Less politically and more economically, optimists pin their philocapitalist hopes on China’s keynesian demand boost (which is working but is not enough to reverse the negative macroeconomic trends worldwide) and on the fact that prices of raw materials are rising again (this could spell doom for hundreds of millions, as food prices are set to rise).  We anticapitalists turning postcapitalists look at unemployment and housing data and conclude that the opposite is still true: they are just trying to provide self-fulfilling prophecies of financial optimism on friendly media, so that reform of capitalism doesn’t have to go too deep.  But the Atlantic regime of financial speculation is dead for good and can’t be resurrected, not even at huge cost for government finances. Economic redistribution and geopolitical rebalancing are the two major things that can solve the crisis. Put people first: sack the bankers, milk the capitalists, invest in society and the environment.

The three-day “Group of 14″ meeting will bring together the G8 leading industrial powers with the emerging giants China, India and Brazil as well as Mexico, South Africa and Egypt at a time when worldwide job losses are sparking fears of social unrest.

The meeting comes before a much-anticipated summit of the Group of 20 developed and developing nations next Thursday in London to discuss recovery strategies for the world economy and reforms to the financial regulatory system.

The G14 “social summit” in Rome will urge the G20 to put “people first,” Italian Labour Minister Maurizio Sacconi said Thursday.

“The concept of economic and financial stability encompasses the concept of social stability,” Sacconi told a news conference.

He said the G14 would advocate a “global pact” to ensure sustainable social protections, investment in people, notably skills development, and job creation, especially in the areas of environmental protection, health and education.

Alex Foti, an activist for the EuroMayDay organisation defending vulnerable workers, said EU governments are prevented by the European Union’s founding Maastricht treaty from implementing such a pact.

The rule by which EU members cannot run public spending deficits of more than three percent of gross domestic product “is a straitjacket on social progress, a major impediment to solving the crisis,” Foti told AFP.

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned Monday that “dramatic” rises in unemployment around the world would set the stage for conflict.

The world financial crisis could spark “social unrest, some threats to democracy and maybe for some cases, it can also end in war,” he warned during an International Labour Organization (ILO) meeting in Geneva.

“This crisis must not be allowed to become a wasteland of unemployment,” Strauss-Kahn said just days after the IMF forecast that the world economy will shrink by up to 1.0 percent this year.

The ILO in January said the global financial meltdown could claim up to 50 million jobs over 2008 and 2009, while the World Bank warned that the crisis could push 46 million back into poverty.

ILO chief Juan Somavia will stress in Rome “that we are confronting an inter-connected financial, economic and social crisis, and that the attention of policy makers should turn to the three crises at the same time,” his deputy Philippe Egger said Thursday.

An ILO study of more than 40 national stimulus packages “found that resources that governments have put forward to support financial markets are five times that allocated to social and economic matters,” Egger told AFP by telephone from Geneva.

EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia predicted a “hot autumn” of social protest in Europe, in an interview with the Italian daily La Stampa.

France last week saw more than a million workers take to the streets in a nationwide strike to force President Nicolas Sarkozy to boost wages and protect jobs. A protest in Paris left nine police officers injured and led to some 300 arrests.

In Rome on Saturday an Italian student movement plans to protest the G14 meeting, calling for “new rights and guarantees against the crisis,” following a similar protest last week that ended with clashes between students and police.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi meanwhile was accused Thursday of insensitivity towards the jobless after the billionaire media tycoon said the answer to unemployment was to “try and find something else, maybe in sales, or set up (your) own business.”

Nearly 400,000 Italians lost their jobs in January and February.

Katharine Ainger, Thursday 26 March 2009

Ten years ago, the anticapitalist movement predicted this recession. Now it must envisage an alternative global future

It was 1999 and the summer of corporate love. Many pundits – now talking of “bad apples” and applauding bailouts – were predicting the stockmarket would go up forever. Not coincidentally, it was also a decade ago that the anticapitalist movement emerged with a rambunctious “carnival against capital” in London’s Square Mile; the contagion spread to the streets of Seattle where the World Trade Organisation meeting was shut down by protesters later that year.

The movement, which was essentially demanding democratic control over the global economy, wreathed summit after summit of the G8, the WTO and the World Bank with protest and teargas. It was wild, infuriating, diverse and sometimes incoherent, as only a network that encompasses indigenous peoples, radical environmentalists, workers and kids in hoodies could be. The movement was like the child in the crowd as the emperor of global neoliberalism wheeled by, pointing out that his cloaks were woven from financial fictions and economic voodoo.

They must now be credited for their prescience. Today, everybody can see the emperor has no clothes; but as the G20 meets in London next week to ensure financial “stability” for a return to business as usual, it appears rather as though the emperor has rushed back to the very same discredited tailors to bail them out and commission several new outfits.

And what of the movement that predicted the crash? Post 9/11 it lost momentum as it was forced to rechannel energy into fighting rearguard actions against state repression and the war on terror. Yet the less visible but vital processes of developing workable alternatives, building grassroots movements, and popular education continued. The movement also effected a palpable cultural shift of alternative economic ideas and environmental concerns towards the mainstream; in Latin America social movements helped elect governments that were prepared to challenge neoliberal doctrine. Movement demands also foreshadowed a rebalancing of power towards the global south, and helped to delegitimise the institutions of the global economy.

These ideas have never been more relevant or necessary. Clearly we need a vision, and it doesn’t look as if the G20, still so in thrall to financial capital, will deliver one. So could this be the hour for a movement that was beaten, teargassed and imprisoned for pointing out the now blindingly obvious?

NGOs, churches and trade unions are mobilising thousands to turn out on 28 March with the demand to “Put people first”; 1 April is “Financial Fools Day”, when direct action activists and environmentalists will be setting up a climate camp outside the European Climate Exchange in London – because the same financial system now in crisis is being entrusted to cut emissions through the artificial creation of a market in carbon credits. Meanwhile another group called G20 Meltdown is promising a carnival at the Bank of England. The climate camp has an open process and has worked hard to establish its social base of legitimacy; the carnival is more of a hotchpotch, and it’s unclear who will turn up. Perhaps some windows will be broken – and frankly, it would be astonishing if no one was angry enough to do so.

Whatever they decide, the G20 and other leaders are going to be faced with increasing unrest from those paying with their jobs, their social security and their taxes for a crisis not of their making and a bailout not of their choosing. From Haiti to India, people are rioting over food. We are entering a singular moment of climate chaos and food shortages, a social and energy crisis as well as financial meltdown. The solutions the “alter-global” networks have developed offer a way out that is based on whole systems thinking. Fundamental to this vision is an economy that meets the needs of everyone on a planet of finite resources.

Which is why the climate camp in the city, with its slogan “Because nature doesn’t do bailouts”, is one of the most interesting of all the movements coalescing in London next week. It’s a potent mix of seasoned anti-globalisation activists who are skilled in creative direct action and a new generation that is energised and refreshingly undogmatic. The camp has taken a key component of the globalisation movement – the temporary autonomous zones of street parties and convergence centres liberated in cities during summit protests – to a new level, creating a transformational space which prefigures the world they want, featuring everything from wind turbines and composted waste to decentralised decision-making and creative play.

At the end of this year, almost exactly 10 years to the day since Seattle, this new incarnation of the movement will be on the streets during the Copenhagen climate summit demanding real climate justice that does not rely on the current “business as usual” proposals. Perhaps anticapitalism had the right idea at the wrong moment in history. Perhaps its moment has come.

• Katharine Ainger is co-author of We Are Everywhere, a book documenting global social movements.

I’m concerned about Europe. Actually, I’m concerned about the whole world — there are no safe havens from the global economic storm. But the situation in Europe worries me even more than the situation in America.

Just to be clear, I’m not about to rehash the standard American complaint that Europe’s taxes are too high and its benefits too generous. Big welfare states aren’t the cause of Europe’s current crisis. In fact, as I’ll explain shortly, they’re actually a mitigating factor.

The clear and present danger to Europe right now comes from a different direction — the continent’s failure to respond effectively to the financial crisis.

Europe has fallen short in terms of both fiscal and monetary policy: it’s facing at least as severe a slump as the United States, yet it’s doing far less to combat the downturn.

On the fiscal side, the comparison with the United States is striking. Many economists, myself included, have argued that the Obama administration’s stimulus plan is too small, given the depth of the crisis. But America’s actions dwarf anything the Europeans are doing.

The difference in monetary policy is equally striking. The European Central Bank has been far less proactive than the Federal Reserve; it has been slow to cut interest rates (it actually raised rates last July), and it has shied away from any strong measures to unfreeze credit markets.

The only thing working in Europe’s favor is the very thing for which it takes the most criticism — the size and generosity of its welfare states, which are cushioning the impact of the economic slump.

This is no small matter. Guaranteed health insurance and generous unemployment benefits ensure that, at least so far, there isn’t as much sheer human suffering in Europe as there is in America. And these programs will also help sustain spending in the slump.

But such “automatic stabilizers” are no substitute for positive action.

Why is Europe falling short? Poor leadership is part of the story. European banking officials, who completely missed the depth of the crisis, still seem weirdly complacent. And to hear anything in America comparable to the know-nothing diatribes of Germany’s finance minister you have to listen to, well, Republicans.

But there’s a deeper problem: Europe’s economic and monetary integration has run too far ahead of its political institutions. The economies of Europe’s many nations are almost as tightly linked as the economies of America’s many states — and most of Europe shares a common currency. But unlike America, Europe doesn’t have the kind of continentwide institutions needed to deal with a continentwide crisis.

This is a major reason for the lack of fiscal action: there’s no government in a position to take responsibility for the European economy as a whole. What Europe has, instead, are national governments, each of which is reluctant to run up large debts to finance a stimulus that will convey many if not most of its benefits to voters in other countries.

You might expect monetary policy to be more forceful. After all, while there isn’t a European government, there is a European Central Bank. But the E.C.B. isn’t like the Fed, which can afford to be adventurous because it’s backed by a unitary national government — a government that has already moved to share the risks of the Fed’s boldness, and will surely cover the Fed’s losses if its efforts to unfreeze financial markets go bad. The E.C.B., which must answer to 16 often-quarreling governments, can’t count on the same level of support.

Europe, in other words, is turning out to be structurally weak in a time of crisis.

The biggest question is what will happen to those European economies that boomed in the easy-money environment of a few years ago, Spain in particular.

For much of the past decade Spain was Europe’s Florida, its economy buoyed by a huge speculative housing boom. As in Florida, boom has now turned to bust. Now Spain needs to find new sources of income and employment to replace the lost jobs in construction.

In the past, Spain would have sought improved competitiveness by devaluing its currency. But now it’s on the euro — and the only way forward seems to be a grinding process of wage cuts. This process would have been difficult in the best of times; it will be almost inconceivably painful if, as seems all too likely, the European economy as a whole is depressed and tending toward deflation for years to come.

Does all this mean that Europe was wrong to let itself become so tightly integrated? Does it mean, in particular, that the creation of the euro was a mistake? Maybe.

But Europe can still prove the skeptics wrong, if its politicians start showing more leadership. Will they?

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/fired-over-a-tuna-sandwich-and-fighting-back/?emc=eta1

AGITATION AS MIDDLE-CLASS EUROPE STRUGGLES TO COPE

By John Thornhill

Economics is convulsing European politics. Governments have fallen in Iceland and Latvia; strikes or protests have erupted in Greece, Ireland, France, Germany, Britain, Lithuania, Ukraine and Bulgaria. Financial turmoil has shaken even the continent’s furthest-flung outposts: the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe has been ravaged by violent strikes, while Russia flew riot police into ice-bound Vladivostok to quell street protests.

This spasm of unrest was hardly expected when the crisis broke in the summer of 2007: many Europeans believed they would be spared the worst effects of a disaster forged in the suburbs of the US. Since then, as the crisis has spread, initially sanguine forecasts have given way to ever more gloomy predictions: European Union finance ministers this week revised down an already grim outlook issued barely 10 weeks ago.

Beyond the economics, there is now a gnawing concern that Europe may be only at the beginning of a far more tumultuous cycle of instability. Whereas the administration of Barack Obama in the US may be looking to exploit the political upside of the crisis, Europe’s leaders are more concerned with limiting its downside. The region’s democracies, as well as the institutions of the EU itself, are being stress-tested as never before.

The proudest achievements of the 27-member organisation – a single market, a common currency and the convergence between west and east – are under strain. “There is no doubt we are living through the greatest financial and economic crisis in living memory,” says José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission. As governments take often unpopular action to salvage their economies, anger is mounting as a result of rising unemployment, pay curbs, bail-outs for devastated banks and falls in house prices and the value of pension funds.

Juan Somavia, director-general of the International Labour Organisation, a United Nations agency, has warned that social unrest could worsen if stimulus packages are not seen to benefit ordinary people, saying: “There’s a sense that it’s ‘billions for bankers but pennies for the people’.”

For the moment, it is impossible to predict what the political aftershocks of the economic earthquake will be. The left should be the natural beneficiary. Yet many of Europe’s socialist parties seem more concerned with defending the partisan interests of their supporters rather than devising a holistic response. Trade union leaders recall ominously that it was the far right rather than the moderate left that gained power in much of Europe in the 1930s during the last catastrophe of capitalism.

Some observers, such as Emmanuel Todd, a French sociologist, are predicting the end of democracy, or at least its significant erosion, as populist rightwing leaders including Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy become increasingly demagogic and authoritarian. Others forecast a reversion to nationalism and protectionism as countries abandon the European ideal and look to defend their own.

In this view, the EU may increasingly be seen as part of the problem rather than the solution, the “Trojan horse of globalisation” in the words of Mr Sarkozy. Along with other national leaders, he has been spearheading the response to the crisis, leaving Brussels bureaucrats to fret about infringements to state aid and competition rules and the trashing of the eurozone’s fiscal rules.

But in spite of heated rhetoric, the national political impulse and the traditional muddle of EU policy, the bloc’s political leaders have not yet broken ranks over the sanctity of the single market or the imperative of collective action. After a hesitant start, the Commission is taking the initiative in developing pan-European financial regulation and helping the most vulnerable member states. It is still possible that the crisis will result in deeper integration rather than disintegration.

Different countries are responding in different ways depending on the vulnerability of their economies, their political systems, their leaders and their national cultures. Yet one feature common to almost all is that it is the middle classes who are suffering the most in this recession. Even before the turmoil, some sociologists were talking about the emergence of “hourglass societies” in Europe as globalisation sifted the winners from the losers.

“The middle class – at least in Germany – is shrinking now. This is a completely new situation for Germany. You have much more upward mobility and downward mobility from the middle class. I assume that the financial crisis will accelerate the process,” notes Stefan Hradil, a German sociologist. That analysis is resonant in Britain too, where the media have highlighted the plight of the “coping classes”, those once self-assured professionals who are now financially stretched.

Perhaps the most explosive political moment will come when Europeans are presented with the bill for today’s rescue packages. Governments will be able to rebalance their public finances only by cutting spending and raising taxes on the struggling middle class.

Wouter Bos, Dutch finance minister and leader of the Labour party, says the crisis has killed the myth of “happy” globalisation, in which everyone benefits. Politicians will have to do more to protect the losers from globalisation if they want to maintain support for open markets and free trade. That will mean that the “visible fist” of government will be increasingly used alongside the “invisible hand” of the market. Effective regulation and social justice are going to become priorities.

But Mr Bos has no doubt about the scale of the challenge: “For the first time in post-world war two history we have a generation that seriously doubts whether the next generation is going to live better than themselves.”

Additional reporting by Hugh Williamson ]]> http://www.greatrecession.info/2009/03/12/middle-class-europe-made-precarious-by-crisis/feed/ 0 http://www.greatrecession.info/2009/02/18/gdps-drop-like-stones-but-wheres-the-action/ http://www.greatrecession.info/2009/02/18/gdps-drop-like-stones-but-wheres-the-action/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:27:53 +0000 alex.foti http://www.greatrecession.info/?p=1384 Japan down 12.7%  minus one less drunk minister (Nakagawa), Germany -8.5%, Italy -7%, eurozone and sterlingzone both down 5.9%, France almost minus five, Obamerica -3.8%

This was annualization for 009 of last quarter of 008. but the Great Recession is gathering momentum and will end up be even worse than that. Germany and Italy will be whacked. The UK is spiralling down the drain, Starbucks top asshole sez.  Steinbrueck said Germany would do wot it takes to keep Ireland in the euro. Ukraine and Eastern Europe hang on a thread before financial ruin strikes and pulls Austria with them into the abyss. Wall Street and the City days are gone. They were the Twin Towers of global finance. A new world has opened up, so forget about your bad banks with our good money. You bankers are the only ones that should be fired. If you say it’s socialism, then let the socialists do it. Nationalization will have to mean socialization. We have to make’em pay. But this means keeping up the temperature in the streets and focus the minds. We have to make’em pay. Not only because it’s moral and it’s our right. But because it is a major demand solution to a major demand crisis. Give money and power back to the people. They’ll spend it and make it work much better than Madoff and the dumbsters that assisted him could ever do. Since GreatRecession endorses MayDay, consider the following exclusive preview this blog’s small contribution to the ongoing generalized agitation vs business and political élites in Europe, America, Asia.
ciao & solidarity vs precarity!

****MAYDAY 2009****

To All Those Who Fight 4: Anarchy, Autonomy, Ecology, Queerness

To all media activists, creative workers, radical artists, union
organizers, immigrant and precarious youth

In 2009, as millions are made unemployed by stupidity and greed, we
call onto all insurgent people and networks out there to unite on the
1st of May for a global MAYDAY against financial capitalism and state
repression, and for social redistribution and self-emancipation.

MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY, THE FIRST OF MAY WE’LL MAKE U PAY!

YOU, the financial and political élites, we’ll make YOU pay for your crisis.

The economic and moral collapse of capitalism is for all to see. But it’s us who’s paying for the crisis with our money and jobs. They’re robbing us blind! States are throwing trillions at bankers, while jobs, wages, incomes, services are savagely cut, and millions are thrown into poverty.

We can fight and reverse this process. The Great Recession, the biggest crisis of capitalism in 80 years, opens up opportunities for social conflict and radical transformation.

We the Precarious, We the Unemployed, We the Immigrants, We the Antiracist, We the Antiauthoritarians, we are already fighting together from Athens to Reykjavik, from Capetown to Gaza, from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires, from Melbourne to Tokyo, from Shanghai to Mumbai, and across all seas and states where migrants risk their lives and freedom, in all the cities where dissident and discriminated people are fighting for social equality, autonomous culture, a better life.

Let’s unite in an ideal world brotherhood all our actions and demonstrations on the 1st of may in all the cities large and small around the globe. Let’s make our states and corporations know that at least on that day we are ONE against their capitalist crisis that threatens us all.

Let’s make’em pay on the 1st of May (and of course in the coming months in London, Berlin, Strasbourg, and in all the demos, strikes, riots across the planet).

We’ll try to do our bit. Let’s link our networks and associations for a common creative and rageful celebration of the global day of the exploited and the excluded. Let us know on movement lists that you
care about a common mayday. Maybe you thought of this already!

euromayday network
www.euromayday.org
MayDay? for us, it’s a pink, black, red, green thing…

More than 150 representatives of trade unions, farmers’ movements, global justice groups, environmental groups, development groups, migrants’ groups, faith-based groups, women’s groups, the have-not movements, student and youth groups, and anti-poverty groups from all over Europe gathered on the 10th and 11th of January 2009 in Paris to analyse collectively the current crises, to develop joint strategies and to discuss joint demands and alternatives in response to these crises. As the financial and the economic crises intensify, millions of women and men are losing their jobs, houses and livelihoods. Tens of millions more are forecast to join the 1.4 billion people already living in extreme poverty. The crises worsen the social, ecological, cultural and political situation of the majority of people on our planet. Despite the evident and foreseeable failure of the current economic model, world leaders are responding by trying to preserve the system that is responsible for the crises.

Governments have been quick to bail out bankers, corporate shareholders and their financial backers with hundreds of billions in public money. To solve the problem, they put into place bankers and heads of corporations: the same actors that created the crises. The workers, the jobless, the poor ? all those affected have received no help in their daily struggle to make ends meet, and to cap it all, they are now supposed to pay the bill.

Governments’ proposals to deal with the unfolding economic crisis do not address the other dimensions of the crisis we face today — global justice, food, climate and energy — and with it the need to transform the economic system towards one that allows us to satisfy the basic needs of all people, to implement all human rights and to restore and preserve the ecological basis of life on our planet.

It is time for change!

We can build a system that works for people and the environment, a system to serve the needs of the many, a system based on the principles of public benefit, global equity, justice, environmental sustainability and democratic control. As a first step, immediate measures must be implemented to address the social impacts on people, whilst supporting the ecological conversion of the economy.

We call upon all social movements in Europe to engage in a process of change. To start with, we call upon movements ;

- to engage in the mass mobilisation for the central demonstration in London on the 28th of March 2009 ahead of the G20 meeting, or to take to the streets in their own countries that same day to make their voices heard. 20 governments cannot decide on the future of the global financial system and economy.

- to undertake a day of action in the week of the G20 meeting, preferably on the 1st of April (FinancialFools’ Day) all across the world, exposing unaccountable financial power and promoting democratic control of finance.

This meeting is a further step in a long?term process of building spaces for European networks to meet. Recognising and drawing on previous and future mobilisations of social movements and civil society organizations in Europe and all over the world, it builds on ongoing efforts developed at the European Social Forum and elsewhere, aimed at realising a democratic and socially and environmentally sustainable
Europe. We commit to intensify cooperation and communication among our networks and organisations with the aim of building capacity for sustained mobilisation and the development of joint alternatives. We are committed to supporting and encouraging all people to have their voices heard in reshaping their societies.

We will meet again on the 18th and 19th of April 2009 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in order to develop the next steps of mobilisation and strategies towards change. We call upon all social movements and social organisations to join this process.