Scenes from the recession, a series of photos from around the world showing the impact of the recession which only need a black and white filter to fit into a documentary about the 1930ties.
More hopeful: The Activist Toolkit, a Wiki set up by some Aussie activist/socialist groups to share all sorts of tricks and tools.
[UK] Unemployment surges through 2m
Unemployment has risen through the 2 million mark on the widest measure of joblessness while the claimant count has suffered its biggest jump on record.
The Office for National Statistics today confirmed that unemployment rose to 2.029 million in the three months to January – the highest in 12 years – a rise of 165,000 from the previous quarter.
The January figure was revised up sharply to show a rise of 93,500, up from the 73,800 reported a month ago. That means the claimant count has surged by around 600,000 in the past year.
Update: Here’s Labour’s Brian Iddon (Bolton SE) as James Purnell’s callous Welfare Reform Bill passed the Commons unopposed by the Tories or Libdems,on its third reading:
… told how he was handing over cash to a close family member to top up his jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) because it was “impossible to live on”. He said that were he not “almost doubling it” the person would not have a decent standard of living.
LabourHome is currently running a poll:
Should Labourhome run an annual awards ceremony for Labour politicians, activists and constituencies?
Yes
No
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
In addition to a couple of obvious awards, (twin Dinky toys to Prezza for Most Unlikely Blog Success, and a therapy gift certificate to Derek Draper for the Most Enjoyable Blog Meltdown) may I suggest The Mandy, an annual award of a magnum of Bolly for Grinding The Faces Of The Poor? I don’t think Iddon would win any such poll, being as he is so definitely off-message, but I bet Parnell’d be in with a very good chance.
Update II
Half of Detroit houses now worth less than 7500 dollars:
DETROIT — It may be tough to get financing for a new car these days, but in Detroit you can buy a house with a credit card.
The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service.
Not $75,000. Remove a zero—it’s seven thousand five hundred dollars, substantially less than the lowest-price car on the new-car market.
The homeowner model of capitalism has failed. It’s time to nationalise the housing stock.
The wingnut right has been creaming its pants about the socalled “Tea Party” protests in which various loons and rightwing bloggers pretend they’re 21st century Minute Men by standing around holding up “creative” plackards. Supposedly grassroots protests against the “socialist” Obama government, the reality turns out to be slightly different:
Last week, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli rocketed from being a little-known second-string correspondent to a populist hero of the disenfranchised, a 21st-century Samuel Adams, the leader and symbol of the downtrodden American masses suffering under the onslaught of 21st century socialism and big government. Santelli’s “rant” last-week calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s plans to help distressed American homeowners rapidly spread across the blogosphere and shot right up into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ craw, whose smackdown during a press conference was later characterized by Santelli as “a threat” from the White House. A nationwide “tea party” grassroots Internet protest movement has sprung up seemingly spontaneously, all inspired by Santelli, with rallies planned today in cities from coast to coast to protest against Obama’s economic policies.
But was Santelli’s rant really so spontaneous? How did a minor-league TV figure, whose contract with CNBC is due this summer, get so quickly launched into a nationwide rightwing blog sensation? Why were there so many sites and organizations online and live within minutes or hours after his rant, leading to a nationwide protest just a week after his rant?
What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.
What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.
As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.
For the Instapundits and such this doesn’t really matter, as they of course are all about the wingnut welfare. It’s the mugs that actually show up for the protests you feel sorry for, as they genuinely believe they’re striking a blow for freedom rather than for some banker’s bonus payments.
Over at Monuments Are for Pigeons, “Victor Serge” is talking about the politics of doomsterism:
And this is where the Doomsters show their class privilege. They can only posit a horrible future because they’ve enjoyed the benefits of living in a rich, capitalist country. For the majority of humanity, barbarism exists today, something socialists have been pointing out for over a century. The megalopolises of the poor, imperialist wars, climate change-induced droughts – these are happening now. A couple of years ago I saw Time of the Wolf, about an unnamed disaster that hits France, reducing survivors to internal refugees fighting for food and water. The only difference between that scenario, and a dozen stories on the news, was that the survivors were white. I was incensed: when it happens to the world’s majority, it barely merits a glance. When it happens to white people i.e. ‘us’: the horror, the horror. (And I reference that deliberately: Conrad and Coppola’s Kurtz got to see first-hand the barbarism that imperialism created, and didn’t handle it very well.)
Doomsters are animated by this ahistoric sense that the world has gone wrong and, unlike the previous 400 years of slavery, imperialism and colonialism, this time it will affect us. But if you want to see barbarism, go to Gaza, where there’s precious little water or food, and Israeli jets murder with impunity from the skies. Go to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where factions linked to resource capitalists have battled each other for years, killing millions. Try Iraq, Afghanistan or any of the other places ‘our’ troops have been slaughtering civilians and resistance movements. Yet faced with real, existing barbarism, the most the Doomsters can find to worry about is the eventual slackening off of oil supply. I’d argue this is myopic at best, and racist at worst.
If you believe catastrophe is inevitable from industrialism, technology and size, then the answer is to keep people from pursuing those things. Local communities for local people. Self-described left-winger Lyle Estill has this to say of people who come from far away: “People who live in a community have a vested interest in strengthening that community. Those are the ones who accept and receive local currency. People who live far away take their expertise, and their spending power, home with them each night.” (173) Why not make it simpler and just say, “Immigrants take our jobs.” Because that’s the racist, anti-immigrant argument Doomsterism boils down to. If you think that people can choose their own role in capitalist economy, then they are at fault for choosing to move – for being too greedy and wanting to consume more. Workers don’t have a right to travel where capital does: they should stay put and starve.
The Doomsters live in a comfortable bubble inside the imperialist world. They don’t see the barbarism that envelopes the poor everywhere and can posit their fears of collapse as something unique. They substitute industrialism, technology or people’s stupidity for the inherent drive of capitalism to expand. If you can’t see the cause, then you can’t see the solution – ergo, there is none, and catastrophe is the inevitable result. None of those things can be changed by collective action: on the contrary, the mass of people are to blame. All we can do is wait for the collapse. The misanthropy close to the surface of every Doomster’s heart quickly turns to racism.