From NOEBIE.net
Historian and geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore claims that the rebellion in Baltimore is an uprising against austerity. She says that gentrified cities, the fall of manufacturing and the filling of jails with black men all fueled the reaction to the killing of Freddie Gray.
The US is more segregated by race and income now than in 1960.
The Coalition of the Radical Left, or SYRIZA, is favored to win parliamentary elections on January 25, giving it a strong chance to form a new government that could confront the catastrophic austerity agenda that has plunged Greece into severe economic and social crisis. Lee Sustar answers your questions about the rise of SYRIZA and what a victory for it on January 25 would mean.
Read it: Why the whole world is watching Greece | SocialistWorker.org.
Alexis Tsipras, the person who looks destined to be the next Greek prime minister, speaks about history and prospects.
“While the mainstream parties led people on — rather brazenly, I might add — we were vehement that austerity would have severe negative consequences and lead to recession; these policies simply weren’t sustainable. We supported grassroots initiatives, including major demonstrations and the social solidarity movement. Lastly, our political emphasis has been on uniting the Left. This was critical — and it really resonated with people.”
Read the interview: A Historic Opportunity | Jacobin.
A nasty strain of austerity capitalism has taken over Europe, leaving broken lives in its wake. Researchers Servaas Storm and C.W.M. Naastepad, senior lecturers in economics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, consider how things got so bad, what role economists and misguided policy-makers have played, and how to change course. According to them, most everybody is getting the story about Europe dead wrong.
via How Parasitic Capitalism and Flawed Economics Turned Europe into the Hunger Games | Alternet.
Yesterday 350 prominent economists issued a statement urging our lawmakers and the Obama Administration to focus on jobs and economic growth, not the budget deficit. I suspect that their plea will be largely ignored, unless we, the people, take responsibility for our own future and rise up in opposition to austerity.
Here is part of what the economists wrote.
The U.S. economy, once in free-fall toward a new depression, has begun to recover. But we are still mired in a prolonged slump marked by mass unemployment, rising poverty, and declining wages. And the fragile recovery is threatened by obsessive concern with cutting deficits that has infected both parties.
As even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recognizes, it is long term unemployment, not excessive deficits or debt, that is now inflicting the greatest human toll and economic damage. Polls show that voters agree joblessness and a bad economy are much higher priorities than deficits.
Yet too many in Washington are fixated on cutting public spending to balance the budget, not on how to put people back to work and get our economy going. There is no theory of economics that explains how we can deflate our way to recovery. Businesses are not basing investment decisions on how much Congress cuts the debt in 2023. As Great Britain, Ireland, Spain and Greece have shown, inflicting austerity on a weak economy leads to deeper recession, rising unemployment and increasing misery.
Indeed, reports this morning indicate that a second recession has already hit the Eurozone.
Please share this information widely. I’ll continue to post more on what we’re facing (and how to resist) in the coming days and weeks. Please comment or email with your own ideas and links to share as well.
Read the Economists’ Full Statement: Jobs and Growth, Not Austerity – Campaign for America’s Future.
P.S. The image above depicts firefighters in protest over budget cuts at Thessalonika, Greece on September 8th, 2012.
California cities’ bankruptcies: Blame the housing bust. [latimes.com] – From reading the voluminous accounts of the fiscal woes of Stockton and San Bernardino, you’d think that municipal unions and feckless city officials are primarily what led these cities down the path to fiscal ruin.
But you’d be wrong. What bankrupted Stockton and San Bernardino were the most severe housing busts in the nation. What bankrupted those two cities were banks peddling subprime mortgages to poorly paid workers.