On 9 October 1967, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was executed by a Bolivian army officer at the end of his ill-fated attempt to foment revolution throughout Latin America. He was executed at the behest of the CIA, who hoped his death would deal a shattering blow to the influence of the Cuban Revolution in a part of the world traditionally viewed as America’s backyard; its role to provide the cheap labor, raw materials, and markets required to maintain the huge profits of US corporations.

But the CIA were wrong, just as successive US administrations have been wrong, in thinking that the ideas for which Che Guevara fought and died could ever be ended with a bullet. On the contrary, over four decades on from his death the Cuban Revolution continues as a beacon of inspiration and hope to the poor of the undeveloped world.

That a tiny island nation with a population of just over 11 million people, located 90 miles off the coast of Florida, should have the temerity to assert its right to political and economic independence from the United States and survive for so long is nothing short of immense. Indeed, many believe that not only have the ideas for which Che Guevara gave his life survived, they have never been more potent, illustrated by the left turn taken throughout the region in recent years. It is a political turn responsible for transforming a part of the world traditionally associated with military juntas, right wing autocracies, and US puppet regimes into the very opposite.

Today Latin America is a part of the world where democracy has taken root, where the tenets of the Washington neoliberal consensus have been rejected in favor of social and economic justice as the objective of government.

Undeniably, Che’s legend has not only continued unabated since his death it has grown. In every town and every city, from Los Angeles to London, Beirut to Bethlehem, from Nairobi to New Delhi, the iconic image of him carrying that expression of burning defiance, captured by Alberto Korda in 1960, is as ubiquitous as it is powerful, found on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs, rugs, posters and a myriad other items. For many it represents something transcendent in the human experience, an idea that stands in opposition to the values of individualism and materialism which are drummed into us every minute of every day in the West.

A read through Che’s writings brings home the fierce determination of a man who burned with anger at the injustice, oppression and exploitation suffered by the world’s poor. In his address to the United Nations General Assembly in1964, he said:

“All free men of the world must be prepared to avenge the crime of the Congo. Perhaps many of those soldiers, who were turned into sub-humans by imperialist machinery, believe in good faith that they are defending the rights of a superior race. In this assembly, however, those peoples whose skins are darkened by a different sun, colored by different pigments, constitute the majority. And they fully and clearly understand that the difference between men does not lie in the color of their skin, but in the forms of ownership of the means of production, in the relations of production.”

Not satisfied with merely delivering such a powerful affirmation of solidarity with the poor and oppressed of another land, Che embarked for the Congo in an attempt to give meaning to them, in the process abandoning the relative comfort and status earned him by the success of the Cuban Revolution to risk his life in a mission to spread the revolution throughout the developing world.

In a later speech to the Afro-Asian Conference in February 1965, he offered this admonition:

“There are no borders in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, because a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory, just as any country’s defeat is a defeat for all of us.”

For Che Guevara the struggle against imperialism and exploitation could only be won gun in hand, utilizing in his view the same kind of violence used without compunction by the oppressor. Not for him non-violence and peaceful protest. His experience, his observation of the poverty and truncated lives suffered by millions throughout Latin America and Africa instilled in him a rage and a desire to visit retribution on the system he considered responsible.

In this he was very much a product of his time, when people of the developing world were locked out of the democratic process in parts of the world where right-wing dictatorships made recourse to violence inevitable.

Despite the myriad articles, analysis, and commentary produced on Che Guevara and his life, much of it hostile and withering, one incident sums up more than any article ever could the enduring force of the Cuban Revolution whose ideas he died trying to spread.

In 2006 Mario Teran, an old man living in Bolivia, was treated by Cuban doctors volunteering their services free of charge to Bolivia’s poor, just as they have and do to the poor in every corner of the developing world in medical missions that have transformed the lives of millions. They performed an operation to remove cataracts from Mario’s eyes, which succeeded in restoring his sight.

Mario Teran is not just any old man, however. He is the Bolivian army officer who executed Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1967.

Source: http://rt.com/op-edge/194384-che-guevara-anniversary-revolution/

Plunging Greek Wages Crater Q2 Disposable Income By 9.3%, Government Borrowing Rises To Record

by zerohedge

Can someone please explain this whole “Grecovery” concept to use because neither we, nor apparently the people of Greece which are not only unemployed and broke, but have negative savings, and collapsing wages, social benefits and disposable income, seem able to understand it.

Here is the latest absolutely disastrous news from Elstat, reporting on Q2 Greek Non-financial sector accounts

During the second quarter of 2013, disposable income of the households and non-profit institutions serving households (NPISH) sector (S.1M) decreased by 9.3% in comparison with the same quarter of the previous year, from 33.2 billion euro to 30.1 billion euro. This was mainly on account of a decrease of 13.9% in the compensation of employees and a decrease of 12.4% in social benefits received by households.

This was the biggest drop in household disposable income since Q3 2012. Is this part of the Grecovery?

Next, the savings rate of the households and NPISH sector, defined as gross savings divided by gross disposable income, was -8.7% in the second quarter of 2013, compared with -6.7% in the second quarter of 2012.

So, households are broke, unemployed, and have negative savings. But at least the stock market is up. Is this, too, part of the Grecovery?

Finally, remember that myth about the suddenly accountable and responsible Greek government, which has a primary surplus, and is living within its means? Then please explain the following:

Net borrowing of general government (S.13) during the second quarter of 2013 amounted to 14.0 billion euro, compared with 3.8 billion euro in the second quarter of 2012. The increase in the General Government deficit in the second quarter of 2013 is due to capital transfers in the context of the program of state aid to specific banks. Net borrowing of general government excluding the impact of the support to financial institutions in the second quarter 2012 amounted to 2.6 billion euro.

This was the biggest quarterly government borrowqing in well… ever. Is this the final component of the Grecovery?

And some other independent data poinst:

• Greek 2Q Govt Deficit Widens to 16.6% of GDP From 11.0% in 1Q – obviously, this spells Grecovery
• Greek Debt Swells to 169.1% of GDP in 2Q, Nearing Pre-PSI Levels – this definitely must be the Grecovery, right?

The good news for all the broke, unemployment, incomeless Greeks: you still have your precious Euro.

Source: Elstat

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-22/plunging-greek-wages-crater-q2-disposable-income-93-government-borrowing-rises-recor

How terrible, how sad, said the politicians from Italy to England. Pope Francis called the shipwreck a “disgrace” and offered prayers for the victims. Italy took the easy route saying, quite understandably, that it was a problem for Europe as a whole.

But less than a week later, the drowning of some 363 migrants off the coast of   the island of Lampedusa has already fallen out of the main news. Had the victims been white Europeans or Americans instead of Syrians, Somalis and Eritreans, no doubt there would be more soul searching.

Even in the immediate aftermath, it became clear that the deaths could have been avoided then and there. How was it that in the combined surveillance forces of the Italian coast guard (backed up by European and American security systems of all kinds) did not spot the foundering boat quickly enough?

The first on the scene were local fishermen Vito Fiorino and Francesco Colapino. They personally pulled dozens of migrants out of the water. But they said they were frustrated by the Italian coastguard. They took an hour to arrive (even though the boat sank only some 700 or so metres off the Lampedusa coast) and, by their accounts, refused to help.

This latest loss of life, however immense, adds to the already huge figure of some 20,000 people estimated to have died in similar circumstances in the Mediterranean since the mid-1990s.

“Murderous Europe”, a statement by Migregroup, a Euro-African network of campaigners for the human rights of migrants, rightly affirms the deaths were in no way inevitable or an act of fate.

The deaths in the seas between Europe and Africa, as well thousands more in the deserts of Sinai, Algeria and Mali  (not forgetting Syria) are the consequence of a war against migrants.

How else can the European Union order control mechanisms and surveillance systems bearing hideous names like Frontex and Eurosur be described?

Migregroup says that while people traffickers are denounced as the guilty parties, it is actually the states of Europe who refuse to issue visas to those seeking asylum or a new life in Europe, thus pushing people into so-called illegality.

There are an estimated six million illegal migrants in Europe who are victims of the “securitarian logic” of the EU’s Shengen Agreement.

Whilst decrying the warring regimes in Syria, Ethiopia and Somalia, European states, including Britain, refuse to offer asylum to those fleeing persecution or poverty. Instead the EU has signed agreements with Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya to make these states stem the flow of migrants.

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which asserts the right of freedom of movement and choice of domicile, clearly does not appear to be on the EU lawmakers’ horizon.

While Italian agencies and international NGOs struggle to help survivors with totally inadequate funds and against obstruction by the Italian state, the real money is of course elsewhere.

The dire situation facing millions in Africa is because as far as the global big powers are concerned, they are simply collateral damage.

While the US state is in shutdown mode, hundreds of millions of tax dollars continue to be poured into making Italy “a launching pad for the wars of today and tomorrow”. While officially saying there are no US military bases in Italy, there are in fact 59 Pentagon-identified US bases in the country, including the Sigonella Naval Air Station near Catania in Sicily – less than 100 miles away from the African coast and even less from the island of Lampedusa.

Since 2008, the Pentagon has spent an estimated $31 million on a Global Hawk complex at Sigonella, part of its “global war on terror” programme for military operations in Africa.

The responsibility for the deaths in the seas of the Mediterranean lies on the shoulders of the European states and their co-criminals in the Pentagon.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
8 October 2013

http://www.aworldtowin.net/blog/war-on-migrants-behind-lampedusa-tragedy.html

This is not annual income but just wealth – in other words, 3.2bn adults own virtually nothing at all.  At the other end of the spectrum, just 32m people own $98trn in wealth or 41% of all household wealth or more than $1m each.  And just 98,700 people with ‘ultra-high net worth’ have more than $50 million each and of these 33,900 are worth over $100 million each.  Half of these super-rich live in the US.

All this is in a new global wealth report published Credit Suisse Bank and authored by Professors Anthony Shorrocks and Jim Davies – see the report here (global wealth report and the database wealth database).  The professors find that global wealth has reached a new all-time high of $241 trillion, up 4.9% since last year, with the US accounting for most of the rise.  Average wealth hit a new peak of $51,600 per adult but the distribution of that wealth is wildly unequal.

There is nothing new in this report one sense because Tony Shorrocks previously authored a UN report back in 2010 (see my post,http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/20/) that found virtually the same wealth inequality and Branko Milanovic also found similar figures in various World Bank studies.  But what is also interesting is that Professor Shorrocks finds that there is little or no social mobility between rich and poor over generations – 87% of people stay rich or poor, hardly moving up or down the wealth pyramid.

Moreover, according to the Credit Suisse report, the ‘American dream’ or the British idea of ‘rags to riches’ is a myth.  Two-thirds of American adults are in the same wealth decile as their parents were. Even globally, “while some individuals do alternate wildly between rags and riches, many stay for their whole lifetime in the same wealth neighborhood for people of their age. Dividing the population into wealth quintiles, about half the population remains in the same quintile after ten years and we estimate that at least a third would be in the same quintile after thirty years.”

Global wealth is projected to rise by nearly 40% over the next five years, reaching $334 trillion by 2018. Emerging markets will be responsible for 29% of the growth, although they account for just 21% of current wealth, while China will account for nearly 50% of the increase in emerging economies’ wealth. Wealth will primarily be driven by growth in the middle segment, but the number of millionaires will also grow markedly over the next five years.

All class societies have generated extremes of inequality in wealth and income.  That is the point of a rich elite (whether feudal landlords, Asiatic warlords, Incan and Egyptian religious castes, Roman slave owners etc) usurping control of the surplus produced by labour.  But past class societies considered that normal and ‘god-given’, Capitalism on the other hand talks about free markets, equal exchange and equality of opportunity.  The reality is no different from previous class societies.

Source: http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/global-wealth-inequality-10-own-86-1-own-41-half-own-just-1/

 If left unchecked, austerity policies could put between 15 and 25 million more Europeans at risk of poverty by 2025 – nearing the population of the Netherlands and Austria combined. This would bring the number of people at risk of poverty in Europe up to 146 million, over a quarter of the population, warns international agency Oxfam as EU Finance Ministers meet in Vilnius tomorrow.

Oxfam’s new report, A Cautionary Tale, finds that austerity measures introduced to balance the books following the €4.5 trillion bank bail-out are instead causing more poverty and inequality that could last for the next two decades.

Meanwhile, austerity is failing to cut debt ratios, as it was supposed to, or trigger inclusive economic growth.

Oxfam says that there are alternatives to austerity policies by drawing lessons from the calamitous periods of austerity cuts to social spending in Latin America, South East Asia and Africa throughout the 1980s and 90s. Some countries in these regions took two decades to claw their way back to square one.

Natalia Alonso, Head of Oxfam’s EU Office, said: “Europe’s handling of the economic crisis threatens to roll-back decades of social rights. Aggressive cuts to social security, health and education, fewer rights for workers and unfair taxation are trapping millions of Europeans in a circle of poverty that could last for generations. It is moral and economic nonsense.”

Living standards down, inequality up

It could take Europeans up to 25 years to regain the living standards they enjoyed five years ago.

“The only people benefiting from austerity are the richest 10% of Europeans who alone have seen their wealth rise. Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the UK – countries that are most aggressively pursuing austerity measures – will soon rank amongst the most unequal in the world if their leaders don’t change course. For example, the gap between rich and poor in the UK and Spain could become the same as in South Sudan or Paraguay,” added Alonso.

Three years on, leading proponents of austerity such as the International Monetary Fund and many respected economists are starting to recognise that these measures have not only failed to achieve their objective to shrink government debt and budget deficits, but have also increased inequality and stunted economic growth.

Unemployment in many European countries is hitting record highs. Women and young people are being hit hardest. In the UK, more than 1 million public sector jobs will be cut by 2018, and twice as many women than men will lose their jobs. Wages are falling fastest in countries facing the harshest austerity prescriptions. Almost one in ten working households in Europe now live in poverty and it could get much worse. For example, tough mortgage laws in Spain let banks to evict 115 families from their homes every working day. Even those in work will be significantly poorer than their parents. Child poverty across Europe is set to rise.

Lessons from the past

“History is repeating itself. Our leaders are ignoring the profound pain that austerity cutbacks had for many years on people in Latin America, South East Asia and Africa in the 1980s and 90s. Their economies shattered and the poor continued getting poorer even when growth made a come-back,” Alonso said. Basic services, such as education and health, were cut or privatized, excluding the poorest and hitting women hardest. As a result, the gap between rich and poor widened.

In Indonesia, it took 10 years for poverty to return to 1997 levels, while in some Latin American countries it took 25 years to bring levels of poverty back down to where they were before their crises began in 1981. “Europe is heading in this direction now,” Alonso said.

Alternatives to austerity

“There are alternatives to austerity. Ahead of tomorrow’s EU Finance Ministers’ meeting, we’re calling on European governments to champion a new economic and social model that invests in people, strengthens democracy and pursues fair taxation. Governments could raise billions for public services, such as health and education, by taxing the wealthiest and cracking down on tax dodging.”

“A new model of prosperity is possible. Investing in schools, hospitals, housing, research and technology, millions of Europeans could be put back to work and support a sustainable economy,” Alonso said.

Austerity was designed to shrink debts. Now, three years after Europe’s budget-cutting began, the evidence is in: severe, indiscriminate austerity is not part of the solution, but part of the problem — and its human costs are devastating.

In the U.S., Greece, Italy, Spain, the UK and elsewhere in Europe there were more than 10,000 additional suicides from 2007-2010, a figure that is over and above historical trends, with the largest rises concentrated in the worst performing economies.

But suicides and depression are not unavoidable consequences of economic downturns: countries that slashed health and social protection budgets have seen starkly worse health outcomes than nations which opted for stimulus over austerity.

Greece, for example, is in the middle of a public health disaster. To meet budget-deficit reduction targets set by the European Central Bank, European Commission, and International Monetary Fund (the so-called troika), Greece’s public health budget has been cut by more than 40%.

As Greece’s health minister observed, “these aren’t cuts with a scalpel, they’re cuts with a butcher’s knife.” The spending was reduced to 6% of GDP, a figure lower than the UK, at 8%, and Germany, at 9%.

As a result, HIV infections have jumped by more than 200% since 2010, concentrated in injection drug users, as needle-exchange program budgets were cut in half. There was a malaria epidemic in Greece — the largest in 40 years — after mosquito-spraying budgets were slashed.

More than 200 essential medicines have been de-stocked from some pharmacies as the state’s drug budget was reduced and pharmaceuticals companies exited the country in arrears.

Since 2008 there has been a rise of more than 40% of people who report being unable to access healthcare that they believe to be medically necessary, the majority concentrated in pensioners.

As patients cannot afford private care and forego preventive care, public sector hospitals have experienced a 24% rise in hospital admissions. Doctors and clinics are therefore overstrained. Infant mortality rates have risen 40% between 2008 and 2010.

Over 35,000 public health workers, nurses, and doctors have lost jobs. Unemployment rates have hit 27% and youth unemployment has jumped to near 75% in some areas.

With little hope for the future, desperate people are turning to cheap, synthetic drugs. Use of anti-depressants has skyrocketed, adding costs to the healthcare system. Suicide rates, previously among the lowest in Europe, have soared.

Were these all inevitable consequences of recession, rather than consequences of austerity? Of course the Greek financial and political elites have made mistakes. And of course Greece’s fiscal and monetary options were severely restricted as part of the bailout deals. But the suffering of the Greeks was not inevitable.

The timing of many of these health effects coincided not with the onset of recession in 2008 and 2009, but with the implementation of deep budget cuts starting in 2010.

Several prevailing myths are commonly offered as alternative explanations for Greece’s devastating health outcomes, including these three:

The first myth: “Greece’s healthcare system is excessive and inefficient.” But there are just five hospital beds in Greece per 1,000 people, versus more than eight beds per 1,000 people in Germany.

The second myth: “Greeks are lazy.” But in 2011 the average Greek citizen worked 2,038 hours per year — 600 hours more than the average German, according to the OECD.

The third myth: “Europe’s bailout money is being squandered.” But bailout money is not flowing in to support Greece’s healthcare system — it is instead circulating back to large international banks in Germany, France and the UK.

What we learned from analyzing past crises is that people do not inevitably get sick or die because the economy has faltered. Fiscal policy can be a matter of life and death.

During the Great Depression in the U.S. in the 1930s, mortality rates actually fell by about 10%. Even though suicide rates increased among the unemployed between 1929 and 1933, this increase was outweighed by short-term drops in road traffic deaths, as people drove less to save on fuel costs.

Then, at a time when total debt was over 200% of GDP, President Franklin Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, which created the U.S. social safety net. New Deal programs to re-house people who lost their homes, help people return to work, and build a public health infrastructure were highly effective — and each additional $100 per capita in New Deal spending reduced suicides by 4 per 100,000 and infant deaths by about 18 per 100,000.

Tuberculosis rates also fell, but disease rates were substantially reduced in those states that aggressively implemented the New Deal rather than those avoiding its implementation — a “natural experiment.” 1934, the year after the New Deal started becoming effective, marked the beginning of the U.S. economic recovery.

Another “natural experiment” occurred in the aftermath of the East Asian financial crisis from 1997 to 1998. Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia all had large market crashes: their currencies plummeted, GDP collapsed, and unemployment soared.

But their politicians responded differently to the crisis, creating a rare laboratory in which we can identify the health effects of economic policy. Indonesia and Thailand turned to the IMF for help, implementing deep cuts to its HIV prevention, whereas Malaysia charted a different path, investing in preventive measures during the crisis.

Indonesia and Thailand suffered large pneumonia and tuberculosis outbreaks, but Malaysia avoided these effects.

Turning to the current recession in Europe, Iceland is another case study revealing that there is an alternative to austerity. Five years ago its three largest banks failed, and their total debt rocketed to over 800% of GDP. It was the largest banking crisis in history relative to the size of an economy and it forced Iceland to turn to the IMF for help.

The troika’s bailout plan called for reductions in spending equivalent to 50% of the budget in order to finance bank bailouts. The health minister resigned in protest at plans to cut the healthcare budget by 30%, as detailed in our book.

Then the president of Iceland took a radical step: asking the people what they wanted to do.

In March 2010, 93% of the Icelandic people voted against financing a bailout for foreign savers of Icesave Bank through draconian budget cuts. Instead, Iceland stabilized healthcare spending.

Thanks to this boost to the nation’s universal healthcare system, no one lost access to healthcare even as the cost of imported medicines rose as an effect of the devaluation of the Icelandic Krona.

There was no significant rise in suicides or depression. Nor were there any significant infectious disease outbreaks. Indeed, last year GDP growth was 2.7%, and unemployment rates have fallen below 5%.

Having seen the results, the IMF turned tail, praising Iceland’s successful approach.

Each of these crises — America’s Great Depression, the Asian financial crisis, and Iceland’s bank meltdown — had different origins, but they led to potentially similar health threats. But their contrasting outcomes support our conclusion that an economic crisis does not inevitably increase in death and disability. The real danger is austerity.

But if austerity is not working, and indeed is part of the problem (as the IMF has recently admitted), why are European leaders continuing its pursuit?

British economist John Maynard Keynes indirectly outlined the dangers of austerity in 1919. Germany’s unpayable debt from World War I, he argued, exacted by European nations in the Treaty of Versailles, would cause economic collapse and, ultimately, social instability in Germany.

Tragically, his premonition was borne out: Germany’s deep austerity under “hunger chancellor” Heinrich Bruning as it struggled to repay debts to France, Belgium, and the U.S. fueled the rise of the Nazi party and, as some historians argue, ultimately World War II in Europe.

In the aftermath of that war, West Germany benefited from the U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan, whereby America injected $1.45 billion in funds to invest in German industry and rebuild vital infrastructure. The Marshall Plan’s stimulus package helped spur recovery, paving the way for decades of prosperity and peace in Western Europe.

Collectively we seem to be losing sight of the lessons from our past. In Greece, austerity packages in Europe are sparking the rising popularity of neo-Nazi parties, such as Golden Dawn.

But there is an alternative. In 2009, the German parliament approved a 50 billion euros stimulus package to spur growth. Across Europe we have found that economies that introduced greater stimulus investment have charted faster economic recoveries.

Thanks to smart investments in “active labor market programs”—programs that help people access job retraining and return to work quickly– Germany, Sweden and Iceland have mitigated rises in depression and suicides from unemployment.

Our research has found that each euro invested in public health can yield up to a three euros return if invested wisely in data-supported government programs.

New York City officials learned this lesson in the early 1990s — after restricting its TB prevention budget, the city suffered a drug-resistant TB outbreak that ultimately cost $1.2 billion to control, about 10 times greater than the estimated price of prevention.

Greece’s HIV, TB, and malaria epidemics will now cost more to control than they would have been to prevent, our research indicates.

What we have learned is that severe, indiscriminate cuts to vital social protection programs are not only economically self-defeating, but fatal.

Impossible Biographies from Ross Domoney on Vimeo.

For them, the crisis has by now come of age. Yet despite and against shallow journalistic interpretations, there is nothing humanitarian about it. This is because for them the crisis was from the upstart orchestrated politically, socially and militarily. In this way, the discourse about racism in crisis-ridden Greece merely obfuscates and comes in handy. For it obscures exactly how structural this devaluation had been for the development of the Greek state in itself, as well as for the self-perception of Greek society. Yet the crisis knows how to twist meanings too. Today, migrants are accused of the very decline of the Greek edifice. And within this twisted world, their devaluation takes on a more offensive and, at the same time, a more legitimate form. Impossible Biographies, as part of the research project The City at a Time of Crisis, bears witness to this offensive. Today, just like yesterday, the devalued lives of migrants shall remind us how it is to live and die within an enforced anonymity and invisibility. How it is to live a life whose biography is impossible.

The City at a Time of Crisis is mapping racist attacks in Athens. To view or contribute information please visit: map.crisis-scape.net

Produced by Ross Domoney and Christos Filippidis

Filmed and edited by Ross Domoney

Research by Christos Filippidis

Additional footage by Yannis Tsakiridis

Special thanks to Clemont

Paloma Yáñez

Klara Jaya Brekke

Dimitris Dalakoglou

Antonis Vradis

Seasoned economic observers remain shocked by recent events. Greece will soon need another bailout. That’s not remotely surprising. What shocks is that there remains some semblance of an economy to bail out after 6 years of depression.

Greece is bust, the political system broken, the nation dysfunctional. Tax still isn’t being collected. Government remains a bloated legacy of political patronage. Workers left in the private sector are desperately clinging to the hope their business can survive the insanity of a Euro made in Germany applied to the Mediterranean.

Margaret Thatcher wisely noted that when politics and economics clash, you bet on the economics to triumph and the government to collapse. A sound rule; it held true when she helped accelerate the suicidal downfall of the Argentine military junta and, of course, the end of the Warsaw Pact. The tax-free bureaucrats of Brussels in the Berlaymont bubble have convinced themselves it can’t happen to them. Anybody reminded of the Ceausescu family preparing for Christmas 1989? The euro may have survived to date but Thatcher’s Law invariably proves correct.

Deluded eurozone leaders continue to prematurely claim that the crisis is over. Greece is stuck between a rock and a hard place. News of the bailout requirement comes just as Chancellor Merkel attempts to bore German voters into re-electing her on September 22nd. However, another Greek bailout plays badly with the German electorate, especially in the wealthy west where citizens paid to integrate (poorly) the ‘Ossis” and remain reluctant to subsidize generations of spendthrift Mediterranean incompetence. Then again Merkel’s latest remarks warn against further haircuts without explicitly ruling them out, so a third CDU term may mean debt relief for the Greeks regardless of her voters’ opposition.

A man walks past a burned store in central Athens (AFP Photo / Louisa Gouliamaki)

Meanwhile the Greeks aren’t exactly contrite: Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras has noted there will be no more austerity in return for another loan. Then again the Greeks have so far this year met one key term of their loans, running a primary surplus. The problem is a primary surplus doesn’t include interest accruing and when you owe as much as Greece does, the end result is that by next year they will probably owe as much as they did before Chancellor Merkel reluctantly permitted a small ‘haircut’ in October 2011. Therefore Stournaras may seek debt relief instead. The Greeks are keen to note a ‘mere’ 10 billion euros ($13.6 billion) will be required on top of the 240 billion euros advanced to the 11.3 million Greeks so far.

Euro coma

…Remember that traditionally bailouts involve suggesting a relatively minor figure then reach a number significantly above the original mooted level…

The EU is so desperate to hold their Ponzi currency scheme together they are now considering using core EU budget funds to bailout Greece. Britain and Sweden will therefore pay for the Eurofiasco they never endorsed.

Hellenic austerity has been a disaster because imposing restraint upon a dysfunctional state is a bit like expecting a walrus to make a good President so long as it wears a necktie. Greeks are, at best, haphazard in paying taxes. The bloated public sector exacerbates the need for reform but stymies the ability of austerity to solve anything by mainly hurting those whose support can be most easily cut: the poor, ill or young.

Greece lies in the abyss of economic damnation. Idiot corrupt politicians spent all the money and the current generation (having largely moved their own wealth offshore) lack the skills to reform the state. Pragmatic observers advocated default years ago but the Greek government caved in to EU pressure, stubbornly sticking with the euro.

True, national bankruptcy and the chaos of a new currency is no picnic but an economy kept in a coma by a political dogma driven by a misguided political experiment is not remotely worth living in for a month, let alone 6 years.

The euro remains on life support. Likewise Greece is living the myth of Sisyphus, sentenced for eternity to pushing a stone up a hill only for it to roll back down as the peak nears. Sooner or later this madness must end. It won’t be pretty but at least a rupture will allow a return to sustainable growth as opposed to a squandered generation.

The language and the time zone changes but, from Turkey and Bulgaria to Brazil, the symbolism of protest is increasingly the same.

The Guy Fawkes masks, the erection of tent camps, the gas masks and helmets improvised in response to the use of tear gas as a means of collective punishment. The handwritten signs – scrawled in defiance of the state’s power and the uniformity of the old, collective protests of yesteryear.

And the youthfulness of the core protesters.

In Gezi Park, Istanbul, before it was cleared by police, I saw school-age teenagers turn up regularly, each afternoon in small groups, colonise what was left of the lawn and start their homework.

The pictures coming out of Sao Paulo tell a similar story.

Bypassing the state

In both cities, people born in a post-ideological era are using what symbols they can to tell a story of being modern, urban and discontented: the national flag and the shirt of the local football team are memes common to both Istanbul and Sao Paulo.

But what is driving the discontent?

When I covered the unrest in Britain and southern Europe in 2011, the answer was clear. A whole generation of young people has seen economic promises cancelled: they will work probably until their late sixties, come out of university with lifetime-crippling debts.

And, as American students famously complained in 2009, the jobs they get when they leave university are often the same jobs they did, part-time, when they were at university. I’ve met qualified civil engineers in Greece whose job was waiting table; the fact that I met them on a riot tells you all you need to know.

With the Arab Spring, it seemed different – from the outside: these were fast-growing economies – in Libya’s case spectacularly fast. But here you hit something that makes this wave of unrest unique: this is the first generation whose lives, and psychology, have been shaped by ready access to information technology and social media.

We know what this does: it makes state propaganda, censorship and a government-aligned mainstream media very easy to bypass. Egyptian state TV totally lost credibility during the first days of the uprisings against President Hosni Mubarak. This month, when Turkish TV stations tried to pull the same kind of non-reporting of unrest, they were bombarded with complaints.

“But,” one politics professor told me, “most of the complaints were from people aged over 35. The youth don’t watch TV, and in any case they have never believed what’s on the news.”

Social media makes it possible to organise protests fast, to react to repression fast, and to wage a quite successful propaganda war that makes the mainstream media and the spin machines of governments look foolish.

At the same time, it encourages a relatively “horizontal” structure to the protests themselves. Taksim Square in Istanbul was rare for having a 60-strong organising group; the protests in Sao Paulo have followed the more general pattern of several organising groups and an amorphous network of people who simply choose themselves where to turn up, what to write on their banners, and what to do.

As I arrived in Istanbul, some of my contacts in financial markets were mystified: why are they protesting when it is one of the fastest growing places on earth?

Get down to street level and the answer was clear. In the first place, many of the young educated people I spoke to complained that “the wealth is going to the corrupt elite”; many pointed out that despite being doctors, civil engineers, dotcom types etc, they could not afford a place to live.

‘Perfectly ordinary people’

But then there was the bigger grievance: they felt the religious conservative government of the AK Party was impinging on their freedom. One Turkish fashion writer – no natural revolutionary – complained of “a growing, insidious hostility to the modern”.

And they saw the heavy police action against the original tent camp in Gezi Park – an environmental protest – as a symbol of this unfreedom.

In Sao Paulo, the grievances are more clearly social: “Fewer stadiums, more hospitals”, reads one banner. The rising price of transport, combined with the government’s determination to prioritise infrastructure and sports stadia, are what this has come to be about.

But again, last week, it was an allegedly disproportionate police action – the arrest of a journalist for carrying vinegar (to dull the sting of tear gas), the shooting of four journalists with rubber bullets – which led to escalation.

In each case, the effects of police action are magnified by the ability of protesters to send images of brutality around the world immediately. And as a veteran of reporting more than 30 years’ worth of “non-lethal” law enforcement, my impression is that the use of CS, baton rounds, water cannon is pushing police procedures all over the world towards “near lethal” levels that are increasingly unacceptable to protesters who go on the streets with no violent intent.

Though smaller by comparison, the Bulgarian protests that on Wednesday removed a controversial head of state security speak to the issues that unite those taking to the streets in many countries: it is not about poverty, say protesters, it is about corruption, the sham nature of democracy, clique politics and an elite prepared to grab the lion’s share of the wealth generated by economic development.

In short, just as in 1989, when we found that people in East Europe preferred individual freedom to communism, today capitalism is becoming identified with the rule of unaccountable elites, lack of effective democratic accountability, and repressive policing.

And what the events of the last three years have shown is that perfectly ordinary people, with no ideological axe to grind, have found the means to resist it.