Depositors decimated by bail-in. Come again? Cypriots discover the debt jubilee? Well yes actually, that is basically how depositors at Cypriot banks have been treated by the Troika, even if the decision to grab up to 9.9% of cash deposits to finance a bail out of the finance sector is being presented as a tax or levy.…
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…
Capitalism, war and environmental decline in the era of European dominance are irrevocably linked. Peace and the environment are two equally wide-reaching topics, and consequently they could be studied separately and from a variety of perspectives. In this article, we will endeavour to demonstrate the relationship between peace and the environment starting with the idea that…
On Wednesday night prime German television channel ARD broadcast undercover reportage concerning the treatment of foreign workers at Amazon’s huge distribution warehouse near Bad Hersfeld in central Germany. State parliamentarians called the report “unspeakable”, “shocking”, “beyond the pale”, and the Left Party spokesperson stated:
“We call on the state government to carry out promptly and with all at its disposal checks of the complainant’s social security fraud, the use of an apparent neo-Nazi security company through Amazon and the inhumane placement in a so-called ‘resort’”.
Bad Hersfeld backs up against the old border with East Germany at the point, the Fulda Gap, which the US determined was the prime strategic entry point for Soviet forces in any invasion of Europe. As a consequence this wooded up-country became a backwater of barbed wire and checkpoints after the war. It is here that Amazon has had built one of its massive distribution centres for Germany, and it is here that undercover reporters infiltrated.
A group of German trades unions, academics, and militants have attempted to seize back the clock as a powerful mode of political expression with their “Wealth Clock”. It seems to be a direct response to the relative success of the US’s National Debt Clock, instituted in the late 80s by property developer Seymour Durst, in impressing into the public consciousness the claimed urgency of dealing with the US national debt, as a route to neoliberal austerity measures. Leaving aside the many arguments that can be levelled against Durst’s fears, the image of a constant up-ticking of a national debt has had its echoes in European states, not least Britain and Germany as flag-bearers for austerity.
According to classical theory, the roots of democracy are in consensus. The truth, however, is quite the opposite. Experience has shown us that the key to democracy lays elsewhere; in the capacity to accept and even guarantee dissent and criticism of the established powers, with resistance to these powers playing an even more important role. Although trust is a vital component of democracy, distrust and maintaining a permanently critical attitude towards the execution of power are even more essential. The way in which this power is exercised must be controlled if we hope to preserve any essence of the notion of power to the people. A serious look at the critical evidence leaves us in no doubt that this is the case, as we take into account the conflicting and pluralistic nature of any kind of social reality. The only chance that democracy has to flourish is if the vast range of conflicting interests and needs are acknowledged and ways are found to respect these as far as possible.
The road to Doima (Colombia), at best unpaved and bumpy, is today crossed by rivers in flood. The rivers have submerged the low concrete bridges and at the second bridge the river is so high the bus has to stop and wait for the waters to subside. The rainstorm that caused the flood gradually dies…
During the closing months of 2012, Slovenia has seen a series of mass popular protests. Thirty thousand demonstrators gathered on November 17 for the first protest, organised by trade unions, students, and organisations of retired people and artists. Dozens of protests followed, large and small, taking place in virtually all of the urban settlements of Slovenia,…
The movie ‘Compliance’ is disturbing on many different levels, and left me with a feeling of extreme discomfort, and even disorientation, long after the credits rolled, no less because it is based on true events, referred to by the American media as the “strip search prank call scam’. As the story unfolds in the movie in the same sequence as it did in reality, Sandra, the manager of an Ohio “Chickwich” fast-food outlet, receives a call from a man falsely claiming to be a police detective. Referring to himself as “Officer Daniels” or “Sir”, he accuses a young female cashier, Becky, of stealing money from a customer. He then enlists Sandra’s assistance in physically detaining Becky in the store room of the outlet and strip-searching her. Sandra and two other employees are caught up in events that become increasingly unsettling, escalate throughout, and ultimately culminate in the degrading sexual abuse and humiliation of Becky by Sandra’s boyfriend, Van.
The expansion of the extractive industries has, as counterparts, first, the reaction of indigenous communities in the defense of their communal goods (land, water, grazing, etc.), and second, the violent counter-attack of the state through police and military repression, legitimated many times by the of exception (in Peru the “state of emergency”, a kind of state of exception, has been applied by governments in previous years to control socio-environmental protests). Political economy and legal policy are both relevant to this situation and both are functionally connected.
In respect of political economy, let us bring to mind what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession”, which is just the theoretical update of the “primitive accumulation” described by Karl Marx, that is to say: capitalist expansion requires the violent transformation of common goods into commodities in order to be appropriated and then used by exchange mechanisms.
Euro or no euro. That was the grand dilemma in which Greece, and in particular, the Syriza movement that you lead, was framed. How do you analyse the period of crisis that Europe is currently undergoing, and which seems to put in question much more than the sacrosanct stability of the euro?
I believe the European model has to be rebuilt from below. We can’t be satisfied with what today is called Europe. The current crisis is not a European crisis but a global one. Europe today does not have the mechanisms to confront it or control the worldwide financial attack against its peoples. Hence why Europe became a continent where the attack of the global financial system was ferocious. We have no defences.
The taxi took an alternate route to the airport that day, the day before the Queen’s Jubilee parade, to avoid the very early morning rehearsals of military personnel, horses, and others involved in orchestrating the impending celebrations. Arriving at my destination 22 hours later, in a time zone 13 hours behind GMT, I went to the Guardian…
Five days in Athens. Five very varied days. I used to frequent Athens as a teenager with my parents. We were always transit visitors, en route to Kano, Nigeria where my late father used to work. Those visits where quick, two days in Athens, visiting ancient monuments, museums, tavernas, cafes, friends, and relatives. You see, post 1974…
Sociologist Charles Tilly drew a compelling analogy between the state as the place of organised means of violence, and racketeering. He defined the racketeer “as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction”, in order to gain control and consolidate power. In this regard, a state and its government differ little from racketeering, to the…
The 15M [the Indignados ‘movement’] is very alive, we see this in the great challenges that await it. It has many achievements, some very visible, like the creation of a different social climate or having socialized the idea that the crisis is a con, and that this con started well before the crisis. A year later it has…
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…
The politics of crisis speaks among other things to the inherent crisis within the capitalist process. Nonlinear studies of capitalism, for example, take a far more honest approach to their subject matter. One can read the theology that is neoclassical economics and despair that even the first steps of scientific method are ignored. The primary failure…
A standard justification for the cuts to public services, the policy of prioritising the repayment of private speculator debts over funding for hospitals and schools, the policy of converting private speculator debt into sovereign debt, is that ‘we’ have lost our sovereignty, or, in a more refined version, ‘we’ have lost our ‘economic sovereignty’, as though…
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 […]
David Hugill (DH): You’ve suggested that the neoliberal project has started to exhaust itself, that it has ceased to be generative of new ideas. But doesn’t it seem like new fronts of neoliberal assault are always opening up? Take Governor Scott Walker’s attack on collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, for example. Does this not represent…