January | 2015 | Fighting for Fairness by Remaking the Real Economy

What would you do if you’d lent loadsamoney to someone and they didn’t pay you back as agreed because they were unemployed and didn’t have the necessary? Would you demand they stop eating so they could repay a bit? Would you start taking stuff from them in lieu of interest payments? Would you threaten them with even worse deprivation, if they didn’t repay in full as agreed? Or would you realise you’d been stupid to lend them all that money in the first place without checking their ability to repay, without even checking if they had a job with some regular income?

Greece can’t repay its debts and the more austerity is enforced, the less able will Greece become. Unemployment already stands at 26% with youth unemployment around 55%. More austerity will only increase those figures reducing Greece’s capability. Martin Wolf suggests the loans to Greece were made recklessly, without due diligence, because the purpose of the loans was not to help Greece but to protect the Euro [‘Greek debt and a default of statesmanship’, Financial Times, 28/1/2015]. Greece exiting would be an example others might follow. So, while exit could be damaging for Greece, for the Euro it would be disastrous, reducing it to the category of an exchange rate peg, rather than a solid currency.

In the aftermath of the 2008 crash, there was much debate as to whether stimulus or austerity would be the best way to return economies to health. The 1930s experience, addressed by the application of common sense and common humanity, saw economies revived by the stimulus exampled by Roosevelt’s New Deal. This hard-learned lesson has been highlighted before at https://gordonpearson.co.uk/2014/10/22/a-new-new-deal/#more-1127
Continue reading The Greek Example →

For a short while on 11^th January 2015, an estimated 1.5 million people were brought together in Paris as a homogeneous entity, along with a further estimated 2.5 million elsewhere in France. They represented huge diversity of race, religion, age, ability, interests and political allegiance. What brought them together for that brief moment was their common protest against the violence meted out to individuals who in these post-enlightenment times, had not broken any law, but had merely exercised their right to freedom of speech. Though few of the protesters might agree with the Charlie Hebdo line, the protest was in defence of their right to express it, and the shared horror at the premeditated violence visited on them.

That spontaneous moment of universal protest is now complete. But the mindless abuse of Muslims was almost immediate. Those aggressive reactions could well seed equal and opposite responses. So the world might continue its progression in the wrong direction, refusing to learn any lessons from the simple minded ‘war on terrorism’ declared by George W Bush after 9/11 and supported by our very own Tony Blair. The time for simplistic generalisations is surely over; the struggle must begin for some deeper understanding on which to base action.

Continue reading Je Suis un Humain →