Freemen-on-the-land is a reactionary western movement which argues that law is based on consent. They distribute legal advice, suggesting that people can and should refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the courts. This has become particularly important in Ireland recently, following the increasing foreclosure on debts. The Irish Times reports over 100 ‘Freeman’-style arguments used in the…
Amador Fernández-Savater: What is the context in which the Italian elections have taken place? Bifo: The political disintegration of Europe. Europe was born as a project of peace and social solidarity, taking up the legacy of the socialist and internationalist culture that opposed fascism. In the 90s, finance capital’s major centres of power decided to destroy the European…
From 15 November 2012, a part of the Occupy Movement in the U.S. led by Strike Debt will be operating a “Rolling Jubilee” which their website describes as:
“A bailout of the people by the people.
We buy debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, we abolish it. We cannot buy specific individuals’ debt — instead, we help liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal.”
David Graeber, for example, has been tweeting about this enthusiastically and the Rolling Jubilee Facebook page has a picture of Slavoj Zizek holding the linked “Strike Debt” logo and a statement claiming that he too supports the campaign. My initial reaction to the plan was open-minded bemusement and a question which I see keeps recurring on the Rolling Jubilee FB page: “How does this work?.”
Op-ed on the arrest of Kostas Vaxevanis for publishing the names of Greeks with Swiss bank accounts A warrant for Greek journalist Kostas Vaxevanis’ arrest was issued today [Ed. 28 October 2012] for the alleged crime of “violating privacy legislation” related to his bi-weekly magazine HOT DOC which published a list of 2,059 names and associated professions…
The Amendment of the German Bankruptcy Act,1 which came into effect six months ago, has opened the door to widespread abuse alleges the industry association VID, which claims to represent more than half of liquidators. “A few influential and wealthy creditors now threaten to dominate proceedings”, the VID chairman Christoph Niering said in Berlin. “In addition,…
Last 25S (25th of Sept) we called to surround the Congress of the members of parliament to rescue it from the kidnapping of the popular sovereignty carried out by the Troika and the financial markets. An occupation executed with the consent and collaboration of most of the political parties. Besides the constant threats, the manipulation…
Martin Wheatley, British financial regulator charged with solving the LIBOR crisis, has returned from his Crusade carrying, we are told, a splinter of the True Cross which he assures us is capable of procuring miracles. Not common or garden miracles involving the lame, Galilean fish stocks, or talking asses, no. Something really impressive: announcing the actual…
Yesterday’s publication of further dismal GDP data for the UK is an opportunity to reconsider its basis as the justification for many aspects of the current neoliberal order. Bracketing out the question of whether economic growth is a valid lodestar for any just society, there comes the old but under-frequented question1 about what constitutes growth and…
In my previous post I asked somewhat rhetorically what else banks had felt able to do during the credit crunch if the belief had arisen that “market stability” (sc. bank survival”) trumped criminal law. The U.S. Securities and Exchnage Commission (“SEC”) has obligingly provided an example. Yesterday (19 July 2012) the Securities and Exchange Commission charged…
What’s the difference between Monaco and the City of London? One is a micro-territory governed by absolute fiat, hollowed out by property speculation, gambling, and the concealment of great crimes of wealth, and the other is Monaco. In case your wondering, Monaco does have branches of HSBC and Barclays, and, if you need anything tricky sorting out,…
With a Procedural Order issued on June 26th, an ICSID Arbitral Tribunal has made a decision concerning an amicus curiae petition filed on 23 May 2012 by an ensemble of Petitioners formed by an international NGO and four Zimbabwean indigenous communities. Reversing the recent trend toward transparency and participation in investment arbitration, the Panel has denied the…
As partners and associates of 190 equity partner US law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf filed out of their 6th Ave. New York office, cardboard boxes of desk clutter in hand, one could not help noticing the similarities with the images of the collapse of Lehman Bros. The superficial similarity is not merely ostensible, however; the reasons…
1. Creation of a shield to protect society against the crisis • Not a single citizen without a guaranteed minimum income or unemployment benefit, medical care, social protection, housing, and access to all services of public utilities. • Protection of and relief measures for indebted households. • Price controls and price reductions, VAT reduction, and abolition of VAT…
If we look at the post-2008 history of European and Member States’ legislation, we can clearly perceive the emergence and consolidation of a discourse of crisis and necessity, which has been used to abandon existing legal constraints and to dismantle the boundaries provided by the structure of the EU. Fortified by a narrative of apocalypse, illegality has been transformed into lawfulness.
Considering the famous 2009 judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) in Germany, we can affirm that according to the fundamental Treaties:
‘the European Union must comply with democratic principles as regards its nature and extent and also as regards to its own organisational and procedural elaboration. This means firstly that European integration may not result in the system of democratic rule [in Member States] being undermined. […]
Following the Irish Government’s decision to modify the constitution of 1937 following a new constitutional convention, the Ice Moon Blog — which has contacts in the highest places in the Irish State — has been able to obtain a secret government memo with a full mock-up of the new constitution to be amended after the Fiscal Compact Referendum. The following are the…
At this week’s UK Treasury Select Committee hearing on the Budget of 2012, attendees were invited to draw parallels between George Osborne’s view of economics and the military stratagems of Field Marshall Haig. It seems that the British Chancellor of the Exchequer has followed Haig in believing that the best way to confound one’s enemies…
Greg Smith’s resignation letter in the New York Times yesterday, announcing a bridge-burning departure from his position as Executive Director of Goldman Sachs’ Equity Derivatives Division (Europe, Asia, Africa) certainly brought Wall St. to a relative halt. GS cancelled conference calls and the Goldman Flacks (PR goons) were rounded up to pour scorn on Mr. Smiths allegations as “unrecognisable”.
The importance of the letter was not so much it’s revelation of a eat-what-you-kill culture in which clients are the main course, not even the contention that somehow GS had changed culture — it hadn’t any more than any other investment bank since the Big Bang. The letter was important because it effectively took GS clients’ faces and slammed them against the restaurant window, through which they could now see their GS contact engaged in anthropophagia between raucous tales of how the current dish had of its own volition signed up to sit on the plate […]
The agreement reached between the Eurogroup and the Greek government in the night between last February 20th and 21st has been considered by the former as ‘a comprehensive blueprint for putting the public finances and the economy of Greece on a sustainable footing and hence for safeguarding financial stability in Greece and in the Euro area as a whole’.
Unfortunately, the recent Abaclat award (2011), that affirmed the jurisdiction of an ad hoc panel of the World Bank’s arbitration arm the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (“ICSID”) over a claim filed by over 160,000 Italian bondholders against Argentina for breach of the Italy-Argentina Bilateral Investment Treaty (“BIT”), might represent an obstacle toward the achievement of the goals of the Greek restructuring. The effect of Abaclat amounted to a declaration that the effective protection of the investment represents the sole term of reference of investment arbitration, independently from the legitimate interest of the state, and that this effectively permitted re-interpretation (if not simply overrode) Argentinian law, the relevant BIT, the terms and conditions of the bonds in question, and even (with respect to “mass claims”) the procedural rules of ICSID itself.
It is worth remarking that three broad types of response to debt crisis could be found in antiquity, in the Mediterranean-Mesopotamian area. We say broad types because it is quite possible that the particular type remarked upon was rather the predominant or defining characteristic of a movement, and could be accompanied by the other types of…
As we are forced to look at the budget over two days, a particular unnecessary cruelty, it’s worth emphasising, as those in the ULA and Sinn Féin have done, that this is a budget based on political choices. It is depressing to watch seasoned politicans like Pat Rabbitte claim pathetically that if they didn’t make the choices…