info
California Domestic Workers Demand Bill of Rights
U.S. financial regulators to warn about student debt risks
April 25, 2013
The panel of senior U.S. regulators charged with safeguarding the financial system will warn this week about risks posed by the rapidly growing amount of student debt, increasing pressure on policymakers to deal with the potential problem.
At roughly $1 trillion and rising, education loans may hamper economic growth and limit home purchases as overly indebted households and young workers cut back on consumption and borrowing, the Financial Stability Oversight Council is poised to warn in its latest annual report, sources familiar with the matter said.
The yearly compendium on financial developments and potential risks to the financial system, prepared by the nine agencies that comprise FSOC, will be made public on Thursday. Student debt will not be presented as an immediate threat to financial stability, these people said, but its mention in the report as a risk is likely to alarm a sector that has been in policymakers’ sights for the past year.
FSOC joins the Federal Reserve’s interest rate-setting panel, the Federal Open Market Committee; the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in alerting about the possible danger student debt poses to either financial stability or the broader economy.
Police ‘cleaning up’ Detroit by kidnapping the homeless, stranding them in other cities
April 22, 2013
Imagine that you are homeless in Detroit. You have an area where you know you are safe, where you can find food and shelter if you ask. Now imagine that a cop grabs you from the street, throws you into a van, drives you to the edge of the city or even a suburb and then kicks you out. That’s what the ACLU is accusing the Detroit PD of doing.: they filed a complaint with the Justice Department against the DPB this week.
The complaint comes at the end of a year-long investigation into claims that the department routinely drove homeless people to areas unfamiliar to them, leaving them to get back on their own. They will approach homeless people, especially in tourist areas like Greektown, force them into vans and drive them miles away, the complaint alleges. Sometimes the officers would even take what little money they had, leaving them with no recourse but to walk back to the city. Sometimes the homeless victims would even be left in neighboring towns and suburbs like Dearborn and River Rouge.
Speaking for the ACLU of Michigan, staff attorney Sarah Mehta told the local CBS affiliate:
“DPD’s practice of essentially kidnapping homeless people and abandoning them miles away from the neighborhoods they know – with no means for a safe return — is inhumane, callous and illegal. The city’s desire to hide painful reminders of our economic struggles cannot justify discriminating against the poor, banishing them from their city, and endangering their lives. A person who has lost his home has not lost his right to be treated with dignity.” (source)
The ACLU was contacted by the St. Peter and Paul Jesuit Church Warming Center, a homeless shelter. They told the organization about several homeless people who were “taken for a ride” by DPB officers. One such story came from Andrew Sheehan, a 36-year-old who used to be homeless but is now working at a grocery store:
“I had my back turned to him and I did not see him approaching, and the first thing he did was he kicked me. He didn’t identify himself as an officer and he kicked me and told me to get up. I asked him if I was free to go. He told me no.” (source)
The organization has published the stories of five homeless people who were kidnapped and harassed by Detroit police. According to the ACLU’s complaint, some of the homeless who were taken had to walk many miles to get back to downtown shelters. This puts them in danger from a variety of sources, especially in the middle of winter.
The ACLU has asked the Department of Justice to investigate the allegations. They have also asked the city to issue a directive to police officers to desist this practice immediately.
This is unconscionable, but it’s not new. Removing the vagrants and undersirables from where the “regular” people might be upset by them is an old practice, according to Samuel Walker, a police accountability expert:
“This is a familiar story with a long history in policing. You do wonder what did this Police Department learn from the consent decree experience?” (source)
Detroit’s Chief of Police, Chester Logan, declined to comment, saying that he had not yet seen the complaint. The AP was also unable to get comments from Mayor Dave Bing or the city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr. Not surprising.
This bad economy has seen an uptick in the homeless situation. Yes, it makes some of us uncomfortable to see them, perhaps because we see more of ourselves in them than we would care to admit. But ignoring the problem won’t solve it and taking these people to the edge of town and exposing them to danger is not the way to handle it. Detroit’s police need to look inside and find their better nature before they get someone killed.
A Facebook friend of mine sent me this video and asked for my thoughts
April 16, 2013
My response was so long, I thought it a waste not to post here. Response starts below:
Well, you may not have known what you were getting yourself into when you asked for my thoughts cos I have a whole essay’s worth of thoughts – lol!:
On our financial system: our financial system for sure doesn’t make any sense – it is unstable and crisis is built into our capitalist system. Among other problems, competition & unsustainable growth are built into the system – there is no way our system can continue for very long without serious reforms or absolute fundamental change (which is really what needs to happen). Competition is great, but the problem with competition is that somebody eventually wins. And when they do, power & money & the ability to accumulate more of both concentrates in the hands of a few, driving the disparity, subverting regulation, and eventually leading to economic disaster.
I can imagine a few alternatives & solutions to this problem and I have in-mind what I believe would be the most possible/likely-to-succeed/least-bloody solution, but ultimately, I’ll jump on board to pretty much anything that answers the problems created by our capitalist system if it becomes popular enough & has strong enough of a possibility of success & doesn’t involve hurting lots of other people.
On RussiaToday as a news source: RussiaToday, like all large news providers (save for Democracy Now, if you want to count that), is biased toward the agenda of the powers they are beholden to. For us in the United States, that’s the corrupt corporate interests that govern our system.
For RussiaToday, that’s Russian state interests. They use real information & real facts, but often frame them in misleading or hyperbolic ways. Amidst major crises, they report facts early and incorrectly often. They feature U.S. stories predominately featuring violence, brutality, and crisis in the U.S. They intentionally try and foster negative feelings about the U.S. and give extensive coverage to news relevant both to the American left and to libertarian/Ron-Paul people – the two largest ‘dissident’ communities in the U.S. That’s their U.S. audience – people who could cause problems for U.S. state interests.
As part of that community, it’s a great & powerful resource. Lots of good information covered extensively about police brutality & our military-industrial-complex that doesn’t get that kind of coverage otherwise. At the same time, when they cite statistics or post stories about how the U.S. government is finally coming ‘for your guns’, I kind of just roll my eyes and tune them out and wait to see if I see it reported on DemocracyNow or TruthOut or SocialistWorker or AlJazeera (which has it’s own problems). So… I find them to be a good source for conglomerated news stories that a ‘dissident’ or a leftist might be interested in, but it’s always important to me, when reading RussiaToday, that I find other sources to confirm what is being reported.
Recommended related sources:
Sorry for the really long response!
-Robert
![the-lone-pamphleteer.tumblr.com: Sundown in AmericaApril 4, 2013
Rarely do journalists reporting on the state of the American or world economy write with the accessibility and honesty of David A. Stockman in his recent New York Times opinion piece, called “State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America.” The former Republican Congressman and Office of Management & Budget director during the Reagan administration has the experience with financial markets and central economic planning that most critics of the system lack, and it makes his column seem both more reliable and more frightening than the alarmist pleas of many other doomsday prophets.
With carefully explained figures and simplified (yet, to my knowledge, accurate) descriptions of the history of twentieth century American capitalism, Stockman takes us through the eras of mistaken governmental policies, avoiding the typical biases that pervade in financial opinion writing:
“The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days.”
Stockman’s willingness to criticize Republicans and Democrats alike is refreshing, as when he points to 1933 as the origin of our current “state-wreck,” when “when Franklin D. Roosevelt opted for fiat money (currency not fundamentally backed by gold), economic nationalism and capitalist cartels in agriculture and industry,” but then only a few paragraphs later emphasizes Richard Nixon’s “sin [arguably] graver than Watergate”: ending the convertibility of gold to the dollar, essentially defaulting on the nation’s debt obligations and launching a “four-decade spree during which we have lived high on the hog, running a cumulative $8 trillion current-account deficit.”
Many of his claims, though controversial, strike me as correct: World War II did more to end the depression than the New Deal; the only reason Alan Greenspan’s monetary policies—keeping interest rates too low for too long and flooding Wall Street with freshly minted cash—didn’t set off inflation was that domestic prices for goods and labor were crushed by the huge flow of imports from the factories of Asia; we’ve been living on borrowed time, spending Asia’s borrowed dimes; beginning under Reagan, and especially under Bush, the GOP basically “embraced Keynesianism—for the wealthy”; that the overblown fear of another Great Depression in 2008 was concocted by Wall Street to force a panicked bail-out from Washington; and—perhaps most frighteningly—that the 10-year deficit is actually $15 to $20 trillion—much larger than the $7 trillion that even “deficit hawks” like Paul Ryan would have us believe (Stockman explains that this disparity is partially made possible by the Congressional Budget Office’s projection of 16.4 million jobs over the next decade, compared with only 2.5 million in the last ten years).
I find myself convinced by Stockman’s column not only because of his seemingly accurate portrayal of the many mistakes made by government and industry alike, but also because he seems genuinely concerned with the stark and widening inequality created by the broken system. He sounds like Bernie Sanders when he says that Paul Ryan’s “proposal for draconian 30 percent cuts over a decade on the $7 trillion safety net—Medicaid, food stamps and the earned-income tax credit—is another front in the GOP’s war against the 99 percent.”
Like many critics of the harshly unequal outcomes of the supposed “recovery,” he invokes mind-boggling figures: real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent; the real net worth of the bottom 90 percent has dropped by 25 percent; the number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million (which is one in five Americans).
In the 1980s Stockman was a true believer in Chicago School neoclassical economics and the trickle-down theory. Unlike most of his peers, however, he’s willing to look, 30 years later, at the disastrous outcomes and know how misguided that ideology was.
Stockman is no Kissinger, warning of the future of an empirical China in America’s image. Instead, he recognizes that just as America will soon follow Greece and Cypriot’s lead, the rest of the world won’t be far behind:
“The greatest construction boom in recorded history—China’s money dump on infrastructure over the last 15 years—is slowing. Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, South Africa and all the other growing middle-income nations cannot make up for the shortfall in demand. The American machinery of monetary and fiscal stimulus has reached its limits. Japan is sinking into old-age bankruptcy and Europe into welfare-state senescence. The new rulers enthroned in Beijing last year know that after two decades of wild lending, speculation and building, even they will face a day of reckoning, too.”
He joins other pragmatic truth-tellers, like former Comptroller General David Walker, in calling for drastic reforms, but is more than pessimistic about the potential to realize them, writing that “the way out would be so radical it can’t happen.” I disagree with Stockman on what appears to be a faith in truly free and functioning markets that could save the global economy while decreasing inequality—especially because he doesn’t address how constant growth could be compatible with an ecologically sustainable future—but I am willing to concede that many of his measures would be improvements over the status quo. I also agree that they’re completely unfeasible as a matter of politics.
So what are we left with? How do we proceed? Is there any way to stop this latest bubble, “inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains,” from bursting and leaving us in ruins? I don’t know, but Stockman’s closing line leaves me with chills: “If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.”
— Written & submitted by the-lone-pamphleteer.tumblr.com whom you should follow.
Please send your own original content for review & publishing on The People’s Record at thepeoplesrec@gmail.com & feel free to write us with any ideas for regular columns, podcasts, cartoons/comics or similar such content.
Or if you’re interested in helping us curate & post regular international protest news content from other sources (we’ll have to trust you first cos of passwords, etc) for The People’s Record on our Facebook page, our Twitter account, our Tumblr, Instagram or other sites that you think we should be on, let us know so we can get that process started.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/65ed6c00d476ea661c22b4351d568b96/tumblr_mkqp0loNKi1r6m2leo1_500.jpg)
the-lone-pamphleteer.tumblr.com: Sundown in America
April 4, 2013
Rarely do journalists reporting on the state of the American or world economy write with the accessibility and honesty of David A. Stockman in his recent New York Times opinion piece, called “State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America.” The former Republican Congressman and Office of Management & Budget director during the Reagan administration has the experience with financial markets and central economic planning that most critics of the system lack, and it makes his column seem both more reliable and more frightening than the alarmist pleas of many other doomsday prophets.
With carefully explained figures and simplified (yet, to my knowledge, accurate) descriptions of the history of twentieth century American capitalism, Stockman takes us through the eras of mistaken governmental policies, avoiding the typical biases that pervade in financial opinion writing:
“The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days.”
Stockman’s willingness to criticize Republicans and Democrats alike is refreshing, as when he points to 1933 as the origin of our current “state-wreck,” when “when Franklin D. Roosevelt opted for fiat money (currency not fundamentally backed by gold), economic nationalism and capitalist cartels in agriculture and industry,” but then only a few paragraphs later emphasizes Richard Nixon’s “sin [arguably] graver than Watergate”: ending the convertibility of gold to the dollar, essentially defaulting on the nation’s debt obligations and launching a “four-decade spree during which we have lived high on the hog, running a cumulative $8 trillion current-account deficit.”
Many of his claims, though controversial, strike me as correct: World War II did more to end the depression than the New Deal; the only reason Alan Greenspan’s monetary policies—keeping interest rates too low for too long and flooding Wall Street with freshly minted cash—didn’t set off inflation was that domestic prices for goods and labor were crushed by the huge flow of imports from the factories of Asia; we’ve been living on borrowed time, spending Asia’s borrowed dimes; beginning under Reagan, and especially under Bush, the GOP basically “embraced Keynesianism—for the wealthy”; that the overblown fear of another Great Depression in 2008 was concocted by Wall Street to force a panicked bail-out from Washington; and—perhaps most frighteningly—that the 10-year deficit is actually $15 to $20 trillion—much larger than the $7 trillion that even “deficit hawks” like Paul Ryan would have us believe (Stockman explains that this disparity is partially made possible by the Congressional Budget Office’s projection of 16.4 million jobs over the next decade, compared with only 2.5 million in the last ten years).
I find myself convinced by Stockman’s column not only because of his seemingly accurate portrayal of the many mistakes made by government and industry alike, but also because he seems genuinely concerned with the stark and widening inequality created by the broken system. He sounds like Bernie Sanders when he says that Paul Ryan’s “proposal for draconian 30 percent cuts over a decade on the $7 trillion safety net—Medicaid, food stamps and the earned-income tax credit—is another front in the GOP’s war against the 99 percent.”
Like many critics of the harshly unequal outcomes of the supposed “recovery,” he invokes mind-boggling figures: real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent; the real net worth of the bottom 90 percent has dropped by 25 percent; the number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million (which is one in five Americans).
In the 1980s Stockman was a true believer in Chicago School neoclassical economics and the trickle-down theory. Unlike most of his peers, however, he’s willing to look, 30 years later, at the disastrous outcomes and know how misguided that ideology was.
Stockman is no Kissinger, warning of the future of an empirical China in America’s image. Instead, he recognizes that just as America will soon follow Greece and Cypriot’s lead, the rest of the world won’t be far behind:
“The greatest construction boom in recorded history—China’s money dump on infrastructure over the last 15 years—is slowing. Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, South Africa and all the other growing middle-income nations cannot make up for the shortfall in demand. The American machinery of monetary and fiscal stimulus has reached its limits. Japan is sinking into old-age bankruptcy and Europe into welfare-state senescence. The new rulers enthroned in Beijing last year know that after two decades of wild lending, speculation and building, even they will face a day of reckoning, too.”
He joins other pragmatic truth-tellers, like former Comptroller General David Walker, in calling for drastic reforms, but is more than pessimistic about the potential to realize them, writing that “the way out would be so radical it can’t happen.” I disagree with Stockman on what appears to be a faith in truly free and functioning markets that could save the global economy while decreasing inequality—especially because he doesn’t address how constant growth could be compatible with an ecologically sustainable future—but I am willing to concede that many of his measures would be improvements over the status quo. I also agree that they’re completely unfeasible as a matter of politics.
So what are we left with? How do we proceed? Is there any way to stop this latest bubble, “inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains,” from bursting and leaving us in ruins? I don’t know, but Stockman’s closing line leaves me with chills: “If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.”
— Written & submitted by the-lone-pamphleteer.tumblr.com whom you should follow.
Please send your own original content for review & publishing on The People’s Record at thepeoplesrec@gmail.com & feel free to write us with any ideas for regular columns, podcasts, cartoons/comics or similar such content.
Or if you’re interested in helping us curate & post regular international protest news content from other sources (we’ll have to trust you first cos of passwords, etc) for The People’s Record on our Facebook page, our Twitter account, our Tumblr, Instagram or other sites that you think we should be on, let us know so we can get that process started.
How workers laid off from a Chicago factory took it over themselves
March 5, 2013
Four years ago, as the recession took hold and layoffs around the country were approaching 500,000 a month, a group of workers in Chicago saved a factory and inspired a nation. Fired by their boss, they occupied instead of leaving. Fired by a second boss, they occupied and formed a worker’s cooperative. Now they are worker-owners of a load of equipment and they’re setting up a factory in a new location.
All they want to do is to get back to making and selling windows. It shouldn’t be this hard to keep good jobs in Chicago, but “A cooperative can be a way of surviving, of moving forward,” says Armando Robles, one of the workers.
Robles was one of 250 workers fired in December 2008 without notice or severance by Republic Windows and Doors when the company announced it was closing its Chicago factory. The company said that it could no longer operate because it had lost its line of credit with Bank of America. The irony of the situation was clear. Bank of America had received billions in government bailouts to keep the economy working, and yet the Republic workers were being laid off without their entitled payments and benefits. Supported by their union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Robles and his fellow workers voted to resist. They occupied the plant for six days, winning back pay, severance, and time for a new company to take ownership. Generating thousands of articles and news reports about their fight, they encouraged a downcast nation, even an incoming U.S. president.
At a press conference during the factory occupation, then President-elect Barack Obama declared: “When it comes to the situation here in Chicago, with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned … I think they are absolutely right.”
The public relations potential, combined with the prospect of stimulus spending and a green economy boom, spurred Serious Energy of California to take over the former Republic plant in February 2009. Among the investors in the new business was Mesirow Financial, a Chicago-based firm, with close ties to (among others), then White House Chief of Staff (soon to be Chicago Mayor) Rahm Emanuel. With $15 million from Mesirow alone, Serious looked forward to landing substantial federal and city contracts.
Two years later, those contracts were yet to materialize. The ballyhooed green economy? Chicago’s grand green retrofitting scheme? They were nowhere in sight, and city and state spending was essentially on ice. By the end of 2009, only 20 of the Republic workers had been hired back. In February 2012, Serious announced it, too, was closing the Chicago factory and selling off the machines.
This time, Robles et al. only needed to occupy for a matter of hours before management agreed to a deal. Serious agreed to give the workers the first option to buy the plant’s equipment and 90 days to come up with a bid.
“Republic walked away from our jobs. Serious walked away from our jobs, but we are not walking away from our jobs,” said Melvin Macklin, who had worked at the plant for more than a decade. In the time between the first layoff and the second, the workers and their families became aware of other options. As it happens, after appearing together with Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis on GRITtv, Robles and United Electrical field organizer Leah Fried sat down with The Working World, a nonprofit that has helped start and maintain worker cooperatives in Argentina and other parts of Latin America.
U.S. – spending slightly up; income drastically down with austerity on its way means tragic economy for working-class Americans
March 2, 2013
U.S. consumer spending rose in January as Americans spent more on utilities, with savings providing a cushion after income recorded its biggest drop in 20 years.
The Commerce Department said on Friday consumer spending increased 0.2 percent in January after a revised 0.1 percent rise the prior month. Spending had previously been estimated to have increased 0.2 percent in December.
January’s increase was in line with economists’ expectations. Consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity and when adjusted for inflation, it gained 0.1 percent after a similar increase in December.
Though spending rose in January, it was supported by a rise in services, probably related to utilities consumption after a cold snap during the month.
Spending on goods fell, suggesting some hit from the expiration at the end of 2012 of a 2 percent payroll tax cut. Tax rates for wealthy Americans also increased.
The impact is expected to be larger in February’s spending data and possibly extend through the first half of the year as households adjust to smaller paychecks, which are also being strained by rising gasoline prices.
“We expect a significant decrease in real consumer spending in the first half of the year,” said Yelena Shulyatyeva, U.S. economist at BNP Paribas, New York.
“We are looking for a very subdued Q1 reading, and that’s the effect from the fiscal tightening. That will weigh significantly on first-quarter GDP, which we expect at 1.2 percent.
GDP advanced at a 0.1 percent rate in the last three months of 2012, with consumer spending rising at a healthy 2.1 percent annual pace.
Income tumbled 3.6 percent, the largest drop since January 1993. Part of the decline was payback for a 2.6 percent surge in December as businesses, anxious about higher taxes, rushed to pay dividends and bonuses before the new year.
Taking into account the higher taxes that went into effect at the start of the year, the squeeze on households was even greater. The income at the disposal of households after inflation and taxes plunged a 4.0 percent in January after advancing 2.7 percent in December.
Excluding the unwinding of the dividend and bonus boost, disposable income increased 0.3 percent in January.
With income dropping sharply and spending rising, the saving rate - the percentage of disposable income households are socking away - fell to 2.4 percent, the lowest level since November 2007. The rate had jumped to 6.4 percent in December.
Savings were the smallest since December 2007.
Inflation was largely contained, even though gasoline prices pushed higher. A price index for consumer spending was flat for a second straight month.
That left its increase over the past 12 months at 1.2 percent, the smallest since October 2009. It increased 1.4 percent in December.
So-called core prices, which strip out food and energy costs, edged up 0.1 percent after being flat the prior month. The year-on-year gain was 1.3 percent, the smallest since April 2011 and well below the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.
The U.S. central bank last year embarked on an open-ended bond buying program and said it would keep it up until it saw a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market. It hopes the purchases will drive down borrowing costs.
Weak growth and benign inflation could compel the Fed to maintain it’s very easy monetary policy stance.
On this week’s Moyers & Company, anti-capitalist economist Richard Wolff joins Bill to shine light on the disaster left behind in capitalism’s wake, and discusses how to battle for economic justice.
![‘An economic time bomb’: The world’s unemployed youthDecember 19, 2012
Akmal Dildorbek is a 23-year-old university graduate in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe. The former computer-science major remains unemployed, as do most of those who graduated with him two years ago. As he tells it, soon the only prospect he’ll have is to leave home to join the flow of unemployed Central Asians seeking underpaid jobs in Russia.“I’m jobless and living at home [with my parents],” Dildorbek tells RFE/RL. “I’m a computer programmer by [education] and I’ve applied for a job every place that needs a computer programmer. I’ve applied for jobs at banks, companies, and private firms. I’ll continue to search for a job. If I can’t find anything, I’ll have to go Moscow to become a migrant laborer.”Dildorbek is one of an increasing number of young adults who are losing hope in a heavily globalized economy that has yet to shake off the effects of the financial crisis.Suffering DisproportionatelyThere are warnings of a “lost generation” of young workers facing a potentially explosive mix of growing inactivity and precarious work in the industrialized world, along with high working poverty in developing countries.According to the United Nations’ International Labor Organization (ILO), more than 75 million people around the world between the ages of 15 and 24 are now without work — an increase of nearly 4 million since the global financial crisis began in 2007. More than 6 million of them have given up on finding a job.The difficulties that young people are facing reflect the weak state of labor markets. But Matthieu Cognac, a youth employment specialist with the ILO in Bangkok, tells RFE/RL that young people in particular are being left behind, since they’re three times more likely to be unemployed than their elders.“Young people are the ones who suffer more than others from discrimination,” Cognac says. “In times of economic growth, they are usually the last in or the last hired. However, in times of crisis, they are also the first ones to be fired or they are the first out.”‘Working Poverty’In the European Union, one in five people under 25 willing to work cannot find a job. Many more young people are being pushed into part-time work contracts or into the informal economy. Unemployment is particularly acute in Spain and Greece, where half of high school and college graduates ready to work are coming up empty-handed.Prospects for work also remain dim in swaths of the Asia-Pacific region, home to the world’s largest youth population. One-in-6 young people is unemployed in Taiwan and the Philippines, while the ratio is 1-in-5 in Indonesia. The worst-off region is the Middle East and North Africa, where approximately 1-in-4 young people is without a job.However, Cognac says that working poverty continues to be the main challenge facing the developing world.“The key focus in Europe is job creation,” Cognac says. “There are not enough jobs out there. The key focus in developing Asia is also creating jobs, but it is really a focus on the quality of those jobs because of the lack of social protection and the lack of social safety nets. Young people simply do not have any other option than to work in conditions of working poverty.”More Trouble AheadWith some 40 million young people entering the workforce every year, labor-market experts and company bosses say the world is sitting on an economic and social time bomb.Untapped youth potential is especially crucial in countries where the population is aging. In such places, a trend of fewer working young people translates into lower tax revenues to meet ballooning social costs. Those unemployed for a long time are less employable and earn less throughout their working lives.The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says long-term unemployment is associated with “elevated risks of poverty, ill health, and school failure for the children of the affected workers.”Growing resentment and mistrust among young people can also foster social unrest. That was the case in the wave of Arab Spring protests that swept across North Africa and the Middle East in early 2011. More recently, severe austerity measures coupled with slow economic growth have fomented unrest in Southern Europe.
Source](http://25.media.tumblr.com/7f341a14cf16b7961c54a7e00fdd8d01/tumblr_mfag9jYGNX1r6m2leo1_500.jpg)
‘An economic time bomb’: The world’s unemployed youth
December 19, 2012
Akmal Dildorbek is a 23-year-old university graduate in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe. The former computer-science major remains unemployed, as do most of those who graduated with him two years ago. As he tells it, soon the only prospect he’ll have is to leave home to join the flow of unemployed Central Asians seeking underpaid jobs in Russia.
“I’m jobless and living at home [with my parents],” Dildorbek tells RFE/RL. “I’m a computer programmer by [education] and I’ve applied for a job every place that needs a computer programmer. I’ve applied for jobs at banks, companies, and private firms. I’ll continue to search for a job. If I can’t find anything, I’ll have to go Moscow to become a migrant laborer.”
Dildorbek is one of an increasing number of young adults who are losing hope in a heavily globalized economy that has yet to shake off the effects of the financial crisis.
Suffering Disproportionately
There are warnings of a “lost generation” of young workers facing a potentially explosive mix of growing inactivity and precarious work in the industrialized world, along with high working poverty in developing countries.
According to the United Nations’ International Labor Organization (ILO), more than 75 million people around the world between the ages of 15 and 24 are now without work — an increase of nearly 4 million since the global financial crisis began in 2007. More than 6 million of them have given up on finding a job.
The difficulties that young people are facing reflect the weak state of labor markets. But Matthieu Cognac, a youth employment specialist with the ILO in Bangkok, tells RFE/RL that young people in particular are being left behind, since they’re three times more likely to be unemployed than their elders.
“Young people are the ones who suffer more than others from discrimination,” Cognac says. “In times of economic growth, they are usually the last in or the last hired. However, in times of crisis, they are also the first ones to be fired or they are the first out.”
‘Working Poverty’
In the European Union, one in five people under 25 willing to work cannot find a job. Many more young people are being pushed into part-time work contracts or into the informal economy. Unemployment is particularly acute in Spain and Greece, where half of high school and college graduates ready to work are coming up empty-handed.
Prospects for work also remain dim in swaths of the Asia-Pacific region, home to the world’s largest youth population. One-in-6 young people is unemployed in Taiwan and the Philippines, while the ratio is 1-in-5 in Indonesia. The worst-off region is the Middle East and North Africa, where approximately 1-in-4 young people is without a job.
However, Cognac says that working poverty continues to be the main challenge facing the developing world.
“The key focus in Europe is job creation,” Cognac says. “There are not enough jobs out there. The key focus in developing Asia is also creating jobs, but it is really a focus on the quality of those jobs because of the lack of social protection and the lack of social safety nets. Young people simply do not have any other option than to work in conditions of working poverty.”
More Trouble Ahead
With some 40 million young people entering the workforce every year, labor-market experts and company bosses say the world is sitting on an economic and social time bomb.
Untapped youth potential is especially crucial in countries where the population is aging. In such places, a trend of fewer working young people translates into lower tax revenues to meet ballooning social costs. Those unemployed for a long time are less employable and earn less throughout their working lives.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says long-term unemployment is associated with “elevated risks of poverty, ill health, and school failure for the children of the affected workers.”
Growing resentment and mistrust among young people can also foster social unrest. That was the case in the wave of Arab Spring protests that swept across North Africa and the Middle East in early 2011. More recently, severe austerity measures coupled with slow economic growth have fomented unrest in Southern Europe.
Europe rises up: Day of anti-austerity rage grips the continent
November 14, 2012
Flights and trains were canceled across Europe on Wednesday as thousands of workers took to the streets to protest austerity measures aimed at reducing massive government deficits and boosting shaky economies.
“We all know that reforms, layoffs and cuts will continue but maybe we manage to get them cut (more slowly),” said Francisco Vallejo, 41, an administrative assistant in Madrid. “The only strike that is useless is the one we don’t follow.”
Unions had called for strikes across Europe to protest the trimming of government-funded salaries and pension benefits, which had risen dramatically over the years and led to significant debt problems in some countries.
The call to strike was heeded by many in Italy and Spain; but union workers in Britain, Germany and Denmark held rallies instead of walking off the job. Transport hubs were at standstill across southern Europe and in Brussels as airports and train stations shut down.
In Portugal, all trains and subways shut down and about 200 flights to and from the country were canceled. Hospitals operated on a skeleton staff while thousands of government workers including most in the justice system and trash collectors failed to go to work.
In Spain, some television channels went off the air and assembly lines at the big union-dominated factories shut down. Spanish unions claimed that 9 million Spaniards stayed at home, or 77% of the workforce.
Much of Spain’s school system was closed and more than half of its hospital employees went on strike.
In Barcelona, high-end stores such as Gucci and Chanel on the Paseo de Gracia closed for the day. In the neighborhoods, only a few bakeries and grocery shores dared to open, intermittently closing when they saw trouble.
In Greece, the strike shut down the subway system for part of the day. About 5,000 Greeks protested in Athens. Port workers blocked the entrance to the Ministry of Defense demanding back wages, they said.
In Italy, about 60,000 turned out in Rome. The president of Rome province, Nicola Zingaretti, condemned “groups of rioters” among peaceful protesters. Zingaretti said a climate of “aggressiveness and intolerance” risked sullying Rome’s image abroad following reports of protesters yelling anti-Semitic slogans outside a Rome synagogue.
The so-called austerity measures comprise spending cuts, tax hikes and changes to labor laws to allow businesses to better adjust to shaky economies. But several governments and many workers worry that the measures may worsen economies by driving down individual incomes.
The protests Wednesday brought out people who blame the economic system as a whole.
“They’ve only just started cuts but they are pretty draconian already,” said Andrew Burgin, European officer for the Coalition of Resistance in London, which organized a rally outside the European Commission offices there. “I think this is the beginning of a new movement. It will be a day remembers in history as the beginning of a pan-European movement, possibly an international movement, against capitalism.”
But European leaders, such as Angela Merkel of Germany, says the problem is the massive debts piled up by individual nations, many of which like Greece and Portugal spent beyond revenues on public projects, expanding welfare and government jobs, and generous public benefits.
Greece and Spain, which have been hit hardest by an economic slowdown and debt crisis that has swept up several nations across the continent, are experiencing unemployment rates of more than 25%. Both countries passed measures recently to change labor laws that protected employees from layoffs and that businesses say prevented them from hiring or innovating.
The austerity measures are supposed to improve the economy over time but in the short-term people in Greece and Spain especially are experiencing curtailment of government health care, reductions in their pensions and salaries and higher taxes.
Source
Photo 1: Madrid, Spain
Photo 2: Google map locations of all general strikes in Europe today
Photo 3: London, UK
Photo 4: Paris, France
About 3,000 protesters flooded Naples yesterday to protest high youth unemployment rates that have plagued Italy in recent months. As demonstrators hurled bottles & rocks at riot police, forces fired back with tear gas & injured 23.
Unemployment for 15-24-year olds climbed to 35.1 percent in September, up 4.7 percent from last year.
(Source: rt.com)
Palestinians storm streets in protest of economic stagnation
September 11, 2012
Thousands of Palestinians clashed with police in protests over the economic stagnation caused by strict Israeli trade controls and a decline in Western aid. Officers fired tear gas and beat back protesters who had blocked roads with burning tires.
In this year’s largest display yet of public discontent with the Palestinian Authority, Palestinians across the West Bank voiced their unhappiness with recently implemented austerity measures.
The most violent clashes occurred in the city of Hebron, where hundreds of youths attempted to storm a police station, pelting it with rocks. Officers in riot gear responded, beating protesters back with truncheons and tear gas.
Demonstrators voiced anger over rising prices and unpaid salaries amid new austerity measures introduced by the government.
“Nobody is able to live, except the big officials. We have to pressure this government to change,” Sami Saleh, a 57-year-old taxi driver said to AFP.
The majority of public discontent was directed against Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Protesters in Hebron hurled shoes at a poster of the US-educated politician with the words ‘Depart Fayyad’ scrawled underneath. Activists then tore the poster down, trampled it and set it on fire.
Some protesters also called for the removal of President Mahmoud Abbas.
In response to the violent clashes PM Fayyad has lowered the price of fuel. Previously, the price of petrol in Palestine was $8.18 per gallon, more than double the US $3.59 per gallon.
PM Fayyad says claimed that the austerity measures were due to a budgetary shortfall caused by the failure of the US and Arab countries to deliver an expected $1.2 billion in financial aid.
Washington froze financial aid to the Palestinian Authority last year after it went against US wishes and made a bid for statehood in the United Nations. Obama lifted the freeze in April, but the funds have yet to arrive.
The Palestinian Authority has been unable to pay employees’ salaries for the last few months due to the aid default. The group employs some 150,000 civil servants, who are now struggling to make ends meet in the downturn.
‘Palestine with its hands tied behind its back’
Economic factors are the catalyst for the dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority’s “inaction” in a number of pressing matters, political analyst Elias Zananiri said in an interview with RT.
“On the level of negotiations with Israel nothing is happening, there is frustration among the Palestinians. On the level of reconciliation with Hamas nothing is happening,” Zananiri said. “Nothing is moving on.”
He cited the trade disparity between Israel and Palestine as one of the root causes of the current economic woes.
The Palestinians buy an estimated $5 billion in products and services from Israel, while Israel buys only $50 million from Palestine, he said.
Only when Palestine rules itself will it be able to thrive as a country. A crumbling economy, unlivable cities, food shortages, limited transportation & education opportunities are a direct result of the Israeli apartheid, funded nearly entirely by the United States. Palestinians have no other choice but to fight back.
The needs of our society should be the driving force behind our decisions, not profits. This is why some people end up with billions while others remain in poverty while working hard their whole lives. Our system rewards those who already have; and it continues to get more and more unbalanced everyday. The last time we organized on a mass scale, we were able to put this in check with the New Deal. But things have become out of control once again and in response, we HAVE to organise, we HAVE to take to the street in protest and we CAN’T allow ourselves to become content with pressing an irrelevant button in a voting booth and pat ourselves on the back for doing something. We have to do more if we want to change anything. Stop worrying about which team will win the white house and start worrying about how you can force pressure and demands on WHOEVER it is. When organized, we have the power.
Join the Democracy at Work movement
Democracy at Work is a project, begun in 2010, that aims to build a social movement. The movement’s goal is transition to a new society whose productive enterprises (offices, factories, and stores) will mostly be WSDE’s, a true economic democracy. The WSDEs would partner equally with similarly organized residential communities they interact with at the local, regional, and national levels (and hopefully international as well). That partnership would form the basis of genuine participatory democracy.
Utilizing media, from short video clips that go viral to our already well-established weekly and increasingly syndicated “Economic Update” radio program (WBAI, 99.5 FM, New York) and from podcasts to articles to blogs, this interactive website reaches and engages a fast growing audience.
Open to and interested in democracy at work, that audience also wants to move actively with beyond today’s dysfunctional economic and political systems while mindful of mistakes made by earlier efforts to go beyond capitalism. This interactive website will serve as the central location for these forms of media, a database of research and resources that support and strengthen the movement, and the open discussions shaping that movement as it grows. We begin with a definition of workers’ self-directed enterprises. In some ways, they are similar to co-ops, worker owned enterprises, and other organizations of production that reject the old, top-down, hierarchical capitalist model. Yet in crucial ways, workers’ self-directed enterprises are also unique.
Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDE’s): WSDE’s are enterprises in which all the workers who collaborate to produce its outputs also serve together, collectively as its board of directors. Each worker in any WSDE thus has two job descriptions: (1) a particular task in the enterprise’s division of labor, and (2) full participation in the directorial decisions governing what, how and where to produce and how to use the enterprise’s surplus or profits.
Simply put, in place of a hierarchical, undemocratic, capitalist production organization giving those decisions exclusively to a small minority – major shareholders and the board of directors – WSDE’s institutionalize democracy at work as the economy’s central principle and society’s new foundation.
We believe that now is the time for a comprehensive new strategy and new movement for social change. We invite you to join with Democracy at Work to work toward those goals.
I want democracy at work. I’d love to build a movement around that idea, and love that Richard Wolff takes the ideas of Marx and others and frames them with modern language and puts them in a modern context. <3
EDIT: Also, follow these guys on tumblr.
The new face of protest: Radical, young and connected
August 13, 2012
Political scientists believe that the protest movement in Russia will undergo change with the gradual withdrawal of liberals and the appearance of new parties on the political stage. Economic factors could also play a role.
According to Igor Bunin, president of the Center for Political Technologies, Russia may soon experience the rise of a radical new breed of protester.
“On the one hand, it seems to me that the protest movement will be more radical, more social, younger and more ready for direct actions,” Bunin predicted.
Meanwhile, many members of the opposition will disappear from the street scene because they aspire to real participation in the election process.
The political opposition is made up of a mixed basket of characters, including Alexey Navalny, a political blogger and one of the leading figures of the protest movement; Boris Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Minister and co-chairman of the Republican Party of People’s Freedom, also known as Parnas; Sergey Udaltsov, political activist and leader of the Left Front movement; and Vladimir Ryzkhov, also a co-chairman of PARNAS and the founder of the Republican party – one of the oldest parties in the country.
Bunin believes the general atmosphere of future street protests may become more radical in nature.
“The spirit of the protest movement is now different from December 2011; this spirit is more of a spirit of social conflict and is more radical,” he warned. “The leaders are different, the liberal movement has become weak, while younger people – those who were born in the late 1980s – are now taking part in protests.”
Coincidentally, Russia is waiting for the verdict to be passed down on the members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, who were arrested in February for delivering a protest song on the altar of Christ the Savior Cathedral in central Moscow.
The members of the band, all in their 20s, face up to seven years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”
Another analyst, Igor Yurgens, head of the Institute for Modern development, says the number of protest participants may increase if the economic situation in the country deteriorates sharply, which, he says, seems unlikely at the moment.
“The number of protesters will depend on the economic situation,” Yurgens said. “In my view, we now don’t have a situation where a sharp deterioration is anticipated, for example, a fall in the prices of our traditional exports.”
Meanwhile, the number of opposition protesters may decrease considerably due to the creation of new parties, he said.
“New political parties have been formed, and they will help to erode the base of the protest movement,” he said.
Concerning the choice of slogans used by the protesters, Bunin said the messages are politically ineffective and obsolete.
“I don’t see any new slogans,” he said.
He also believes that the number of future protesters is not expected to increase.
“I think the number will stay the same, up to 50,000 people per protest,” Bunin said. “Udaltsov’s plans to bring many more people are not feasible.”
However, the movement will not disappear altogether anytime soon, he added.
