Desperate acts of desperate people

Last Thursday, a man in Modesto, California, whose house was scheduled for foreclosure, shot and killed the sheriff’s deputy and the locksmith who came to evict him.

Modesto authorities responded by sending 100 police and SWAT snipers and it ended Waco-style, with the building burning to the ground with the man inside.

US foreclosures – in which the lender takes legal possession of the property – rose from 2,203,295 in 2007 to 3,920,418 in 2011.

Rapidly deteriorating economic conditions in every part of the world are driving individuals who see no way out of their predicament to the most desperate of actions.

Earlier this month, across the Atlantic retired pharmacist, Dimitris Christoulas, shot himself on the steps of the Greek Parliament building in Syntagma Square after savage cuts in his pension payments.

Described as decent, law-abiding, meticulous and dignified, the 77-year-old had written in his one-page, three-paragraph suicide note that it would be better to have a "decent end" than be forced to scavenge in the "rubbish to feed myself".

Friend and neighbour Antonis Skarmoutsos said that “with his suicide he wanted to send a political message. He was deeply politicised but also enraged."

A committed leftist, Christoulas was active in citizens' groups such as "I won't pay", which started as a one-off protest against toll fees but quickly turned into an anti-austerity movement. He became a symbol of resistance for those who perceive austerity politics as unfair and ultimately self-defeating.

Suicide rates are soaring worldwide as governments act to contract their economies in response to the deepening global recession. Slashing public spending, freezing and cutting wages, shrinking and closing public services, eliminating jobs by the hundreds of thousands is the norm across Europe.

Austerity measures in the UK, Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland and elsewhere are certain to accelerate in the coming months, driving millions to and beyond the limits of their tolerance.

Last November, as the Cameron-Clegg Coalition announced its plans to deny incapacity benefits to 1 million people, the bodies of Mark and Helen Mullins were found lying side by side in their rundown home in Bedworth, Warwickshire after an apparent suicide pact.

In a video filmed at a soup kitchen earlier this year, Mr Mullins told how his wife's mental health problems had left them in a benefits limbo: “The job centre decided Helen couldn't sign on as she was incapable of employment as she has no literacy and numeracy skills. “

He said. “However, the incapacity people wouldn't recognise her disabilities which led to month after month of seeing specialists. We're in a catch 22 situation.”

Without money, the couple were forced to live hand to mouth on vegetables they got from a soup kitchen in Coventry, a 12-mile round trip on foot.

For the 99% whose lives are being smashed by the crisis nothing can be more urgent than the construction of a replacement for the bankrupt system which chases after profits at whatever cost to the majority of the population.

The politics of protest whether in the form of strikes – such as the one-day 10 May action called by Unite and the PCS over pensions – demonstrations or even riots are limited in the face of this onslaught and can add to people’s frustration without troubling the ruling class.

All that is needed is the political movement – a global network of people’s assemblies - to create democratic governments which will break the power of the corporations, outlaw speculation and the extraction of profit via shareholding, and establish a society designed to satisfy the needs of people rather than the insatiable greed of private capital.

The elements for a not-for-profit alternative are in place – socially-owned and democratically-run workers’ and consumer cooperatives, credit unions, building societies, highly successful not-for-profit companies and services of all kinds. It’s not rocket science. It’s about going beyond resistance.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

A dictatorship of capital in the home of democracy

The global “psychological operation”, aka psyops, that helped to secure last night’s vote of confidence in the Greek parliament for the hastily reorganised Pasok cabinet is a clear expression in its historical birthplace of the negation of democracy.

Massive demonstrations in Syntagma Square in front of Parliament, accompanied by general and other strikes have delivered that message. Yet all of the notions of the will of the people, all citizens having a say, equal participation, self-determination have melted into the air.

On the eve of the confidence vote “inspectors” from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) arrived in Athens to reinforce the hurricane of warnings of the terrible consequences for Greece should it fail to adopt the prescribed measures.

These are designed to ensure that the monstrously, impossibly, unsustainably indebted country meet its obligations to other governments, banks and financial institutions.

These two unelected agencies represent the interests of the participants in the global financial system – the banks, hedge funds, bond dealers, speculators and gamblers in derivatives that stand to lose unimaginable sums of unearned, mostly imagined title to wealth.

And the pressure is certain to mount in the days running up to July 3, when the “socialist” government must vote – if the “international community” has its way – to make a new, even more severe assault on its own people who clearly can’t and won’t take any more.

Let’s not suggest for one moment that there’s a global conspiracy, that the psyops operators are acting according to an agreed plan, (although who knows what was discussed earlier this month at the annual Bilderberg meeting).

No conscious conspiracy is needed to excite the credit ratings agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor, who’ve simply continued to do their job – putting a set of letters (CCC, the lowest) to the likelihood that Greece will be able to pay the interest on its debts - simultaneously ensuring that soaring interest rates put it into the realm of the impossible.

Nobody needs to tell the banks and investors who’ve lent to Greece that the only way to defer the looming global breakdown is to close down any drain on profitability, to eliminate public sector spending, to transfer whatever is left to the for-profit corporations.

But why is Greece’s debt so important that it has become the focus of world attention? Compared to the amount the US owes – its national debt is approaching $14 trillion – it hardly seems worth bothering about.

There are plenty of people talking of a new Lehman moment, a reference to its collapse in 2008 which triggered the present financial crisis. They are only too aware of the interconnected web of debt dependency that ties countries, corporations and populations.

German, French and British-based banks have massive holdings of Greek debt that would be worthless if a default takes place. And banks have so far only written off around half the vast overhang of fantasy finance created in the globalisation period from the 1980s onwards.

Where does Greece fit into all of this? It is the home for the world’s largest fleet of merchant ships. Close to 4,000 vessels, approximately one fifth of the world’s total, carry oil and many other commodities around the world in tankers and containers making a huge contribution to world trade.

With trade certain to collapse as it did in 2008 – when it plummeted by 90% – and tourism, Greece’s second largest source of income certain to fall as living standards in the rest of Europe decline, Greece hasn’t a hope of sustaining its repayments.

In 508BC, following a popular uprising, the government of Athens was reorganised around an assembly of all of the citizens. It was an early model of democracy. In the ferment of political discussion on the squares of cities, towns and villages of Greece, Cairo, and Madrid a new richer concept of democracy is emerging.

Its needs to embrace the ending of the dictatorship of capital over people’s lives and the principles of self-determination expressed, for the first time, through demos and kratos – people and power.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Greece edges closer to the brink

Greece is closer than ever before to social breakdown as the Pasok “socialist” government struggles to force through yet more austerity measures demanded by lenders, including the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund.

The credit rating agencies which assess each country’s health have now driven their assessment of Greece to the lowest in the world, because its now crumbling government has, as yet, been unable to impose a sufficiently brutal assault on its people.

Some Pasok MPs are refusing to vote for a new round of cuts, while the right-wing parties are opposing them for their own reasons. Another 24-hour general strike today brought the country to a halt while thousands of activists and unionists converged on Athens' central Syntagma Square on the parliament's front steps to try to prevent deputies from debating the measures.

"Thieves, traitors!" many chanted. "Where did the money go?" "I feel rage and disgust," said 45-year old public sector worker Maria Georgila, a mother of two. "These are very tough measures and they won't get us out of the crisis. I can't believe they have no alternative."

Daily mass protests have drawn hundreds of thousands of people on to the streets in every town throughout the country. They have rejected pleas from prime minister George Papandreou that it is his patriotic duty to make the cuts. Demands raised include a call for Greece to default on its massive foreign loans, to leave the euro and return to the drachma and for the replacement of the current political system with direct democracy.

New cuts would increase the size of unemployment, which is already at a record 16% and deepen a recession now into its third year. The Greek economy shrank by a further 5.5% in the year to March 2011, household consumption contracted 7.8%, while investment was down 19%.

The Greek protests are directed at the government, but behind it stands something much more threatening. Yesterday the finance ministers of the eurozone under pressure from the ECB failed to agree on a proposal to force private investors to share the cost of a further bailout by extending the period of their loans to the bankrupt country.

The ECB fears the wrath of “the markets”, the private investors who lend on the expectation of a fat return for their money. Also concerned are major European banks who stand to suffer if Greece defaults on its loans. The banks have Greek debt on the asset side of their balance sheets and a write-off would be catastrophic.

Across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, the rapidly developing global capitalist crisis has driven millions of people, young and old into action against a system of governments – both autocratic and parliamentary – which became established during the post-1945 rebuilding of capitalist production.

In Britain, public sector unions, including teachers and civil servants, are set for the largest day of strike action for a generation at the end of the month over pensions and job losses. It’s a welcome start, but as the experiene of Greece shows, strikes by themselves cannot push back the waves of the deepening crisis.

During half a century, the inexorable logic of capitalist growth demanded international agreements which enabled the emergence of increasingly powerful global manufacturing, trading, property-owning and financial corporations. Their “rights” are established in contracts backed by international treaties more powerful than the laws of any country.

Ending their power over people’s lives is the key to finding a solution. To respond to Maria Georgila, “they” actually do not have an alternative. “We”, however, can proceed to build people’s assemblies and establish a new global economy and politics based on social ownership, democratic control and not-for profit sustainable production for need.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor