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The Global Economy in 2011: Recovery Recedes, Convulsion Looms

Geschreven door Kees dinsdag, 11 januari 2011 12:13

Artikel van Walden Bello op website TNI:

As the U.S. and Europe appear to be headed for a deeper economic crisis, some analysts discern a “decoupling” of East Asia and other developing areas from the western economies.

In contrast to their cautiously optimistic forecasts about a sustained recovery at the end of 2009, the dominant mood in liberal economic circles as 2010 draws to a close is gloom, if not doom. Fiscal hawks have gained the upper hand in the policy struggle in the United States and Europe, to the alarm of spending advocates like Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf who see budgetary tightening as a surefire prescription for killing the hesitant recovery in the center economies.

Zie rest artikel hier

The impact of free trade on the financial crisis … and vice versa

Geschreven door Kees donderdag, 25 november 2010 12:52

Behind the currency wars and the worsening global economic crisis lies a largely unquestioned free trade model that both contributed to the crisis and, without radical reform, is a major obstacle to overcoming it.

(Het stuk is inmiddels vertaald en op globalinfo verschenen)

Lees het hele stuk op de website van TNI

A century since Hilferding’s Finanz Kapital – again, apparently, a banker’s world?

Geschreven door Patrick Bond maandag, 22 november 2010 13:24

(Dit stuk is inmiddels vertaald en op globalinfo verschenen) The power and reach of financial institutions, not to mention the resulting superprofits, are the source of widespread, often extreme frustration. Industrialists, small businesspeople, government leaders, workers, consumers, environmentalists, the Greeks and Irish (and similar Third Worlders), and indeed all debtors have suffered usurious, speculative or bailout-related decimation of their resources over the past thirty years.

 (lees het stuk verder op Znet)

Who Wins?

Geschreven door Kees maandag, 11 oktober 2010 08:51

(*** Stuk is inmiddels vertaald en op globalinfo te vinden ***) While Labor Unions celebrate Anti-Austerity Day in Europe, European Neoliberals raise the ante:
Governments must Lower Wages or Suffer Financial Blackmail

Most of the press has described Europe’s labor demonstrations and strikes on Wednesday in terms of the familiar exercise by transport employees irritating travelers with work slowdowns, and large throngs letting off steam by setting fires. But the story goes much deeper than merely a reaction against unemployment and economic recession. At issue are proposals to drastically change the laws and structure of how European society will function for the next generation. If the anti-labor forces succeed, they will break up Europe, destroy the internal market, and render that continent a backwater. This is how serious the financial coup d’etat has become. And it is going to get much worse – quickly. As John Monks, head of the European Trade Union Confederation, put it: “This is the start of the fight, not the end.”

(lees verder op website auteur: http://michael-hudson.com/2010/10/who-wins/)

On rentre à la maison ?

Geschreven door dissent-fr zaterdag, 09 oktober 2010 14:10

Quelques réflexions sur la dynamique des contres-sommets (jeudi 30 septembre 2010)

Des membres du collectif Dissent-Paris, notamment impliqué dans la préparation du contre-sommet de Strasbourg pendant le dernier sommet de l’OTAN, sont allé.e.s discuter ’bilan et perspectives’ dans plusieurs villes françaises. Alors ? Si la dynamique des contres-sommets n’en sort pas vraiment renforcée, on saisit un peu mieux les enjeux de ce creux de la vague.

Les critiques des contres-sommets sont presque aussi vieilles que les contre-sommets : trop spectaculaires, soumis à l’agenda du G8 et de son monde, pris dans l’épuisant cycle répression/anti-répression, ils sont dénoncés depuis longtemps comme une caricature de l’activisme et un certain nombre de gens les ont abandonnés, ou se contentent d’y passer le jour J sans plus d’investissement ni d’enthousiasme1.

(lees verder het originaal hier)

FAULT LINES & SUBDUCTION ZONES: The Slow-Motion Crisis of Global Capital

Geschreven door Kees woensdag, 06 oktober 2010 16:52

The housing-price collapse of 2008, the credit crunch, the bank failures, the downswing of the world economy, the fiscal crisis of the sovereign states, all have been expressed as wild gyrations in the global circulation of information, attention, emotion. Everything undergoes tremendous acceleration at the crucial moments, before the wave recedes into a blur. We are sure that beneath the surface agitation, something has really changed. Institutions have been destroyed. The course of individual lives has dramatically shifted. The composition of the social classes has been altered in depth. For the first time since the 1970s, the continuity of the American way of development appears uncertain. Yet people find their surrounding environments exactly the same; while world leaders call for just one thing, a return to normal.

Amidst the paralysis of public debate, questions arise for those who can neither forget, nor clearly remember. How do we perceive social change? How do we grasp the facts that will prove decisive in the future? When will the surging wave return again? How do our own lives make a difference to the slow-motion crisis of global capital?

In his new book, The Enigma of Capital, David Harvey makes an important remark: the major crises of the capitalist system – like the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970s or the current deflation of the financialized economies – are never really “resolved.” Instead, the determinants of the crisis are shifted around to new places within the system, masking persistent instabilities and sowing the seeds of future upheavals. (...)

Lees verder het origineel

»Die meisten sind eben keine Opfer«

Geschreven door Kees vrijdag, 10 september 2010 19:48

Vor 30 Jahren wurde die autonome Hurenorganisation »Hydra e.V.« gegründet, die sich für die Interessen von Sexarbeiterinnen einsetzt und ihnen Beratung anbietet. Seit 1980 hat sich deren Situation verändert. 2002 trat das »Gesetz zur Regelung der Rechtsverhältnisse der Prostituierten« in Kraft, das die rechtliche und soziale Stellung von Prostituierten verbesserte. Doch das Ziel des Vereins, die Entstigmatisierung des Gewerbes, ist auch nach 30 Jahren nicht erreicht. Simone Kellerhoff ist zuständig für Gesundheitsprävention, Frauenhandel und Lobbyarbeit bei Hydra e.V.

Interview in Jungle World met Simone Kellerhof van de autonome hoerenorganisatie Hydra. Zie verder bij Jungle World op website

Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism

Geschreven door Kees donderdag, 09 september 2010 13:27

Mozambique's food riots – the true face of global warming

Geschreven door Kees maandag, 06 september 2010 22:11

It has been a summer of record temperatures – Japan had its hottest summer on record, as did South Florida and New York. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Niger are flooded and the eastern US is mopping up after hurricane Earl. None of these individual events can definitively be attributed to global warming. But to see how climate change will play out in the 21st century, you needn't look to the Met Office. Look, instead, to the deaths and burning tyres in Mozambique's "food riots" to see what happens when extreme natural phenomena interact with our unjust economic systems. Stuk verder te lezen in The Guardian (IS INMIDDELS VERTAALD)

Peru: veteran guerilla fighter Hugo Blanco speaks on Amazon struggle

Geschreven door WW4 Report vrijdag, 03 september 2010 09:01

In the early 1960s, Hugo Blanco launched Peru's first agrarian reform, as an initiative of self-organized campesinos in the valleys of La Convención and Lares in Cuzco department, where an oppressive feudalistic share-cropping system had been in place for generations. When this movement to take back the land was met with repression, he formed a campesino self-defense militia which was the first armed struggle of the radical left in Peru. Captured and sentenced to life in prison in 1962, he was released and exiled following the populist military coup of Gen. Juan Velasco eight years later. He returned to Peru to participate in crafting the new constitution when civilian rule was restored in 1978. In 1980, he was a presidential candidate, and was serving as a senator with the United Left party when he again had to flee the country with Alberto Fujimori's suspension of democratic rule in 1992. He today publishes the journal Lucha Indigena, and is a leading voice in support of the indigenous movement in Peru's Amazon

Lees meer: Peru: veteran guerilla fighter Hugo Blanco speaks on Amazon struggle