Saturday 5 - Sunday 6 May 2012: Maison des Associations Internationales, Brussels Join us in a two-day conference in Brussels with movements from across Europe to strengthen progressive responses to the EU's crisis. Speakers will include Susan George - Carola Fischbach-Pyttel - Leigh Phillips - Esther Vivas - Mariana Mortágua - Alexis Passadakis - Miren Etxezarreta - Lina Filopoulou - Jakub Patočka - Andy S ...

Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) was a costly mistake from the start. On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and t ...

Nearly 86 percent of private investors have agreed to join in the debt-swap deal that will help Greece avoid an uncontrolled default. But is that good news? Many experts have their doubts. In a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview, economics professor Harald Hau argues that not only will the plan put the burden on taxpayers, but it will mean an even bigger crisis to come. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Almost 86 percent of private-se ...

Neoliberal economics planned in Brussels and Berlin will push Greece into third-world working conditions. The reporting of the Greek tragedy over the last couple of years gives the impression that economics is a master science. Yet, the mainstream economists who gave Lehman Brothers a certificate of rude health just before its collapse, predicted tat by 2012 the Greek economy would start growing. The econom ...

We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it. Yes, Minister. What can I say? As Felix Salmon says, this really isn’t credible. The problem with all previous rounds here has been that austerity policies depress the economy to such an extent that it wipes out most of the topline fiscal gains: revenue fall, so does GDP, so the projected debt/GDP ratio gets, if anything, worse. Now we have a ...

Translated from www.grenzeloos.org One more episode of the Greek drama is about to be played in the coming 2 months. After repeated bail-outs, hair-cuts and ‘successful’ (according to the European media…) interventions of the EU, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF, Greece is about to default. According to many economists, the default will take place on the 20th of March, the day that Greece has to ...

US radicals came up a century ago with sound proposals for a maximum income, enforced through progressive taxation, to ensure that the rich couldn’t so easily buy political influence, as well as to adjust inequality. The Occupy Wall Street movement hasn’t yet demanded a cap on individual income but it probably will. Ever since the “golden age” after the Civil War, great American popular surges for economic ...

From the group REinFORM we want to show ours more energetic protest by the action of the Jefatura Provincial de Telecomunicaciones of Asturias about the community radios.This department (under the authority of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce) has started to send letters to the residents of the flats where there is located the necessary equipment to broadcast of some community radios of the re ...

By Allan Little BBC News Having to pay for its reunification after the fall of the Berlin wall, Germany broke the budget deficit rules in 2003 - did this set a bad example for the eurozone?   Who is to blame for starting the current crisis in the eurozone? Greece? Italy? The real answer may lie further north. It was not the behaviour of the eurozone's southern members that first plunged the single curr ...

The dreadful debt saga will only come to a close when Greece takes charge of its predicament Negotiations to reduce Greek debt have been suspended after no agreement could be reached last week. At some point in the near future Greece seems certain to default on its obligations. But the drama surrounding the talks in Athens, Berlin and Paris shows that there will be nothing co-operative about Greek default. ...