austerity

   Jair Bolsonaro                   Fernando Haddad

In order to meet the colossal challenges of the time, fundamental change to the socio-economic order is needed. The environmental catastrophe is the major issue, together with armed conflict, potentially nuclear. Both threaten the survival of humanity and the planet, and both are widely ignored by the men and women of power, whose short-term approach, obsession with ‘the economy’, and a nationalistic introspective view of the world is leading us to the precipice of disaster.

When the global financial crisis resurfaces, we the people will have to fill the vacuum in political leadership. It will call for a monumental mobilisation of citizens from below, focused on a single and unifying demand for a people’s bailout across the world.
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Argentinian president Mauricio Macri speaking on September 3rd, 2018 (Youtube screenshot).

ATHENS – It is a tale of two realities. Later this week, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will give his annual speech to the nation – Greece’s equivalent of the State of the Union address — at the 83rd Thessaloniki Trade Fair.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Since the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro was reduced to ashes by a fire that broke out Sunday night, the country has been in the grips of not only grief but a powerful collective sense of outrage over their loss of the 200-year-old museum. The anger has manifested itself in major mass mobilizations, heaping further pressure and disrepute on the right-wing, neoliberal government of President Michel Temer that had gutted public spending to an unparalleled extent.

Authored by Daniel Lacalle via DLacalle.com:

Reading the daily headlines, it’s easy to forget that the corollary of a civilization in precipitous decline is a world of creative ferment, a new world struggling to be born. If you could have a God’s-eye view of all the creative resistance rending the fabric of political oppression from the U.S. to Indonesia to Colombia, you would surely be persuaded that all hope is not lost.

Compared to the performance of the Argentinian economy this time last year, economic activity is down by 5.8% as the government applies the IMF’s austerity measures, aimed at cutting government expenditures in order to make budgetary room to repay the international bloodsuckers. The Argentinian economy is looking more and more grim.
telesur reports:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and [humans are] at last compelled to face with sober senses [our] real conditions of life, and [our] relations with [our] kind.
— Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto