Crisis

Argentina’s New $50 Billion IMF Loan Is Designed To Replay Its 2001 Crisis

July 28, 2018 Sharmini Peries, Therealnews.com Educate! Argentina, Crisis, IMF, Loans

For several months now. Argentines have been taking to the streets to protest against neoliberal austerity measures of President Mauricio Macri. The most recent such protest took place on July 9 on Argentine’s Independence Day. There has also been three general strikes thus far. In the two years since he took office, President Macri has laid off as many as 76,000 public sector workers, and slashed gas and water and electricity subsidies, leading to a tenfold increase in prices, in some cases. Now, the government argues that all of this is necessary in order to stem inflation, and the decline of the currency’s value. Last month, Macri received the backing of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF agreed to provide Argentina with a $50 billion loan, one of the largest in IMF history. In exchange, the Macri government will deepen the austerity measures already in place.

America The Failed State

July 3, 2018 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com Educate! Capitalism, Crisis, US Imperialism

TORONTO—Our “corporate coup d’état in slow motion,” as the writer John Ralston Saul calls it, has opened a Pandora’s box of evils that is transforming America into a failed state. The “unholy trinity of corruption, impunity and violence,” he said, can no longer be checked. The ruling elites abjectly serve corporate power to exploit and impoverish the citizenry. Democratic institutions, including the courts, are mechanisms of corporate repression. Financial fraud and corporate crime are carried out with impunity. The decay is exacerbated by the state’s indiscriminate use of violence abroad and at home, where rogue law enforcement agencies harass and arrest citizens and the undocumented and often kill the unarmed.

The Crisis Next Time: Planning For Public Ownership As An Alternative To Corporate Bank Bailouts

July 3, 2018 By Thomas Hanna, Thenextsystem.org Create! Banking, Crisis, Finance, Public ownership

The next financial crisis is all but inevitable. While its exact timing and severity cannot be predicted, both the accelerating frequency of crises in recent decades and the continued consolidation of the banking sector in an increasingly financialized economy suggest that we should be prepared for a crisis sooner rather than later. In the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, the US federal government intervened at an unprecedented scale to bailout our largest commercial banks after they became entangled in the mess of risky financial products built on top of an unsustainable housing bubble. The effect of these massive bailouts was, in the end, to preserve the status quo: the modest attempts made to regulate the financial sector to protect consumers and avert further devastating financial crises have largely been rolled back, and the banks that were then “too big to fail” are today even bigger.

Warning Signs Point To A New Global Financial Crisis

June 21, 2018 By Martin Khor, Towardfreedom.org Educate! Capitalism, Crisis, Finance, New Economy

(IPS) – There are increasing warnings of an imminent new financial crisis, not only from the billionaire investor George Soros, but also from eminent economists associated with the Bank of International Settlements, the bank of central banks. The warnings come at a moment when there are signs of international capital flowing out of some emerging economies, including Turkey, Argentina and Indonesia. Some economists have been warning that the boom-bust cycle in capital flows to developing countries will cause disruption, when there is a turn from boom to bust. All it needs is a trigger, which may then snowball as investors in herd-like manner head for the exit door. Their behaviour is akin to a self- fulfilling prophecy: if enough speculative investors think this is the time to move back to the global financial capitals, then the exodus will happen, as it did in previous “bust” phases of the cycle.

‘Carbon Bubble’ Could Spark Global Financial Crisis, Study Warns

June 8, 2018 By Fiona Harvey, Theguardian.com Educate! Clean Energy, Crisis, Finance, Fossil Fuels

Investors beware, climate change is upon us. The energy industry is transforming to a new clean energy economy. Your investments in old dirty energy may end up being lost investments, know as stranded assets. This has been discussed in recent years, but now the reality is hitting. Investors should get out of carbon fuels and investment in carbon infrastructure now or their losses could be significant. A cross-party task force in Great Britain published a recommended force that large companies, pension funds and other big investors to report their exposure to climate risks. Reuters reported: “The report said companies should examine and disclose how climate change could impact their businesses in the future, such as increased exposure to extreme weather events for insurance companies and the impact of physical disruptions to supply chains for companies in the agriculture sector.

Italian Debt Crisis Erupts: Is This A Greek Debt Crisis Writ Large?

June 4, 2018 By Dr. Jack Rasmus, Globalresearch.ca Educate! Crisis, Europe, Greece, Italy

With no independent monetary policy and strict limits on its fiscal policy, all Italy could do in a recession or financial crisis, such as 2008-2010, was borrow money from the ECB and the Euro Commission (with help from the IMF–together the three pan-European institutions called the ‘Troika’). As it borrowed its government and private debt escalated. When the Eurozone slipped into a double digit recession in 2011-13, Italy’s crisis deepened. It borrowed still more, to pay the interest on the debt it had previously borrowed–the interest payments going to the Troika, and from the Troika to the northern Europe banks (especially Germany) from which the Troika in turn raised funds with which to lend to Italy (and other economies during the debt crises in Europe 2010-2015).

Ten Years After The Crash

April 11, 2018 David F. Ruccio, Anticap.wordpress.com Educate! Crisis, Economics, New Economy

The economic crises that came to a head in 2008 and the massive response—by the U.S. government and corporations themselves—reshaped the world we live in.* Although sectors of the U.S. economy are still in one of their longest expansions, most people recognize that the recovery has been profoundly uneven and the economic gains have not been fairly distributed. The question is, what has changed—and, equally significant, what hasn’t—during the past decade? Let’s start with U.S. stock markets, which over the course of less than 18 months, from October 2007 to March 2009, dropped by more than half. And since then? As is clear from the chart above, stocks (as measured by the Dow Jones Composite Average) have rebounded spectacularly, quadrupling in value (until the most recent sell-off).

Going Down With The Bad Ship U.S.A.

March 17, 2018 Glen Ford, Blackagendareport.com Educate! Crisis, Inter-Imperialist Rivalry, US Imperialism

There is no mystery to the ideological collapse of U.S. ruling class politics under late stage capitalism and imperial decline. Simply put, the corporate duopoly parties have nothing to offer the masses of people except unrelenting austerity at home and endless wars abroad. A shrunken and privatized Detroit serves as the model for U.S. urban policy; Libya and Syria are the scorched-earth footprints of a demented and dying empire. The lengthening shadow of economic eclipse by the East leaves the U.S. Lords of Capital with no cards left to play but the threat of Armageddon. As China reclaims its historic place at the center of the earth, alongside the huge and heavily armed landmass of Russia, Washington flails about in a frenzy of firewall-building, buying time with the blood of millions, hoping to somehow preserve its doomed hegemony.

The ‘Human Rights’ War On Syria

March 16, 2018 Jeremy Salt, Ahtribune.com Educate! Crisis, Human Rights, Syria, Wars and Militarism

The perfidious role of ‘human rights’ organizations in the war on Syria has been exposed again with the Amnesty International report on Syria for 2017/18, followed by an equally tendentious article in the Melbourne ‘Age’ newspaper by Claire Mallinson, Amnesty’s national director for Australia. In the name of human rights these organizations have actually worsened the crisis in Syria. They have never dealt honestly with its primary cause, the determination of the US and its allies seven years ago to destroy the government in Damascus, as part of a bigger plan to destroy the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah strategic axis across the Middle East. Democracy, human rights and the best interests of the Syrian people were never on the agenda of these governments. They were cold-blooded and remorseless in what they wanted and the means by which they sought to get it.

Corporations Profiting From Water Infrastructure Crisis

February 22, 2018 By Elizabeth Nussbaumer, Foodandwaterwatch.org Educate! Corporations, Crisis, Infrastructure, Profit, Water

Here are some numbers to start. In 2014, 64 percent of bottled water was, essentially, filtered tap water -- up from 51.8 percent in 2009. From 2010 to 2014, total federal funding for public water infrastructure fell from $6.9 billion to around $4.4 billion. In other words: as funding for safe public water fell 37 percent, bottled water companies were able to increase sales of what was basically just tap water under the guise that it was “safer.” Even though the U.S. government requires stricter safety monitoring of tap water than for bottled water. When Congress doesn't fund water infrastructure, Nestlé wins. And this is something they spend millions doing. The International Bottled Water Association, Nestlé Waters NA, Nestlé USA and Coca-Cola lobbied Congress on issues including bottled water, water infrastructure...

The Big Pharma Family That Brought Us Opioid Crisis

February 20, 2018 By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org Educate! Big Pharma, Crisis, Opioids

If the devil wears Prada, what do America’s most destructive drug pushers wear? They wear smiles. The drug pushers we have in mind here have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, enough fatalities to decrease overall U.S. life expectancy at birth for the last two years running. Yet no police SWAT teams have pounded down any doors hunting these drug pushers down. These particular drug pushers have devastated millions of families across the United States. Yet some of America’s most honorable institutions, outfits ranging from Yale University to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have spent decades lauding their philanthropic generosity and benevolence. We’re obviously not talking El Chapo or any of his drug-running buddies here. We’re talking about the mega-billionaire family behind one of America’s most profitable drug-industry empires, the privately held Purdue Pharma.

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse

February 16, 2018 Umair Haque, Informationclearinghouse.info Educate! Class Struggle, Crisis, US Imperialism

February 15, 2018 "Information Clearing House" - You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.” Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”...

Stock Market Designed To F**k 90% Of Us

February 15, 2018 Lee Camp, Redacted Tonight Resistance Report Capital, Crisis, Finance

As the stock market had its largest one-day drop in decades, what our media won't tell you is that 84% of stock wealth is in the hands of the top 10%. Looking at the stock market to judge the economic health of our country is actually like looking at a dying man and judging his health based on how the leeches look. Most Americans do not benefit from it as the rich play with lives. But that's just half of the story. Redacted Tonight's Lee Camp has the censored side of our volatile economy.

Dangers Of Focusing All Our Attention On Donald Trump

January 24, 2018 Jerome Roos, Roarmag.org Strategize! Capitalism, Crisis, Electoral Politics, Trump Administration

It’s been a year since Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States of America — and we’re already exhausted. Exhausted by the endless stream of sexist and racist bigotry pouring out of his hideous face and Twitter feed. Exhausted by the rapid succession of 24-hour scandals, one outrage sweeping another from the headlines before the immensity of the previous one has even begun to properly sink in. Exhausted by the immature personal grudges and individual fallings-out that are constantly played out in public amidst the gratuitous threats of nuclear annihilation. Exhausted by the gas-lighting narcissism, the power-hungry egotism and the self-aggrandizing vanity of a multi-billionaire businessman who has never known anything but public adulation for his inherited wealth.

Humans Only Have Few Decades Left. But We Can Change That.

January 10, 2018 By Eleanor Goldfield, Artkillingapathy.com Create! Capitalism, Class Struggle, Crisis

By severing effect from cause, we are not only dangerously cut off from understanding the gravity of these events, but we are also blind to climate change events that (so far) haven’t resulted in world-wide disasters. For example, the fact that we are literally drowning due to sea level rise is perhaps something you’ve heard peripherally on some depressing Facebook post over your morning cup of coffee. The reality, however, is that sea level rise is not only an issue that carries with it catastrophic consequences greater than what we’ve already seen, but it’s happening faster than previously predicted. In November of last year, NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission warned that due to temperatures as high as 54º above normal, the Greenland ice sheet is “far more unstable than we realized.”

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