICSID is the vehicle these corporations are using to ensure that these profits are not threatened.
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  • … over two thousand bilateral and regional trade and investment agreements signed in the last few decades have created new rights for transnational corporations, including rights that humans don’t have: corporations have acquired the right to settle anywhere they want and bring with them any personnel they decide they need, they are allowed to repatriate profits without restrictions and even to litigate against governments in demand of profits lost because of democratically decided policies, not through local courts but via international arbitration panels shaped to defend business interests and where human rights do not necessarily prevail.
  • El Salvador effectively banned mining in 2008 and the policy has enjoyed bipartisan support there. This particular case, then – and there are other similar ones – raises very fundamental question about politics and sovereignty.
  • Although a tribunal recently judged that Venezuela has to pay ExxonMobil $1.6 billion for appropriated oil assets – a judgment that is now suspended as Venezuela seeks further amendments – the oil giant was seeking nearly ten times that amount, and the decision was hailed as a victory by the Maduro government.
Arabica Robusta

After Greece: Can the Left Change Europe? » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Na... - 0 views

  • The public consciousness is, at last, aware of the issues of financial regulation, wealth distribution and the means of production. But questions relating to religion regularly push these into the background (1).
  • Nikos Filis, editor of Avgi, a newspaper with, as main shareholder, the radical left coalition Syriza (2), came to a different conclusion: “The attack may orientate Europe’s future: either towards Le Pen and the far right, or towards a more reasoned approach to the problem. Because security needs cannot be met by the police alone.”
  • “If Syriza had been less intransigent on standing for the rights of immigrants, we would already have 50% of the votes. But this choice is one of the few points on which we all agree.”
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  • They scarcely existed five years ago but now they look like credible candidates to exercise power; and they may be able to relegate their countries’ socialist parties — which share responsibility for the general financial disaster since 2008 — to a supporting role, just as Britain’s Labour Party supplanted the Liberal Party, and France’s Socialist Party supplanted the Radical Party (3). Those changes were permanent.
  • In Athens, that nowhere is all too clear. But austerity’s cruelty, with social and health consequences extending to hunger, cold and increases in infectious diseases and suicides, does not necessarily mean a change of policy (4). Austerity’s architects are well paid to have nerves of steel.
  • Syriza has calculated precisely that free electricity, public transport, emergency food for the poorest and vaccines for children could be financed through more aggressive anti-corruption and anti-fraud measures. The outgoing conservative government admitted that these deprived the public coffers of at least €10bn a year.
  • These measures are not up for negotiation with other parties or the country’s creditors, Milios insists: “They are questions of national sovereignty; they won’t add anything to our deficit. We are therefore intending to implement this policy whatever the outcome of debt renegotiations.”
  • In these circumstances, the European conference on debt that Tsipras called for two years ago in this publication (6) could become a realistic prospect. Ireland’s finance minister backs the idea, and it has a historical precedent in the 1953 conference that cancelled Germany’s war debts, including what it owed to Greece. Syriza hopes the conference it is calling for will provide “the alternative solution which will bury austerity for good.”
  • Merkel has threatened Greece with expulsion from the euro if its government breaks the budgetary or financial disciplines to which Germany is so attached. The Greeks want both to loosen austerity policies and to remain in the single currency. Those wishes are shared by Syriza (8), because a small, exhausted country cannot fight on all fronts at once. “We’ve been the troika’s guinea pigs. We don’t want to become the guinea pigs for a euro exit,” says Valia Kaimaki, a journalist with links to Syriza. “Let a bigger country, such as Spain or France, go first.”
  • Moulopoulos believes that “without European support, it will not be possible to do anything at all.” That is why Syriza accords importance to support from forces beyond the radical left and the Greens, in particular the Socialists. Yet the Greeks have had experience of the surrenders made by social democracy since Andreas Papandreou forced his party to make a major shift towards neoliberalism 30 years ago. “If he had stayed on the left, there would have been no Syriza,” says Moulopoulos. “In Germany too, when Oskar Lafontaine resigned from the government [in 1999], he expressed regret that social democracy had become incapable of even the most insignificant reforms. Globalisation and neoliberalism with a human face completely destroyed it.”
  • Electoral victory for Syriza, or for Podemos in Spain, could demonstrate, contrary to what Hollande or Matteo Renzi in Italy say, the viability of a European politics that rejected austerity. That would challenge more than the German right.
  • Now the threat is much greater. “If we don’t change Europe, the far right will do it for us,” Tsipras has warned. It has become even more urgent to be bold.
  • The task for the left in Greece and Spain, on which much depends, is hard enough without adding onto their shoulders the heavy responsibility of defending Europe’s democratic destiny, and averting a “clash of civilisations”. But that is what is at stake.
Arabica Robusta

Brexit: A Nail in the Coffin of Neo-colonialism in Africa | Black Agenda Report - 0 views

  • For some, Brexit has called into question the purpose of the EU and for some white liberals it has sparked concern over the possibility that it marks the end of internationalism.
  • The 1993 formalizing of the EU was for Africa no different than the 1884 Berlin Conference where Europe united to regulate and cooperate in its Scramble for Africa during heightened colonial activity by European powers. This predecessor union of Europe eliminated or overrode most existing forms of African autonomy and self-governance. Today in Africa the EU plays the role of enforcing neo-colonialism through its Africa Working Party (COAFR) and so-called Africa-EU Strategic Partnership that ensure neo-liberal economic policies dominate Africa. We can be sure that when the partnership claims to cooperate on issues like governance and human rights it is not talking about how European countries are governed or human rights abuses in those countries. It is based on the paternalistic premise that Africa is inherently savage and contemporarily corrupt and naturally prone to abusing human rights.
  • elieving Brexit could represent the beginning of the end for international cooperation, as some have put it, is to believe that the world does or should revolve around Europe. The late Pan-Africanist Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael) pointed out that those whose thinking is dominated by Euro-centrism and white supremacy often mistakenly “make the particular history of Europe the general history of the world.”
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  • The epic tug-of-war between the internationalism of communist versus capitalist was not the only type of internationalism to emerge from the 20th century. A non-Western Euro-centric reflection recognizes the history of the movement for Pan-Africanism in the struggle for a united African continent under a socialist government. The original Organization of African Unity (OAU) – now the African Union (AU) – was a direct attempt toward that.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Global currency wars and US imperialism - 0 views

  • What is very curious in the present state of affairs is that, unfortunately, no other country other than China retains those rights. No other major partner (of the G20) has fully retained those rights, although some of the emerging countries such as India and Brazil have done something to that effect. Instead, they have generally accepted the dictates of the US.
  • It is important to understand that this is the central problem. The problem is the global integrated monetary and financial system, ruled as it is by the dollar, that is ruled by the exclusive prerogative of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve, of the US state. This is not acceptable. That is the problem. The problem is not the exchange rate of the Yuan or that of the Rupee or any other currency. Absolutely not.
  • First, for those who assume that the system is not so bad, and who accept that the US dollar should continue to be effectively the major, if not absolutely the exclusive international currency, the idea would be to restore the system as it was before the 2008 financial breakdown along with, perhaps, some minor regulatory reforms (most of which are essentially more cosmetic and rhetorical than real). This is exactly what the Stieglitz Commission and the Stieglitz report aim at. It accepts that the US dollar should remain the almost exclusive international currency (with some minor concessions). But it also accepts the right of the US government to manage the currency exclusively and on its own. As for everyone else, they have to adjust to the US dictates. This is, of course, not acceptable, especially for the South. If the Europeans, the British, the Japanese accept it that is their business. But I don't see why the Asians, the Latin Americans, the Africans should accept it. And it is not accepted, certainly not by China and some of the emerging states - India and Brazil in particular. Although it is not accepted morally by African states, in practice they have completely accepted to submit to its consequences - they have done nothing to respond to the challenge. So, that is the Stieglitz style solution. And it has completely failed. Nobody pays attention to the Stieglitz report, which has been dropped in the waste-basket, and nobody really cares about it. It has not convinced the partners, especially from the South. Even the North does not give any consideration to the recommendations of Stieglitz.
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  • Among those rules needed, a relation to gold cannot be avoided. That is to say, the system cannot be stabilised if there is not a fixed stabiliser. The new international currency unit has to be defined as equivalent to a precise quantity of gold. The gold exchange standard is needed, but not the gold standard as it has been in the Bretton Woods period, that is from 1945 until 1971, when the convertibility of the dollar into gold was suppressed by unilateral decision of the US. During these 30 or so years, in effect it was correct to say that the dollar was as good as gold. But since the 1970s, this is no longer the case.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Why is the "ideal system" underpinned by a fetish connection to gold?  Note that the gold standard was accompanied by feverish attempts to colonize gold producing areas such as South Africa and Peru.
  • Thus, there is only the third alternative. We - that is, the countries of the South, emerging as well as the others - should seek to establish arrangements between ourselves
Arabica Robusta

Now can Podemos win in Spain? - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition - 0 views

  • Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators — whom the world press refer to as los indignados — gathered in the square of Puerta del Sol in Madrid on 15 May 2011, protesting against the banks’ stranglehold on the economy and a democracy they felt no longer represented them. They outlawed flags, insignia and speeches on behalf of organisations and parties, and soon had a slogan: “United, the people do not need parties.”
  • Podemos’s creation stemmed from the realisation that “15-M [15 May] was locked in a social movement-based conception of politics,” said sociologist Jorge Lago, a member of Podemos’s citizens’ council, part of its wider leadership structure. “The idea that a progressive build-up of strength among the demonstrators would inevitably produce political results proved to be false.” Associations to fight tenant evictions and resistance networks against health sector cuts were established, but the movement ran out of steam and fell apart.
  • But what should happen when a government that social movements regard as over-timid comes under fire from conservatives? Should they play into their enemy’s hands by joining the criticism, or keep silent, betraying their cause? There is no easy answer to this.
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  • Half of Spain’s unemployed no longer receive benefits, while 33 of the 35 biggest companies avoid tax through subsidiaries in tax havens (6). Half a million children have been plunged into poverty since 2009, but the wealth of Spain’s super-rich has increased by 67% since Rajoy came to power (7). To avoid the wrath of a fractious population, last December’s “citizen security” law outlawed everything that made the 2011 mobilisation possible, including meetings in public places and distributing leaflets.
  • Spain’s situation may be risky. It makes the far right, Iglesias has pointed out, “as happy as a fish in water” (8). Yet the Spanish left has an advantage over its French counterpart: a large fringe element of the nationalist far right is formally integrated into the PP, which makes it difficult for them to push an anti-system platform, unlike France’s Front National, which has only ever run local councils.
  • “To be specific,” Lago said, “we don’t talk about capitalism. We defend the idea of economic democracy.” Nor is the left-right dichotomy discussed: “The divide,” Iglesias has said, “now separates those, like us, who defend democracy ... and those who are on the side of the elites, the banks, the markets. There are people at the bottom and people at the top ... an elite and the majority.”
  • People looked at them like they were from another planet, and my students went home discouraged ... That’s what the enemy is expecting us to do: use words no one understands, remain a minority, fall back on our traditional symbols. And they know that as long as we do that, we pose no threat to them.”
  • Shaped by Gramscian thought, Podemos leaders believe that the political struggle should not be limited to overthrowing existing social and economic structures, but should also be against the hegemony that legitimises the domination of the powerful in the eyes of those they dominate. In this cultural area, the enemy imposes its codes, language and narrative. And one tool stands out for its ability to shape “common sense” — television.
  • “There’s nothing extremist about Podemos’s programme” (10), Iglesias has said: a constituent assembly on coming to power, tax reforms, debt restructuring, opposition to raising the retirement age to 67, the introduction of a 35-hour week (40 at present), a referendum on the monarchy, a kick-start for industry, the recovery of powers ceded to Brussels, self-determination for Spanish regions. Foreseeing an alliance with similar movements in southern Europe (Syriza in Greece, which has come to power in the 25 January election), Podemos’s plans do threaten financial powers, what Iglesias calls “German Europe” and “the caste”.
  • And those powers are already baring their teeth. A piece by journalist Salvador Sostres in El Mundo in December compared Iglesias to the former Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, and claimed he had only one idea: “to make the blood of the poorest flow, to the very last drop.” A PP politician was even more direct:  “Someone should put a bullet in the back of his head.”
Arabica Robusta

Trump's Fake Critique of Trade Deals Leaves Out Workers by Jonathan Rosenblum - YES! Ma... - 0 views

  • Trump is simply carrying on that tradition. He’s finding great success because, as MarketWatch columnist Rex Nutting recently noted, Democrats have “sided with the elites on the crucial economic question of our times: Who would win from globalization, and who would lose?”
  • Instead, we must build a movement for trade justice that rejects both Trump’s opportunism and the long-standing neoliberalism of the Democratic and Republican parties.
  • In 1999, in the face of a seemingly invincible World Trade Organization, tens of thousands of activists allied with the movements for labor, the environment, human rights, and racial justice united in the streets of my hometown, Seattle, and shut down the WTO meeting. Under the slogan “Teamsters and Turtles United at Last,” the protesters struck a blow against elites and lifted up a vision of a world trading system that put communities ahead of corporations and created jobs while protecting human rights and the environment.
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  • Meanwhile, economist Jared Bernstein and Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach just issued a thought-provoking manifesto on progressive principles for global trade.
Arabica Robusta

The Right Left for Europe by Yanis Varoufakis - Project Syndicate - 0 views

  • As Tory turned mercilessly against Tory, the schism in the Conservative establishment received much attention. But a parallel (thankfully more civilized) split afflicted my side: the left.
  • As I travel across Europe, advocating a pan-European movement to confront the EU’s authoritarianism, I sense a great surge of internationalism in places as different from one another as Germany, Ireland, and Portugal. Distinguished Lexiteers, like Harvard’s Richard Tuck, are prepared to risk quashing this surge. They point to pivotal moments when the left took advantage of Britain’s lack of a written constitution to expropriate private medical business and create its National Health Service and other such institutions. “A vote to stay within the EU,” Tuck writes, “will…end any hope of genuinely left politics in the UK.”
  • Many leftists find it hard to fathom why I campaigned for “Remain” after EU leaders vilified me personally and crushed Greece’s “Athens Spring” in 2015. Of course, no truly progressive agenda can be revived through the EU institutions. DiEM25 was founded on the conviction that it is only against EU institutions, but within the EU, that progressive politics has a chance in Europe. Leftists once understood that the good society is to be won by entering the prevailing institutions in order to overcome their regressive function. “In and against” used to be our motto. We should revive it.
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  • Perhaps Flassbeck’s harshest criticism of DiEM25’s radical pan-Europeanism is the charge that we are peddling left-wing TINA: “there is no alternative” to operating at the level of the EU. While DiEM25 advocates a democratic union, we certainly reject both the inevitability and the desirability of “ever closer union.” Today, the European establishment is working toward a political union that, we regard as an austerian iron cage. We have declared war on this conception of Europe.
  • The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a DiEM25 signatory, recently quipped that socialist nationalism is not a good defense against the postmodern national socialism that the EU’s disintegration would bring. He’s right. Now more than ever, a pan-European humanist movement to democratize the EU is the left’s best bet.
  • we believe it is important to prepare for the collapse of EU under the weight of its leaders’ hubris. But that is not the same as making the EU’s disintegration our objective and inviting European progressives to join neo-fascists in campaigning for it.
Arabica Robusta

I cite: Is debt the connective thread for OWS? - 0 views

  • An emphasis on debt could be politically promising -- particularly as it helps people understand the trap of capitalism, the way the system feeds off them, the way it relies on debt at multiple levels and establishes terms of credit and debit for the benefit of the capitalist class. A politics of debt seems especially posed to reach a middle class that compensated for its declining income with credit (that said, household indebtedness has declined since the beginning of the great recession even as part of that decline can be attributed to mortgage defaults). 
  • there seem to be some challenges or potential drawbacks to a political strategy based on debt:
  • It is difficult to overcome the individual dimension of debt: the individual quality of debt (credit card, mortgage, student loan) presents a collective action problem.
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  • Focusing on student loan debt too easily slides into the language of attacking higher education already prominent on the right.
  • The construction of debt as a problem can easily elide with right-wing attacks on deficits, the national debt, too much government spending, etc. The mistake is to treat government debt as the same thing as individual and household debt, and vice versa. 
  • when we contrast debtors with proletarians: the former consume, the latter produce. Admittedly, in the face of CDOs, debts become a kind of production--but it's fake, empty, a ponzi scheme, production without production. 
  • The most pressing common issue in the present is climate change. This affects everyone. The rich are currently dispossessing the people of our collective wealth, positioning themselves so that they are mobile, comfortable, defended, impermeable.  The rest of us will face the ravages of weather, drought, flood, famine, shortages, disease. The only way to deal with any of this is collectively -- beginning from the premise that food, shelter, health, and knowledge belong to all in common. Anyone who thwarts this is an enemy of the people.
  • A politics that focuses on debt seems to treat people as failed capitalists -- even if debtors are not shopaholics or spendthrifts, that is, even if debt is a matter of self-investment, or purchasing in order to benefit one's self, children, household, the model seems too close to the one that treats people as human capital, the homo economicus of liberal and neoliberal theory.
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    An emphasis on debt could be politically promising -- particularly as it helps people understand the trap of capitalism, the way the system feeds off them, the way it relies on debt at multiple levels and establishes terms of credit and debit for the benefit of the capitalist class. A politics of debt seems especially posed to reach a middle class that compensated for its declining income with credit (that said, household indebtedness has declined since the beginning of the great recession even as part of that decline can be attributed to mortgage defaults). 
Arabica Robusta

Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics | John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review - 0 views

  • But Piketty advances such an argument without breaking completely with the architecture of neoclassical economics. His theory thus suffers from the same kind of internal incoherence and incompleteness as that of Keynes, whose break with neoclassical economics was also partial. Deeply concerned with issues of inequality, just as Keynes was with unemployment, Piketty demonstrates the empirical inapplicability over the course of capitalist development of the main conclusions of neoclassical marginal productivity theory. His work has thus served to highlight the near-complete unraveling of orthodox economics—even while staying analytically within the fold.28
  • This overall incoherence, as we shall see, ultimately overwhelms Piketty’s argument. He is unable to explain why capitalist economies tend to grow so slowly as to generate such a divergence between wealth and income (and between capital and labor). Hence, while his analysis sees slow growth or relative stagnation as endemic to this system, he neither explains this nor is concerned directly with it. Significantly, he replaces more traditional notions of capital as a social and physical phenomenon with one that equates it with all wealth.29
  • Nor does he address the relations of power—principally class power—that lie behind the inequality that he delineates. His analysis is confined largely to distribution rather than production. He neither follows nor (by his own admission) understands Marx, though at times clearly draws inspiration from him.31
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  • But even with these and other deficiencies, Piketty, nevertheless, brings a certain degree of reality—even a sense of “class warfare” (if only implicitly)—back to bourgeois economics. The result is to heighten the crisis of neoclassical theory. Moreover, he argues—even though he dismisses the idea as “utopian”—for the imposition of a tax on wealth.33 Piketty thus represents a partial revolt within the inner chambers of the economics establishment.
  • Edward Wolff has pioneered the study of wealth data in the United States. In his most recent paper, he finds that the average (mean) net worth of the wealthiest 1 percent in 2010 was $16.4 million. By contrast the average for the least wealthy 40 percent was $–10,600 (that is, it was negative!).39
  • Piketty has no notion of capital as an exploitative social relationship.
  • However, beginning in the mid–1970s, capital made a remarkable comeback, and the ratio began to climb, and is now approaching the level that existed at the start of the First World War. Public capital has been privatized and political regimes throughout the world have been very well disposed toward the interests of wealth-holders.43
  • He shows that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and right up until the First World War, wealth in most rich nations equaled six to seven years of national income.
  • If the rate of return on capital r is greater than the growth rate of the economy g, then capital’s share of income will rise. Piketty shows that over very long periods of time, r has in fact been greater than g; in fact, this is the normal state of affairs in capitalist economies.
  • He finds that there is a direct and significant correlation between the size of the endowment and the rate of return on it. Between 1980 and 2010, institutions with endowments of less than $100 million received a return of 6.2 percent, while those with riches of $1 billion and over got 8.8 percent. At the top of the heap were Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, which “earned” an average return of 10.2 percent.49 Needless to say, when those already extraordinarily rich can obtain a higher return on their money than everyone else, their separation from the rest becomes that much greater.
  • Reality could not be more different than what neoclassical theory leads one to expect. In the United States, real weekly earnings for all workers have actually declined since the 1970s and are now more than 10 percent below their level of four decades ago. This reflects both the stagnation of wages and the growth of part-time employment.50 Even when considering real median family income that includes many two-earner households there has been a decrease of around 9 percent from 1999 to 2012.51
  • But how does this relate to issues of class struggle and class power? What are the consequences of these realities in terms of control of corporations, the economy, the state, the culture, and the media? Piketty, though making a few tantalizing allusions, tells us next to nothing about this.
  • “The neglect of power in mainstream economics,” as the heterodox Austrian economist Kurt Rothschild wrote in 2002, “has its main roots…in deliberate strategies to remove power questions to a subordinate position for inner-theoretic reasons,” such as the search for mathematical models with a high degree of mathematical certainty.
  • It goes without saying that Piketty’s acceptability to neoclassical economics is dependent on his avoidance of the question of inequality and power.
  • Just as class power tends to concentrate, so does the power of the increasingly giant, oligopolistic firms which, in economic parlance, reap monopoly power, associated with barriers to entry into their industries and their ability to impose a greater price markup on prime production costs (primarily labor costs).
  • Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, declared that “Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away…. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits…. Monopoly is the condition for every successful business.” Indeed, this might even stand as the credo of today’s generalized monopoly capital.64
  • For Piketty himself there is no organic relation between the two main tendencies that he draws in Capital in the Twenty-First Century—the tendency for the rate of return on wealth to exceed the growth of income and the tendency toward slow growth. Nor is his analysis historical in a meaningful sense, which requires scrutiny of the changing nature of social-class relations. Increasing income and wealth inequality are not developments that he relates to mature capitalism and monopoly capital, but are simply treated as endemic to the system during most of its history.
  • Here it is useful to recall that for Keynes the danger was not only one of secular stagnation but also the domination of the rentier. He thus called for the “euthanasia of the rentier, and consequently the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the [artificial] scarcity-value of capital.”69 In today’s financialized capitalism, we face, as Piketty recognizes, what Keynes most feared: the triumph of the rentier.70 The “euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist” is needed now more than ever. This cannot be accomplished by minor reforms, however—hence Piketty’s advocacy of what he calls a “useful utopia,” a massive tax on wealth.71
  • It is significant that imperialism plays no role in Piketty’s analysis, neither in explaining the growth of wealth and wealth inequalities, nor even in the analysis of past growth, or prognostication of future growth. On the contrary the book is informed by a perception according to which capitalist growth in one region…is never at the expense of the people of another region, and tends to spread from one region to another, bringing about a general improvement in the human condition.
  • Significant in this respect is that he chose as the epigraph of his book a line from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the French Revolution: “Social Distinctions can be based only on common utility.”75
  • One could hardly pick a statement more opposed to the system in which we live, which seeks not the common but the individual utility.
Arabica Robusta

Syriza: The radical left's Greek Spring? | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • The phenomenon of Syriza has captured the hearts and minds of European intellectuals. For many informed observers Greece is the prelude of tectonic changes that would shape future European politics, as there is a wave of elections in in 2015 countries facing similar challenges, including Portugal and Spain. The rising popularity of the Spanish ‘Podemos’ movement makes it plausible to see another party of the radical left gaining electoral support in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis.
  • addressed the audience together promising ‘Syriza, Podemos, Venceremos’ (literally “Syriza, we can, we’ll win”).  So, should we expect a ‘spill-over’ of governing radical left parties in Europe or is, this, another Greek exceptionalism?
  • The tight external conditionality attached to the bailout is coupled with a limited timeframe within which crucial decisions need to be taken.
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  • Similarly, Greece is the only country in the Eurozone where the economic recession triggered a political crisis, marked by governmental instability, electoral rise of the far right and mass MP defections. A unique feature of the Greek political system since the beginning of the recession in 2009 is the high number of MP defections who crossed the floor. In our study we found that the period between 2010-2012 approximately 75 MPs defected; since then this number has increased.  
  • Syriza participated in the parliament even before the crisis, even though as a party with minimal electoral support. Hence, power structures were already present, while it could also draw on experienced mainstream politicians.
  • Europe's radical left will have to go through a harsh winter before its 'Greek spring.' More importantly, punishing Syriza to prevent the rise of Podemos will add another catastrophic decision in the management of Europe's debt crisis. Instead the humanitarian crisis in Greece should be dealt on its own right taking into consideration Greece's particularities.
Arabica Robusta

The London Whale, Cyprus and Washington | Op-Eds & Columns - 0 views

  • As the Cyprus crisis was unfolding last week we also got to see the report of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on JP Morgan’s losses at its “London Whale” trading division. The report chronicles a series of bad bets on derivatives that were compounded by traders doubling down their stakes. They concealed the size of their losses both to bank officers and regulators. The end result was a $6 billion loss.
  • If the big banks are too big to regulate and, according to Attorney General Holder, too big to prosecute, then the only sensible course is to break them up. There have been some promising developments in this area. At the top of the list is Elizabeth Warren’s election to the Senate. Senator Warren has already made it clear that she will use her seat on the Banking Committee to try to hold the banks and bank regulators accountable. The other important development is that Warren seems to have an ally in Louisiana Senator David Vitter.
  • If there is ever going to be enough political force to break up the big banks it will have to come from this sort of left-right coalition that moves in toward the center.
Arabica Robusta

The Kilburn Manifesto: our challenge to the neoliberal victory | Stuart Hall | Comment ... - 0 views

  • What is new about this phase of capitalism? Its global interconnectedness, driven in part by new technologies, and the dominance of a new kind of finance capitalism mean that, while a crisis of this system has effects everywhere, these effects are uneven. So far the Bric countries seem relatively unscathed, while the impact of economic devastation has spread from Asia and Africa into Europe.
  • The breakdown of old forms of social solidarity is accompanied by the dramatic growth of inequality and a widening gap between those who run the system or are well paid as its agents, and the working poor, unemployed, under-employed or unwell.
  • Neoliberalism's victory has depended on the boldness and ambition of global capital, on its confidence that it can now govern not just the economy but the whole of social life. On the back of a revamped liberal political and economic theory, its champions have constructed a vision and a new common sense that have permeated society. Market forces have begun to model institutional life and press deeply into our private lives, as well as dominating political discourse. They have shaped a popular culture that extols celebrity and success and promotes values of private gain and possessive individualism. They have thoroughly undermined the redistributive egalitarian consensus that underpinned the welfare state, with painful consequences for socially vulnerable groups such as women, old people, the young and ethnic minorities.
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  • Outside party politics new social movements, including environmental, anti-cuts and feminist groups, have not come together sufficiently with the old, defensive organisations of the working class to produce the coalition that might make them an effective political force.
  • This is no time for simple retreat. What is required is a renewed sense of being on the side of the future, not stuck in the dugouts of the past. We must admit that the old forms of the welfare state proved insufficient. But we must stubbornly defend the principles on which it was founded – redistribution, egalitarianism, collective provision, democratic accountability and participation, the right to education and healthcare – and find new ways in which they can be institutionalised and expressed.
Arabica Robusta

Trump, our post-modern 1930s and DiEM25's moment | Yanis Varoufakis - 0 views

  • Is there an alternative? I think so: A Progressive International that resists the narrative of isolationism and promotes inclusive humanist internationalism in place of the neoliberal Establishment’s defence of the rights of capital to globalise.
  • DiEM25 is encouraging progressives in the US, who supported Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, in Canada and in Latin America to band together into a Democracy in the Americas Movement.
Arabica Robusta

The Day After - DiEM25 - 0 views

  • That such a campaign could prevail – leading soon to a hard right government in Britain – testifies to the high-handed incompetence of the political, financial, British and European elites. Remain ran a campaign of fear, condescension and bean-counting, as though Britons cared only about the growth rate and the pound. And the Remain leaders seemed to believe that such figures as Barack Obama, George Soros, Christine Lagarde, a list of ten Nobel-prize-winning economists or the research department of the IMF carried weight with the British working class.
Arabica Robusta

A Blow for Peace and Democracy: Why the British Said No to Europe - 0 views

  • The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life.
  • A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain’s ancient regime and the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.
  • The most effective propagandists of the “European ideal” have not been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st century zeitgeist, even “cool”. What they really are is a bourgeoisie with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as “neoliberalism”.
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  • The Guardian once described Blair as “mystical” and has been true to his “project” of rapacious war.
  • Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders of the Syriza government in Athens are the products of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and  political treachery of post-modernism. The Greek people courageously used the referendum to demand their government sought “better terms” with a venal status quo in Brussels that was crushing the life out of their country. They were betrayed, as the British would have been betrayed.
  • On the eve of the referendum, the quisling secretary-general of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, warned Britons they would be endangering “peace and security” if they voted to leave the EU.  The millions who ignored him and Cameron, Osborne, Corbyn, Obama and the man who runs the Bank of England may, just may, have struck a blow for real peace and democracy in Europe.
Arabica Robusta

Debt, Mining and the Global Reconquest | Occupy 2012 - 0 views

  • From the perspective of the global South, the primary extraction of raw materials like coal, the subjugation of popular autonomy, the implementation of debt as a form of social control and the continued expansion of climate change are clearly intertwined.
  • Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules.
  • Speaking at the memorial service for the miners killed by South African police (above), Julius Malema reprised these themes on Thursday, calling again for nationalization of the mines: The democratically elected government has turned on its people.
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  • As the national week of mourning continues, church leaders have spoken out against Lonmin and students at Wits University in Johannesburg are set to march. A national inquiry into the events has already been established but it is not clear if the ANC can contain the wave of radical protest the massacre has set in motion. Malema may be an opportunist, as some charge, but the grievances he articulates are all too real.
  • Sarkana was right, only he did not go far enough. The reconquest forced by the combination of debt and mining was not just of Africa: it was planetary. So are the consequences. Let’s hope that his heirs in South Africa can begin the resistance.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Bilderbergers beware - 0 views

  • Van der Pijl’s exceptionally rich study of Bilderberg and subsequent US-European geopolitical maneuvres, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (which thankfully Verso Press is about to reissue), provides the theoretical underpinning that I feel Jones’ passionately conspiratorialist followers desperately need, if they ever aim to properly judge the world’s complex combinations of structure and agency.
  • ut religion, Freemasonry, Rotary, Jews, etc., can be subsumed into the social category of ‘intellectuals’, whose function, on an international scale, is that of mediating the extremes, of ‘socializing’ the technical discoveries which provide the impetus for all activities of leadership, of devising compromises between, and ways out of, extreme solutions.”
  • But they were nervous, too, of a coming political storm, remarked van der Pijl. Representing both BP and Goldman Sachs in 2007, Peter Sutherland (former WTO director) “was quoted as saying that it had been a mistake to have referenda on the EU constitution. ‘You knew there was a rise in nationalism; you should have let your parliaments ratify the treaty, and it should be done with.’ Kissinger said words to the same effect concerning unification of the Americas, stressing the need to mobilise the enlightened media behind its propagation.”
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  • So there is no doubt that world banker domination – which should have been reduced by the 2008-09 financial melt – will continue. Only the occasional sovereign default – Argentina (2002), Ecuador (2008), Iceland (2008) and maybe Southern Europe this year – or imposition of exchange controls (as rediscovered by Malaysia in 1998 or Venezuela in 2003) reduces the banksters’ grip.
  • The strongest political effort by these libertarian anti-Bilderberg protesters is to attempt the election of Texan member of Congress, Ron Paul, as president, and with 20 percent popularity, he remains Mitt Romney’s only irritant within the Republican Party as the November showdown with Obama now looms.
Arabica Robusta

Eurodad.org - Conditionally yours: An analysis of the policy conditions attached to IMF... - 0 views

  • The IMF claims to have limited its conditions to critical reforms agreed by recipient governments. However, the worrying findings of this research suggest that the IMF is going backwards – increasing the number of structural conditions that mandate policy changes per loan, and remaining heavily engaged in highly sensitive and political policy areas.
  • The biggest IMF facilities in terms of loan totals have the heaviest conditionality. This rise is driven by exceptionally high numbers of conditions in Cyprus, Greece and Jamaica, which together accounted for 87% of the total value of loans, with an average of 35 structural conditions per programme.
  • Almost all the countries were repeat borrowers from the IMF, suggesting that the IMF is propping up governments with unsustainable debt levels, not lending for temporary balance of payments problems – its true mandate.
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  • Other sensitive topics include requirements to reduce trade union rights, restructure and privatise public enterprises, and reduce minimum wage levels.
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