Dick of the Year – credit rating agencies
These 3 companies are the guardians of the masters of the universe. Moody’s, Fitch, and Standard and Poor are tasked by the world of finance with assessing the risk of loans. It is them who tell investors what the safety is of a particular package of mortgages, or a given government. But in 2007 something [...]
Occupy Toronto
By Juliette Daigre & Tom Malleson Occupy Toronto began on Saturday 15 October, with a 2,000 person march (a pretty impressive size for Canada) through the financial district before setting up camp in a downtown park. For weeks we’d been following with interest the news coming out of Occupy Wall Street: from the initial Adbusters [...]
Murdoch, New Labour, Credit Crunch, Expenses: collapses of concentrated power
Four years, and four great institutions of British capitalist hegemony have been shaken by crisis. In 2008, the banks collapsed. In 2009, it was expenses and ‘trust in MPs’. In 2010, New Labour – the machine which coaxed the working classes to vote for neo-liberalism. And in 2011, it’s News International. Each seems in a [...]
The Dependency Paradox
Personal responsibility is a recurring theme in Conservative rhetoric, although they tend to use the more down-to-earth expression of “doing the right thing”. David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith in particular like to use this to block any criticism of the proposed reforms to the benefits system and public sector pensions. Instead, they champion a [...]
UK Uncut – the support is growing, and diversifying
All across the country today, UK Uncutters took to the high street. This time, our target was banks. This time, we were shouting about the health service. This time, our message was a new one – “restructure the banks, not the NHS” – “It’s the banks that caused this mess, don’t sell off the NHS”. [...]
The bitter irony of using the financial crisis to scrap the NHS
This post first appeared on the UK Uncut blog Around 50% of American bankruptcies are triggered by medical bills. When we talk of ‘sub-prime mortgages’, we are talking about real people facing financial ruin. The main reason that these Americans are thrown out of their homes is that they get sick. When a whole economic [...]
Privatising profit and socialising risk
This is essentially the modus operandi of the modern western government: to promote the interests of corporate gloabalisation and to offload the risks onto the people. This has manifested itself in many ways over the last few decades, but interestingly many have been demonstrated in only the last few years and even days. As the [...]
US Uncut – James Meredith didn’t sit quietly, and neither can we
Carl Gibson is the founder of US Uncut and CIVIL USA, the US Uncut chapter in Jackson, Mississippi. On the night before James Meredith was admitted to the University of Mississippi as the school’s first black student, Segregationist Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett addressed a crowd of 41,000 Ole Miss Rebel fans at the Ole Miss [...]
Call to Action – US Uncut, Washington DC Chapter
Call to Action US Uncut, DC Chapter February 15, 2011 US Uncut DC is calling on you to join a series of protests that link the avoidance of taxes by US corporations and banks to the proposed service cuts and pay freezes threatening Americans * The first protest will be on Saturday, February 26th 2011 [...]
We remember, Mr Cameron
I was asked to write a post for UKUncut on the new campaign on banks. This was it. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. Bright Green readers were recently reminded of Milan Kundera’s famous quote. And how apt. Because more than anything else, this government is hoping that we [...]
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