Life gets in the way of blogging.

I was hoping to do a several part series on how the Greek financial crisis had got to the stage it was, and why the wrong people were being blamed. Unfortunately my life, both work and study, got in the way and I wasn’t able to complete the series. And oh how things have changed since I last wrote! It now seems out of date to continue the series.

But now that work and study are now not so overbearing on the rest of my life, I feel a little more free to post, so will be restarting the Koalasaurus blog.

Greece and the Eurozone Part 1 of 2: The Greek Situation in Context – The Routes of the Economic Crisis

The news at the moment has been dominated by the news of Greek economic crisis. It is right for people to be concerned, the Greek economic crisis has the realistic possibility of dragging the European Union and the Euro currency down with it. Also, the lives of ordinary working class people living in Greece are set to be completely destroyed, whilst the ruling class in Greece and internationally continues to prosper at our expense.

This article is the first of two articles looking at the Greek Situation where I will try to explain briefly the routes of the crisis in Greece and the Eurozone.

The second piece will look at two further things that worry me deeply. Firstly, the implicit international hostility to the Greek people and the almost universally accepted notion that they must be made to pay for the crisis.

Secondly, the hostility towards the decision of premiere Papandreou to call for a referendum on the subject. The basic idea being that democracy at this point has to take a backseat while the men in suits go off and “fix the economy”.

The Routes of the Economic Crisis

The current economic crisis in Greece has it’s roots all the way back in the credit crunch of 2007/08 which became the global recession that we are currently enduring now.

Everyone knows how borrowing money works. If you want to borrow £100,000, you accept that you will need to eventually pay more than that £100,000 in interest in order for the bank to agree to lend you that money. The only reason that the bank will lend you that money is on the understanding that at some point in the future, you will pay them back the money and a significant profit.

Well back in the middle of the past decade banks all across the world were in a race to lend money. In the United States in particular, banks were lending money for mortgages for people to buy property, to people that normally you would consider to risky to lend to (people in precarious, low wage employment for example).

The thought was that because property prices were sky rocketing, that if these people did not meet their repayments, it didn’t matter to much to the bank, because they could just reclaim the house and sell it for a huge profit anyway. For the banks it appeared as a win/win situation…even if it did mean ruining people’s lives in the process.

Unfortunately people were defaulting on their loans a bit to quickly, just as the price of property began to nose dive. Normally this would just mean that American Banking would be hit. But in this day-and-age of international finance, when America sneezes, the world catches the flu.

The reason the crisis was able to spread is that in another desperate attempt to make profits on the debts of ordinary people, the debts of these homeowners was packaged up and sold…yes, you can actually sell debt! Once repackaged, these debt ‘securities’ were sold on and on, and on, and on…and on. The problem was that, at the speed which international financial transactions occur these days, there was no way of telling where the “bad debt” from the United States had gone. Nobody even knew how much “bad debt” there was.

This led to a “liquidity crisis”. Basically the banks did not know whether or not they had bought any of the “bad debt” so, although they had enough money to be getting on with business as usual, they were not lending to each other, to businesses or to the likes of you and I.

This meant businesses were not getting loans, their spending was going down, people were being laid-off, and the crisis spread from being a liquidity crisis of financial capitalism, to a being a full on economic crisis.

So in came the governments. After over three-and-a-half decades of neoliberal economic policy and it’s hostility to nationalisation, the Bush administration took part in the largest nationalization in history. The world powers got together and bailed-out the mortgage giving banks. Billions upon billions of tax payers money internationally was spent bailing out the banks so that they could get back to “business as usual”. Although a lot of the bailout money was spent on luxury boats, jets and other disgusting excesses of the bankers bonus culture, the bail-out, coupled with the quantitive easing championed by Gordon Brown suceeded…kinda.

The next article will explain how these crises lead to a situation where the ruling classes could make ordinary people, in Greece and beyond, pay for the economic crisis created by greedy bankers.

Why Aren’t the BBC Talking About Occupy Wallstreet?

It is shocking that for over a month now, thousands of demonstrators have been occupying wall street. The amount of people backing the occupation is apparently stronger than you think, with a slim majority of people asked by Times magazine agreeing with the demonstrators.

What’s more shocking is that if you live in Britain and follow the BBC, this occupation could be going on in a parallel dimension for all you know. The BBC still are not reporting it! Nothing on BBC News 24, nothing on the front page of BBC News Online (as of yet) and nothing even on BBC Online US & Canada. In fact, at the moment the news of an accident on the set of the new Resident Evil Film is the most read page on the BBC’s US & Canada page!

This is despite this new, exciting and dynamic movement being more popular than the tea-party! It’s almost as if the BBC are too afraid to put the idea of occupation into the heads of the British Public. Regardless of the fact that occupations have been a part of protest in Britain for years.  From the workers occupations of Vestas, Visteon or the student occupations of pretty much every university ever over Gaza, (The list in that link is far from exhaustive), people in Britain can always be relied upon to surprise people with their radical direct action.

That’s why I’m very pleased to see a lot of the right leaning media in the UK getting nervous about the possibility of “Occupy London” becoming more than just a dream, but reality, this Saturday!

I’m going to keep a watchful eye over the BBC News Homepage, and I bloody well hope that if the occupation does take root, that the story the BBC puts up on their site knocks “Family Guy should have finished by now” off the ‘most read story’ list, for fucks sake!

Steve Jobs – Rotten Apple

Since the world heard of the passing of Steve Jobs there have been lots of articles, reports and Facebook status’ proclaiming how terribly  sad his early death was. The loss of such a great visionary, a leader and revolutionary who thought outside of the box and brought us the most life changing technology imaginable. The Washington Posts piece on him likened him to a saint. The Queens Gazette creddited Steve Jobs with having created a “a whole new culture”. Stating that Steve Jobs’ left not only his family behind, but “a world forever altered by the technology and products that use it that he developed and gave to the world.”

Seriously, you’d have thought Nelson Mandela had died! To be fair to the Washington Post, they did say that he wasn’t loved by all, pointing that ” Some commentators quickly noted that Jobs was also so demanding and obsessive in his quest for perfection that he was often described as a “tyrant.” He publicly ridiculed competitors as “bozos,” and many of his own staff were afraid to find themselves riding an elevator with him.”

But mentions nothing of the Chinese workers who were treated so badly that the bosses were forced to give them a 30% pay rise just to get the workers to stop commiting suicide at work! The factory boss saying “We hope the hike in wages will help improve the living standards of the workers and allow them to have more leisure time, which is good for their health”.

The Chinese workers in this factory are going through a similar stage that workers in Britain went through in the 19th century. The workers were in such miserable conditions that they started to die off. The bosses then had to pay them more so that their levels of health would be higher. He we have history repeating itself.  Steve Jobs is the 21st century equivilent of a 19th century industrial capitalist!

One commentator, Rod Dreher wrote a pro-capitalist leaning piece explaining how Steve Jobs was a jerk, a tyrant who mistreated his employees and family. But labelling him a hero for the effort! Finnishing however by saying that  “in the end, I bet Bill Gates will have proved the better man.”… If you are proved a better man than Bill “Childeater” Gates, a man so evil when his friend and co-founder of Microsoft got cancer he tried to cut him out and take his shares. This man, the richest man on the face of the earth, the head of a giant monolith of a company that consistantly comes up against monopoly commisions…this mas is a better man than Steve Jobs.

All of this talk of multi-millionaires, this obsession with wealth, celebrity and the ‘powerful’, is distracting us from whats really going on in society. A society where briefly, the fact that Queen Elizabeth had a cold was the most read story on the BBC website! Steve Jobs death was a personal tragedy to him and his family. But the brutal truth is that when Steve Jobs died the the Apple Shops still oppened, the chinese factory making iPods, kept making iPods. And the reason that this happened, and the reason it will continue to happen everytime a capitalist dies, is because the bosses don’t make the wealth, workers do!