On the Road to a Jobless Recovery

Unemployment in the United States currently hovers at 10 percent, and more than 17 percent if involuntary part-time and discouraged job-seekers are included. And according to most forecasts, it is likely to remain above pre-crisis levels for at least three years. In good times, the economy might generate 400,000 new jobs each month. Today, the United States needs about 15 million jobs to make up for recession losses, population growth and labor force drop-outs. Despite record numbers of (...) read

Taking Back Homes from the Banks: Exercising the Human Right to Housing

> Bill Quigley

May has seen an upsurge in local organizations exercising their human rights to housing. Most people recognize that international human rights guarantee all humans a right to housing. With the millions of homeless living in our communities and the millions of empty foreclosed houses all across our communities, groups have decided to put them together. Organizations across the US are engaging in "housing liberation" and "housing defense" to exercise their human rights to housing. Read (...) read

Tax Day and America’s Wars. Small-City Mayor Takes on the Pentagon

Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by (...) read

The New ‘Lost Generation’: Young Workers

A devastating new report, "The Kids Aren’t All Right," released by the Economic Policy Institute underscores the plight facing young workers in the US—and how little is being done to address the long-term damage this recession has inflicted on a generation of workers. Read more read

Globalization Marches On

> Growing popular outrage has not challenged corporate power

Shifts in global power, ongoing or potential, are a lively topic among policy makers and observers. One question is whether (or when) China will displace the United States as the dominant global player, perhaps along with India. There is yet another significant shift in global power: from the general population to the principal architects of the global system, a process aided by the undermining of functioning democracy in the United States and other of the Earth’s most powerful states. Read (...) read

Globalization on the rocks

Corporate globalization in the ‘real’ world economy lay behind what appeared at first to be a strictly financial crisis. It was hooked on debt, a deadly vice which eventually crushes everything in its grip, to the point where no-one knows the value of anything. So it could be that, in August 2007, seemingly marginal ‘sub-prime’ people who started posting their house keys through the letterboxes of loan sharks across the US signalled the shipwreck of a misbegotten ‘global’ enterprise. Read (...) read

Crisis of the Capitalist System: Where Do We Go from Here?

Immanuel Wallerstein comments on the global financial crisis from a long-term historical perspective, and on the opportunities it offers for global justice movements (Harold Wolpe Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 5 November 2009). Read more read

"Subprime Carbon?": Friends of the Earth attacks carbon-trading markets

The world’s carbon trading markets growing complexity threatens another "sub-prime" style financial crisis that could again destabilise the global economy, campaigners warn today. In a new report, Friends of the Earth says that to date "cap and trade" carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions but have been plagued by inefficiency and corruption that render them unfit for purpose. Read (...) read

The Movement Against the Banks

A massive rally in Chicago next week aims to express public displeasure with the massive bank bailout outside the American Bank Association annual meeting. Protesters will converge at 11:30 on Monday, October 26, at 301 North Water Street, where the meeting is taking place. "The same financial institutions that caused the economic crisis and took billions in taxpayer bailouts are back to earning incredible profits," rally organizers—including Public Citizen, the AFL-CIO, and Change to (...) read

Doing a Decent Job? A New Report on the IMF Shows a Leopard who Cannot Change its Spots

Despite changes in rhetoric, IMF policy advice and conditions are still having the same detrimental effects on social protection, decent work and poverty in countries forced to take out loans due to the financial crisis, a new report released today shows. Published on the eve of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Annual Meetings to be held in Istanbul on 6-7 October, Doing a decent job? IMF policies and decent work in times of crisis, critically examines the situation (...) read

Call for "global jobs pact" amidst rising job losses

In its latest Global Employment Trends update of May, the ILO has revised upwards its unemployment projections to levels ranging from 210 million to 239 million unemployed worldwide in 2009. The report notes that the economic crisis is detrimental for both women and men, whether they are at work, looking for work or outside the labour force. Women are often in a disadvantaged position in comparison to men in labour markets around the world. Read (...) read

Will China save the world from depression?

> Foreign Policy in Focus

The world is looking at China to save it from depression, but China has built its export based economy on the backs of its rural population, which is too poor to absorb the industry’s output now that global demand has slumped. Will China be the "growth pole" that will snatch the world from the jaws of depression? This question has become a favorite topic as the heroic American middle class consumer, weighed down by massive debt, ceases to be the key stimulus for global production. Although (...) read

Strategic issues of the global crisis

>  The international debate and the alter-globalist movement’s approach

The London G20 summit was as disappointing as expected. Several declarations were of course of interest insofar as they seem opposite to the policy principles of past years. Let us take note of them and not hesitate to remind the G20 about the promises on regulation. An initial question puts a damper on our optimism: can we really trust the leaders of the G20 to establish new regulation and to accept the consequences? For the moment, it doesn’t seem so. The dominant impression is that, (...) read

The global financial crisis: Lessons and responses from Africa

> Demba Moussa Dembele

As the international financial crisis points to the collapse of laissez faire economics and discredits market fundamentalism, Africa and the global South should break free from failed neoliberal policies and the institutions that have promoted them and define their own paths to development, writes Demba Moussa Dembele, director of the Forum for African Alternatives. The crisis provides fundamental lessons, says Dembele, the first being that markets do not have self-correcting mechanisms, (...) read

Chomsky on the Obama/Geithner Rescue Plan

> Video

There’s been an outcry in America about the financial rescue plan unveiled by the Obama administration under the leadership of Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner. The Obama administration plans to buy up $2 trillion in toxic financial assets. The plan is being denounced by economists in the mainstream press, as well as commentators in the alternative media. Pepe Escobar also provides excellent commentary of Geithner’s PPPIP (Public-Private Partnership Investment Programme), which he refers (...) read

Meltdown Not the Only Crisis in the World

Muhammad Yunus, who claimed the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize founding Grameen Bank, which has lent out more than six billion dollars to mostly poor women, says the global recession presents a historical opportunity for change. Catherine Makino, IPS Correspondent, Interviews MD. YUNUS, Bangladeshi banker and economist Read read

Asia: the coming fury

> Foreign Policy In Focus

With the sudden end of the export era, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago, writes Walden Bello. As goods pile up in wharves from Bangkok to Shanghai, and workers are laid off in record numbers, people in East Asia are beginning to realize they aren’t only experiencing an economic downturn but living through the end of an era. For over 40 years now, the (...) read

World Social Forum: Resolution and a Plan of Action

The World Social Forum ended its ninth edition on February 1 in Belém with its "Assembly of assemblies" adopting dozens of resolutions and proposals to be the subjects of a programme of mobilisations around the world in 2009. The 21 thematic assemblies thus broke the apparent WSF taboo on taking common political stands under pressure from thousands of civil society groups anxious to seize the opportunity opened by the global economic crisis to progressive change. A week of demonstrations (...) read

Toxic capitalism

http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip (...)

The crisis that we are witnessing today is shaking the very foundations of neo-liberal capitalism. It is unfolding at an accelerating speed, and nobody is capable of saying where it will lead. This article does not try to follow its unfolding step by step, because it would be likely to be outdated by the time it was published. It seeks rather to suggest some keys to interpret this crisis and to demonstrate what is at stake on the social level.  read

The Financial Crisis of 2008

> Interviewed by Simone Bruno

I would like to talk about the current crisis. How is it that so many people could see it coming, but the people in charge of governments and economies didn’t, or didn’t prepare? The basis for the crisis is predictable and it was in fact predicted. It is built into financial liberalization that there will be frequent and deep crises. In fact, since financial liberalization was instituted about thirty five years ago, there has been a trend of increasing regularity of crises and deeper crises, (...) read

Africa and global finance: potential resistance?

> by Patrick Bond

Far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North’s problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism. At minimum, the ongoing chaos offers new ideological space and material justifications for African finance ministries to re-impose exchange controls and re-regulate finance, and to find sources of hard currency not connected to the Bretton Woods Institutions or Western donors. The 2008 world financial meltdown (...) read