Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. 'A New Way Forward'--Demos TodaySorry for the late notice about this. It looks like all the demos start at 2pm ET and 11am PT, so there may still be time for people to get to them. Hat-tip to LF:Link to the site of A New Way Forward: http://www.anewwayforward.org/demonstrations/ Sorry about the perfunctory post. Labels: activism, banking crisis, financial crisis Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). Leaders Not Facing Up to Scale of Crisis (Guardian)Great piece in today's Guardian, with apt discussion of how G20 protest compare with the protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999.Our leaders still aren't facing up to the scale of the crisis It's hardly surprising that some want to trash the City, but to claim that the G20 protesters have no alternative is nonsense When mass protests exploded on the streets of Seattle in 1999 against the kind of globalisation embodied in the World Trade Organisation, their anti-capitalist message was widely portrayed as utopian. A decade on, as anti-capitalist demonstrators vented their fury yesterday on the social and ecological vandals of the City and prepared to do battle today outside the G20 meeting in the heart of what was once London's docks, it looks more like common sense. The wreckage of the neoliberal order - which reached its zenith in the wake of Seattle and has generated the greatest global economic crisis since the 1930s - is now all around us. World trade is in free fall and, by some measures, collapsing faster than at the time of the Great Depression. While G20 leaders talk of saving or creating 20 million jobs, 25 million are expected to be lost in the wealthy OECD states alone, whose main area of competition now seems to be their relative rates of economic decline. And what in the richest economies means mass unemployment and rising poverty translates into destitution and rising death rates in the developing world. So it can hardly be a surprise that some people end up trashing the homes or offices of bailed-out bankers - or that French workers have taken to "bossnapping" executives handing out mass redundancies, as has been the experience of astonished Caterpillar and Sony executives in recent weeks. As unrest over the impact of the crisis has grown across Europe, workers are increasingly resorting to direct action against closures and following the example of the successful occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, backed by Barack Obama last December. The night before last, workers occupied Belfast's Visteon car components plant after 565 out of its 610-strong UK workforce were sacked on Tuesday, and by yesterday morning the action had spread to its factories in Enfield and Basildon. There is likely to be plenty more of this kind of thing to come, as conflict over who carries the costs of the crisis becomes more overt - and so there will have to be if we are to avoid the return to business as usual that politicians and corporate powerbrokers evidently still envisage across the western world. Of course, all the talk at the ExCel centre is of regulation, a green New Deal and "partnerships of purpose". Champions of the failed free market are thin on the ground anywhere these days - even Nigel Lawson and Cecil Parkinson, the Thatcherite architects of the 1980s Big Bang City deregulation, this week turned their backs on the financial mayhem they unleashed. But the fact that many of those presiding at the G20 are the same people who brought us to the present catastrophic pass scarcely inspires confidence in their ability to overcome the crisis. No doubt some modest progress will be made on bringing hedge funds and tax havens under control, though the US and Britain are holding out against tougher regulation. The transatlantic battle over regulation versus co-ordinated expansion is in any case largely a phoney one. Obama is right that the US can't be the sole engine of global recovery, but then Germany's own fiscal stimulus is a good deal larger than its politically hybrid government likes to let on. And if demand is boosted simply to refloat the existing failed economic model - which in the US and Britain includes a crippled, corrupted financial system - it won't work anyway. The same goes for G20 plans to inject extra cash into the International Monetary Fund, which claims to have changed the nefarious neoliberal ways that made it a target for the protesters of the 1990s, but is in fact still imposing the kind of structural adjustment conditions which are the opposite of what is needed to pull countries out of the slump. As for today's expected declarations on action against global warming, they barely count as political window-dressing. All the signs are that most of the politicians playing to the gallery in London today have yet to face up to the full scale of the crisis, or what will need to be done to overcome it. Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and President Lula are right to single out the Anglo-Saxon model and "white men with blue eyes" for the meltdown - even if that underplays its systemic nature. But this isn't only a crisis of capitalism or of a particular form of capitalism after all, it's one of US economic and global power as well. That's because it's the product not just of financialisation and deregulated markets, but also of chronically low American savings and unsustainable levels of consumption - including the massive military expenditure that has underpinned US wars and global overstretch in the years since the end of the cold war. The deficits they've generated have increasingly been financed by China and the fact that today's meeting is of the G20 rather than the G7 - and that its most important meetings are between Obama and President Hu Jintao - is a symbol of the decline of American economic power exposed by the crisis. The rebalancing of the US relationship with China, which is so far riding the economic storm somewhat more successfully than its western counterparts, can play a part in overcoming the crisis. But right now recovery is being held back by the failure of the US, and even more precariously Britain, to intervene decisively in the financial sector to drive up lending - rather than pour cash into the black hole of bankers' gambling debts. In both countries, the combination of halfhearted quantitative easing and a refusal to take control of the banks is stifling the impact of tax cuts and extra public spending. In Britain in particular, the limits of crude Keynesianism - rather than direct intervention and nationalisation - are clearly being reached. Meanwhile, market enthusiasts have once again been complaining, as they did at the time of Seattle, that the G20 protesters have no alternative. It was never true in the 1990s, but now such claims are simply ridiculous. The policies and programmes now pouring out of the international trade union movement, NGOs, political parties and thinktanks - on climate change, jobs, green investment, public services, trade, finance, international institutions and global justice - are voluminous and serious. The problem is not a shortage of alternatives, but a lack of political muscle so far to make them stick. Labels: activism, financial crisis, G20, protest, rioting, Seattle, WTO Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). Two Items on Guadeloupe General StrikeTwo items on the recent massive general strike in Guadeloupe. First, from Friday's Democracy Now!:Labor Victory in Guadeloupe After Six-Week Strike Reverberates Across French Caribbean and France Hear it or read it here. Second, an article on the general strike by Immanuel Wallerstein: Guadeloupe: Obscure Key to World Crisis Read the rest of the article. Labels: activism, Democracy Now, financial crisis, general strike, global downturn, Guadeloupe, Immanuel Wallerstein Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). Inside Account of Activism in GreeceThis is a letter forwarded to us from D&S collective member Amee Chew (sent to her from a friend of hers), with more details about the situation in Greece--lots of good inside info and links.Friends, I don't know if others have been following the daily news of what is unfolding in Greece. The press here has mostly reported events as another explosion of "riots" in response to a police killing, without context. In fact, what is taking place in Greece is much larger than that. In its immediate context, the uprising of the last 10 days comes on the heels of a rising oppositional movement: recently, the Greeks managed to achieve a general strike with support from 80-90% of the working population against privatization of national industries and other neoliberal policies, and for doubling the minimum wage. A broad hunger strike among Greek prisoners, with mass solidarity from Greek society, has also compelled the government to agree to the release of about half the prison population (and the movement declared that this would not be enough). The "spontaneous" anger of young people against police violence has beneath and alongside it long-standing movement structures that are allowing it not simply to "discharge" and dissipate, but to grow, strengthen itself and expand into new political areas. It is taking place in a population that is highly politicized and has a history of resistance to draw from. But it's extraordinary to see the mass mobilization of very young people--high-school students between the ages of 11 and 17, taking to the streets, taking over their schools, developing a politics that addresses their lives directly. It's not just resistance to police repression now, but a wider discussion is taking place about education social organization--with students holding mass assemblies in their occupied schools, trying to decide what the meaning would be of an education that is part of the life they want for themselves, and not the life that is being prepared for them by the existing society. (The flyer at the this link, from the website of the Coordination of Occupied Schools Alexandros Grigoropulos, says it well. The slogans translate as follows: across the top "The time has come for us to take the future into our hands." On the left, is the image of a student sleeping over books with the caption "School, home, tutoring". On the right are students filling the streets, marching behind a banner that says "These days belong to Alexi: cops, pigs, murderers!" and above it, the caption reads, "Struggle, rupture, revolution." ) At this point, hundreds of schools, colleges and universities have been occupied and are being transformed into centers of organizing. They are running their own radio stations, some of which are private stations now under occupation. They are occupying public buildings; attacking police stations and government ministries. Yesterday, students occupied the central state-run television station during its news broadcast of the Prime Minister's speech and stood with a banner saying, "Stop watching and go out into the streets!" Two smaller placards read, "Freedom for all those who have been arrested," and "Immediate release for all the arrested." (Video here.) In a separate action, another group attacked the central Athens headquarters of the MAT, burning vehicles and a portion of the building. The MAT (Monades Apokatastasis Taxis "Units For Restoring Order") are the "riot police"--a specifically political branch of the police force developed to suppress "civil unrest." They were developed by police who received training in the US. (Greece has been a central recipient of US police training and technology for repression.) The dissolution of the MAT is one of the central demands that has come out of the assemblies of occupied schools and universities. (This also has a particular topical appropriateness: the MAT were first introduced by Konstantinos Karamanlis, father of the current Prime Minister and leader of the same right wing party Nea Dimokratia, in the years following the fall of the Greek junta. The leader of the junta would later write in his memoir that if the MAT had existed at that time, the junta might not have fallen.) A video from this past weekend shows a battle with MAT police in the Exarchia neighborhood--the area in which the police murder took place that sparked the current uprising, and a center of left organizing--in which youths defending their neighborhood are using laser beams to blind the police and also to pinpoint them as targets so that they can maximize the effect of their crude firepower (molotov cocktails and stones) by focusing a barrage on one target at a time. (Video.) At the center of the battle in Athens is the historic Polytechnion--the university famous for the events of November 17, 1973, when the junta attacked protesting students with tanks. As a result of that history, the police are constitutionally unable to enter the university, making it a protected enclave for political organizing and a tactical base of operations. Every evening now, after the protests and street battles, students and other active members of the movement gather for a general assembly. The Coordination of the General Assemblies and Occupations in Athens has given the movement both a political face and a structure of continuity for building, planning and deepening its political consciousness. (Website and blog.) The uprising in Greece has a particular relevance at this moment in history. If you read the military manuals and strategy papers of the US architects of empire, Greece is a centerpiece of "counterinsurgency" doctrine. In the immediate postwar period, the US and England fought an extended counterinsurgency war to suppress the left (communist and anarchist), which had become the most powerful political force in the country through the years of resistance to the German occupation. The strategy was to brutally repress the armed resistance (80,000 British troops and the arming of domestic fascists to kill, imprison, and torture left guerillas), while at the same time promoting elections and including a legitimate "socialist" opposition, which supported surrendering arms and using the parliamentary system. This is the "handbook" which the US uses in its imperial wars of conquest and occupation. It's called "promoting Democracy." Appropriate then, this declaration of the Greek uprising: "Their Democracy murders..." (here). ---------------------- [Since I haven't seen it yet appear in English, I'm pasting below the statement put out by the students who occupied the national TV yesterday. Translating as best I can:] Our action is the result of an accumulated pressure which is robbing us of our lives, and not only an emotional explosion based on the murder of Alexis Grigoropulos by the police. We are one more collective, a piece of the revolt which is taking place. Labels: activism, Greece, protest, socialism Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
