We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, November 21, 2014

When Politicians are Even More Stressed than Banks

Click here to access article by Costas Panayotakis from TeleSur.

The begins his essay with the news about stress tests being applied to European banks, and strangely, or not, all the European banks like their counterparts in the US passed the test. However, some of the banks in the periphery did not pass by much.

With the rapidly growing anti-austerity party of the left, Syriza, the European ruling capitalist class are facing a major challenge to their policies. Read the article to see how a capitalist class deals with opposition within countries being governed with capitalist versions of "democracy".

Questions about the future of eurozone economies have also been raised by the volatility of the markets for sovereign debt issued by the countries of the European periphery, especially Greece. Greece is an interesting case because it illustrates in an extreme form the predicament of politicians around Europe and the world who are called upon to make ordinary citizens pay for the ongoing global capitalist crisis.