global financial crisis

The current economic crisis in Europe can be compared to a couple in a street building a three storey mansion in a street made up of one storey dwellings and then forcing the residents of the one storey dwellings to stop paying their electricity and gas bills to meet the mortgage repayments of the couple who built the three storey mansion. Article by Joe Toscano

Amid a European and global economic crisis, governments are still letting markets get away with little regulation, big bonuses and dubious financial instruments that are distorting financial stability for short-term gain and putting enormous pressure on people to pick up the manufactured debts. (See also "The US Dollar as a weapon: debt and devaluation," which is about a fascinating theory of this kind of economic policy in relation to US debt.)

Author John Ralston Saul is in town for the Sydney Writers Festival and will be speaking at the Sydney Town Hall this evening at 6pm. I shall be going along.

Ralston Saul has updated his book 'The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World.'

For more than a decade, Saul has been arguing that it is high time to completely rethink the primacy of economic fundamentalism, to discard what he sees as the flawed, 1970s ideology of unfettered free-market globalisation. "The recent European bailout adds fuel to his argument", he says.

Ellen Brown shows how the examples of the publicly owned Bank of North Dakota and the past example of Australia's now privatised Commonwealth Bank demonstrate that President Obama can begin to turn the US economy around without pouring hundreds of billions more US taxpayer dollars down the black hole of the private banking system. The Queensland Government, now bent on selling $15 billion worth of publicly owned assets to 'solve' its own finacancial crisis, should take note.

Includes appendix: Steven Keen on why bankers deserve less respect than plumbers.

Originally published on truthout. See also: www.webofdebt.com, www.ellenbrown.com, "How a state-owned bank could make Queensland asset fire sale unnecessary" (originally published as "But Governor, You CAN Create Money! Just Form Your Own Bank.") of 30 May 09.

Clinics in the USA are now running lotteries for free treatment because so many people cannot afford medical treatment there as unemployment rates rise. The 'most powerful nation in the world' does not have a decent health-care system.

The growth model produces extensive areas that are riddled with debt and have no genuinely productive function or options by which to repay that debt. The extremity of circumstance shown in these videos also presents a new, terribly real, but currently unreported wave of refugees - the repossessed homeless.

Pornography is not just about getting naked, or having sex, or even recording, depicting or describing it. It requires an element of commerce. Lots of people think they can get rich from it, and some very big household-name corporations have diversified into this area, including GMH and the Murdoch Press. Perhaps they hope to have a pornography-led recovery from the global financial crisis? Anyway, it seems like just about everyone is involved, whether they like it or not...