φεύγω ...

για λίγες ημέρες αφήνω πίσω μου αυτή την κόλαση που λέγεται Αθήνα και πάω να απολαύσω το αγαπημένο μου Αιτωλικό ...

don't forget

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my state of mind is fragile


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υπέροχο

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λόγω οικονομίας

[...]

"The final debt-driven collapse, in which both wages and profitability plunge, gives the lie to the neoclassical perception that crises are caused by wages being too high, and the solution to the crisis is to reduce wages....

What their blinkered ignorance of the role of the finance sector obscures is that the essential class conflict in financial capitalism is not between workers and capitalists, but between financial and industrial capital. The rising level of debt directly leads to a falling worker share of GDP, while leaving industrial capital’s share unaffected until the final collapse drives it too into oblivion."

(Steve Keen's Scary Minsky Model, Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism)

sad but so true

Leonard Cohen :

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That's how it goes, and everybody knows.

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Ναόμι Κλάιν : να πληρώσουν αυτοί που ευθύνονται

My city feels like a crime scene, and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I'm not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday.

I'm talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world's wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.

How else can we interpret the G20's final communique, which includes not even a measly tax on banks or financial transactions, yet instructs governments to slash their deficits in half by 2013. This is a huge and shocking cut, and we should be very clear who will pay the price: students who will see their public educations further deteriorate as their fees go up; pensioners who will lose hard earned benefits; public sector workers whose jobs will be eliminated. And the list goes on. These types of cuts have already begun in many G20 countries including Canada, and they are about to get a lot worse. For instance, reducing the projected 2010 deficit in the U.S. by half, in the absence of a sizeable tax increase, would mean a whopping $780-billion cut.

They are happening for a simple reason. When the G20 met in London in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, the leaders failed to band together to regulate the financial sector so that this type of crisis would never happen again. All we got was empty rhetoric, and an agreement to put trillions of dollars in public monies on the table to shore up the banks around the world. Meanwhile, the U.S. government did little to keep people in their homes and jobs, so in addition to hemorrhaging public money to save the banks, the tax base collapsed, creating an entirely predictable debt and deficit crisis.

At this weekend's summit, Prime Minister Stephen Harper convinced his fellow leaders that it simply wouldn't be fair to punish those banks that behaved well and did not create the crisis (despite the fact that Canada's highly protected banks are consistently profitable and could easily absorb a tax). Yet, somehow, these leaders had no such concerns about fairness when they decided to punish blameless individuals for a crisis created by derivative traders and absentee regulators.

Last week, the Globe and Mail ran a fascinating article about the origins of the G20. It turns out the entire concept was conceived in a meeting back in 1999 between then Finance Minister Paul Martin and his U.S. counterpart Lawrence Summers (itself interesting since Summers was, at that time playing a central role in creating the conditions for this financial crisis, allowing a wave of bank consolidation and refusing to regulate derivatives).

The two men wanted to expand the G7, but only to countries they considered strategic and safe. They needed to make a list but apparently they didn't have paper handy. So, according to reporters John Ibbitson and Tara Perkins, "the two men grabbed a brown manila envelope, put it on the table between them, and began sketching the framework of a new world order." Thus was born the G20.

The story is a good reminder that history is shaped by human decisions, not natural laws. Summers and Martin changed the world with the decisions they scrawled on the back on that envelope. But there is nothing to say that citizens of G20 countries need to take orders from this handpicked club.

Already, workers, pensioners and students have taken to the streets against austerity measures in Italy, Germany, France, Spain and Greece, often marching under the slogan "We won't pay for your crisis." And they have plenty of suggestions for how to raise revenues to meet their respective budget shortfalls.

Many are calling for a financial transaction tax that would slow down hot money and raise new money for social programs and climate change. Others are calling for steep taxes on polluters that would underwrite the cost of dealing with the effects of climate change and moving away from fossil fuels. And ending losing wars is always a good cost saver.

The G20 is an ad-hoc institution with none of the legitimacy of the United Nations. Since it just tried to stick us with a huge bill for a crisis most of us had no hand in creating, I say we take a cue from Martin and Summers. Flip it over, and write on the back of the envelope: Return to sender.

The social contract is broken and the system is going down..

Take what you can, where you can, while you can..

το αγαπημένο μου σούπερμόντελ

Η Κρίστεν Μακμέναμι σε πρόσφατη φωτογράφιση στο περιοδικό LOVE


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στον ελεύθερο χρόνο

Ακουαρέλα σε χαρτί, Ιούνιος 2010


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η μεγάλη απάτη

Of course, much of the world's elite understand exactly what they're doing: i.e., use the economic catastrophe they themselves created as a pretext to kill the welfare state they've despised for 65 years. Nonetheless, a significant chunk of them actually believe they're doing the right thing for everyone.

How is this possible? The best explanation I've seen appears in a 1994 book by John Ralston Saul called The Doubter's Companion. It's a kind of dictionary—the whole book is just him defining and discussing a bunch of words. And one thing he defines is "debt, unsustainable levels of." Everything you need to understand about our current attempt to obliterate ourselves can be found within it. His most important point is that money is not real. Yet somehow we've decided it's a great idea to stop feeding real food to real people and cease educating real children in order to demonstrate fealty to an abstract concept.

My favorite parts are these, but you should go below the fold and read the whole thing:

A nation cannot make debts sustainable by cutting costs. Cuts may produce marginal savings, but savings are not cash flow. This is another example of the alchemist’s temptation...

Civilizations which become obsessed by sustaining unsustainable debt-loads have forgotten the basic nature of money. Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring abstract value. Unhealthy societies often become mesmerized by money and treat it as if it were something concrete. The effect is to destroy the currency’s practical value.

more

τουλάχιστον κάποιοι αντιδρούν

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οι Δουβλινέζοι

In Ireland, a Picture of the High Cost of Austerity

By LIZ ALDERMAN

DUBLIN — As Europe’s major economies focus on belt-tightening, they are following the path of Ireland. But the once thriving nation is struggling, with no sign of a rapid turnaround in sight.

Nearly two years ago, an economic collapse forced Ireland to cut public spending and raise taxes, the type of austerity measures that financial markets are now pressing on most advanced industrial nations.

“When our public finance situation blew wide open, the dominant consideration was ensuring that there was international investor confidence in Ireland so we could continue to borrow,” said Alan Barrett, chief economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute of Ireland. “A lot of the argument was, ‘Let’s get this over with quickly.’ ”

Rather than being rewarded for its actions, though, Ireland is being penalized. Its downturn has certainly been sharper than if the government had spent more to keep people working. Lacking stimulus money, the Irish economy shrank 7.1 percent last year and remains in recession.

Joblessness in this country of 4.5 million is above 13 percent, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed — those out of work for a year or more — have more than doubled, to 5.3 percent.

Now, the Irish are being warned of more pain to come.

“The facts are that there is no easy way to cut deficits,” Prime Minister Brian Cowen said in an interview. “Those who claim there’s an easier way or a soft option — that’s not the real world.”

Despite its strenuous efforts, Ireland has been thrust into the same ignominious category as Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. It now pays a hefty three percentage points more than Germany on its benchmark bonds, in part because investors fear that the austerity program, by retarding growth and so far failing to reduce borrowing, will make it harder for Dublin to pay its bills rather than easier.

Other European nations, including Britain and Germany, are following Ireland’s lead, arguing that the only way to restore growth is to convince investors and their own people that government borrowing will shrink.

[...]

κόκκινα τριαντάφυλλα

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πυροβολόντας το πόδι μας

Krugman: The Third Depression

[...]

Why the wrong turn in policy? The hard-liners often invoke the troubles facing Greece and other nations around the edges of Europe to justify their actions. And it’s true that bond investors have turned on governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors. On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse risk than Spain, which has been far more reluctant to take the hard-liners’ medicine.

It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.

So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

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eye candy

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coming soon

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DOC TV



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ζητώ ταπεινά συγγνώμη

χθες έγραψα ένα ποστ στο οποίο ανέφερα τη μεγάλη μπούρδα "οι ελίτ της χώρας - οικονομική και πολιτική"

σήμερα που το διάβασα συνειδητοποίησα ότι ο χαρακτηρισμός "ελίτ" δεν τους ταιριάζει δεδομένου ότι μιλάμε για κάτι μαυραγορίτες και κάτι τελευταία λαμόγια

ζητώ λοιπόν συγγνώμη για τις λάθος εντυπώσεις που έδωσα χθες



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οι μαύρες ημέρες του Ιούνη

Είναι πλέον εμφανές ότι οδεύουμε με γοργά και σταθερά βήματα προς την πλήρη κατάρρευση όλων αυτών που θεωρούσαμε σαν δεδομένα

Εργασιακά δικαιώματα, συντάξεις και μισθοί για χιλιάδες εργαζόμενους θα μοιάζουν σε λίγο με όνειρα του παρελθόντος

Την ίδια ώρα οι ελίτ της χώρας - πολιτική και οικονομική - συνεχίζουν χωρίς κανένα ταμπού και ενδοιασμό να προκαλούν το κοινό αίσθημα, φέρνοντας στον νου την περίφημη ρήση της Μαρίας Αντουανέτας "Ας φάνε παντεσπάνι".

Δεν γνωρίζω πως θα εξελιχθούν τα πράγματα.

Δεν γνωρίζω ποιο θα είναι το άχυρο που θα σπάσει την πλάτη της καμήλας

Το μόνο που γνωρίζω είναι ότι αυτό το πράγμα δεν μπορεί να συνεχιστεί

Έχουμε όλοι μας καθήκον να κάνουμε ό,τι περνάει από τα χέρια μας για να το σταματήσουμε

Όσο παραμένουμε άπραγοι και αδιάφοροι απλά κάνουμε τα πράγματα ακόμα χειρότερα

rise up, people

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eίναι τώρα εδώ και 10 μέρες

που προσπαθώ να ανακτήσω την πρόσβαση στο μπλογκ μου και στο mail μου

έστειλα διάφορα mail στην Google αλλά το μόνο που έπαιρνα για απάντηση ήταν κάτι αυτόματες απαντήσεις από κάτι αυτόματα μηχανήματα

σήμερα πήρα ένα mail που έλεγε ότι λυπάται για την ταλαιπωρία, αλλά εντοπίστηκε παράνομη δραστηριότητα στον λογαριασμό μου

μιας κι εγώ δεν είχα καμία τέτοια δραστηριότητα αυτό σημαίνει ότι το gmail δεν είναι ασφαλές

εκτός αυτού, η εταιρεία που απέτυχε να προστατεύσει το mail μου μου απαγορεύει την πρόσβαση σε αυτόν για 10 ολόκληρες ημέρες

αυτά ...