global financial crisis

The current economic crisis in Europe can be compared to a couple in a street building a three storey mansion in a street made up of one storey dwellings and then forcing the residents of the one storey dwellings to stop paying their electricity and gas bills to meet the mortgage repayments of the couple who built the three storey mansion.

Article by Joe Toscano

The scramble by members of the European Union to appoint technocrats as leaders of Greece and Italy highlights how little input electors have on government policy in the 21st century. Unfortunately they have forgotten what is good for the markets isn’t as most governments believe, good for the people they rule.

The current economic crisis in Europe can be compared to a couple in a street building a three storey mansion in a street made up of one storey dwellings and then forcing the residents of the one storey dwellings to stop paying their electricity and gas bills to meet the mortgage repayments of the couple who built the three storey mansion.

Amid a European and global economic crisis, governments are still letting markets get away with little regulation, big bonuses and dubious financial instruments that are distorting financial stability for short-term gain and putting enormous pressure on people to pick up the manufactured debts

Much of Britain’s press is relentlessly euro-sceptic, to the extent that the euro’s survival is being talked down and political supporters of Europe no longer speak up. For a change, think of some of the benefits.

Once again financial markets which were prime movers in causing the economic crash in 2008 are gambling on destabilising currencies. Back in the 1990s the pound bounced around wildly in the hands of speculators and it is again weak against the euro, despite the euro’s problems. The euro brought new stability to currency markets, challenging the supremacy of a US dollar, exposed by America’s massive budget deficit.

Several countries, like Montenegro in former Yugoslavia, have the euro as the official currency without being a formal member of the euro zone, because their own economies are not viable enough. Ecuador's economy hit the rocks and the country now uses the US dollar as its national currency to inject more stability.

Author John Ralston Saul is in town for the Sydney Writers Festival and will be speaking at the Sydney Town Hall this evening at 6pm. Bookings can be made through the Sydney Writers' Festival 2010 website.

Ralston Saul has updated his book 'The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World.'

'For more than a decade, Saul has been arguing that it is high time to completely rethink the primacy of economic fundamentalism, to discard what he sees as the flawed, 1970s ideology of unfettered free-market globalisation. "The recent European bailout adds fuel to his argument", he says. "This is the outcome of globalism? That we're more in debt than we were in 1973? We're not having a conversation about what worked and what didn't [in globalisation], and we have to have that conversation." [SMH 17th May 2010, p6]

Ralston Saul says we had the chance to reform the system - but that was before the global financial crisis.

Saturday 31 October 2009

by Ellen Hodgson Brown J.D.
Originally published on truthout.

Pouring money into the private banking system has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in.

President Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan has so far failed to halt the growth of unemployment: 2.7 million jobs have been lost since the stimulus plan began. California has lost 336,400 jobs. Arizona has lost 77,300. Michigan has lost 137,300. A total of 49 states and the District of Columbia have all reported net job losses.

US citizens deserve better than the third-world US health-‘care’ system

The French News reports that in the United States more and more people are out of work. A sign of this is the number of people who cannot access medical and hospital treatment.

When North Americans lose their work, they usually lose their health insurance.

Some clinics have been willing to treat people for free, but now they are overwhelmed by the numbers of people seeking help.

Apparently some clinics are now running lotteries to choose who to treat in parts of the USA.

The report showed a line of 75 people without work or health insurance, presenting to be part of a lottery for free treatment, in Darlington, Virginia. Among those lining up was a diabetic, a woman with a thyroid deficiency problem and an out of work teacher with cardiac insufficiency. Apparently some in the queue had cancer.

We saw one woman ‘winning’ the right to treatment on this occasion.

Apparently those who did not win would be able to try in another lottery after 15 days!

Clinic spokespeople say that they are trying to manage the best they can.

Now in Southern California, soon in place near you

The link http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/702.html provides two short videos that starkly illustrate the ultimate results of unsustainable growth, as it is unfolding right now in Southern California, and as it is likely to unravel anywhere that continues too far with an economy based predominantly upon land speculation, urban construction and retail.

Extensive areas riddled with debt and without productive function or options

This growth model produces extensive areas that are riddled with debt and have no genuinely productive function or options by which to repay that debt. The extremity of circumstance shown in these videos also presents a new, terribly real, but currently unreported wave of refugees - the repossessed homeless.

This article comes from the background research for the Freewaves Feminist Magazine Show on 3RPP Radio Port Phillip, Victoria, Thursday, 20 August 2009. On the show with me was Catherine Manning, who wrote “Would you like porn with that?” for Candobetter, who has started up an internet site focused on removing porn from children’s eye level in stores.

Before we did the show together, I did a bit of research into the nature of pornography and why it might be good, or bad. I had difficulty coming to grips with the subject at all for some strange reason. I think that, like a lot of people, I have learned to tune out from the skin-marketing all around me, so focusing on the subject and related issues required an effort. I found a lot of very interesting writing and some very funny blogs.

This is what I came up with.

What is pornography anyhow?

Pornography is not just about getting naked, or having sex, or even recording, depicting or describing it.