An expert body of the United Nations has warned the Spanish government that the severe budget cutbacks it is applying must not undermine its commitment to upholding the economic, social and cultural rights of the country's people.

Austerity measures imposed by the government of centre-right Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy could have "a negative and disproportionate impact on the enjoyment of those rights," said the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR).

Committee Chairperson Ariranga Govindasamy Pillay, a native of Mauritius, said these concerns will definitely appear in the final conclusions of its review of Spain's compliance with the provisions of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to be released on May 18.

The Committee, made up of 18 independent experts from different regions of the world, monitors observance of the Covenant by the 160 states that have ratified it since its adoption in 1966 and its entry into force in 1976.

Two particular events mark the case of Spain, which was discussed this week, said expert Jaime Marchán of Ecuador, the Committee's rapporteur on the report presented by Spain.

One was the elections in November last year, won by the People's Party, which replaced the government of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) led by former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, in power since 2004.

The second feature mentioned by Marchán was "the persistence of a very severe economic crisis whose direct negative and devastating impacts have often interfered with maintenance of basic levels of protection for economic, social and cultural rights."

In his assessment of Spain's compliance, the rapporteur recalled that since 2004 the country has taken measures to promote economic, social and ...

The US-Viet Nam war was a war of aggression against a people who never, not once, set foot on US soil to kill or bomb this country. It was not a war for freedom, as the apologists of the empire like to say.  That war, with US soldiers, Latinos, blacks and working class Americans, plus hundreds upon hundreds of war planes that dropped tens of thousands of bombs, sorties they called them, killed over 2 million Vietnamese people and injured that many more, men, women and children and like recent US bombing of Iraq, also demolished the country.

Of course the war generals also implemented the popular slogan "destroy the village in order to save it" which in practical terms ravaged the countryside with special killing platoons, assassinating and massacring villagers, such as the infamous attack on My Lai. Additionally and indiscriminately, they also used napalm, the war’s freedom chemical of choice, on those people. The napalm automatically affected thousands of soldiers, including Latino combatants.

That war was no different than the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the war against that other colonial power, Spain, the recent coup de tat against President Manuel Celaya and the democratically elected government in Honduras, and this one in particular hits the veins, the war on Mexico, where we lost over half of the territory. Indisputably history says, they have all been fabricated. No exceptions. The United States of America, with manifest destiny as its guiding moral civilizing light, has perpetually, engaged in wars of expansion, pillage and the stealing of conquered lands and their natural resources, that is oil and natural gas amongst many others.

Essentially, that's how the foundation of this country was laid. It started with the stealing of the land from the native indigenous people of America -the ones who gave us thanksgiving- then slaughtering them, and the remainder placed in reservations. Some like the ...

According to official figures, the unemployment rate affecting people under 25 years of age has reached 50 percent in Spain, 48 percent in Greece, 35 percent in Portugal, and 31 percent in Italy. Youth unemployment is also high in Ireland (30 percent), France (23 per cent), and Britain (22 percent). 

On average, 25 percent of European's youth labor force is unemployed and yet another 25 percent only has a precarious, low paid job, even though most of unemployed young people possess high educational qualifications, including university diplomas. 

In all these countries affected by high sovereign debt and economic recession, conservative governments have imposed drastic cuts in public spending, reduced social welfare programs and pensions and increased taxes, especially those paid by consumers, among other austerity measures. 

These programs have deepened economic slumps and fiscal difficulties across Europe. 

As the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced on Mar. 29 in its more recent economic assessment for the G7, the seven most industrialized countries of the world, "Our forecast for the first half of 2012 points to robust growth in the United States and Canada, but much weaker activity in Europe, where the outlook remains fragile." 

"We may have stepped back from the edge of the cliff," the OECD’s chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan cautioned, "but there’s still no room for complacency." 

Padoan also warned that the Eurozone’s three largest economies - Germany, France, and Italy – might have shrunk by an average of 0.4 percent during the first quarter of the year. 

The German economy already suffered a slowdown of 0.2 percent during the last quarter of 2011. Given the OECD ...

Last Thursday, people across Spain made a show of force in a general strike, at a scale ranging from the government estimate of 800,000 to the 4 million claimed by the unions. It was timed to challenge new reforms that are expected to make it easier for employers to fire workers, dealing a blow to organized labor.

The 15M movement, which began with occupations in the central squares of cities around the country last year, played an important role in the strike’s success. Despite ongoing conflicts between the largest unions and 15M, several weeks ago the movement’s key organizations — including neighborhood assemblies, Democracies Real Ya, Yo No Pago and the Platform of People Affected by the Mortgage (PAH) — announced their support for the general strike and started working to make it a success.

Early on, there appeared an anonymous blog called 29M sin Miedo (M29 without Fear). It invited workers to speak out against intimidation from their companies about the prospect of the strike, such as threats of dismissal or demands for signed statements about whether they intended to strike or not. The blog, which collected as many as 250 complaints, achieved a double objective: it made these abusive practices visible, and it provided a list of companies to picket on the day of the strike.

The 15M movement’s collectives followed suit with their own initiatives, including leafleting, public meetings about the overhaul of labor rules, caceroladas (the banging of ...

Europe seems to be obsessed with austerity. Country after country is being forced by either the financial markets or the European Union to start cutting its public-sector deficit. And, as if this were not enough, 25 of the 27 EU member states have just agreed on a new treaty (called a “fiscal compact”) that would oblige them never to have a cyclically adjusted budget deficit of more than 0.5% of GDP. (For comparison, the United States’ budget deficit in 2011 was close to 8% of GDP).

But, as the European economy risks falling into recession, many observers are asking whether “austerity” could be self-defeating. Could a reduction in government expenditure (or an increase in taxes) lead to such a sharp decline in economic activity that revenues fall and the fiscal position actually deteriorates further?

This is highly unlikely, given the way our economies work. Moreover, if it were true, it would follow that tax cuts would reduce budget deficits, because faster economic growth would ...

With the world’s industrial democracies in crisis, two competing narratives of its sources – and appropriate remedies – are emerging. The first, better-known diagnosis is that demand has collapsed because of high debt accumulated prior to the crisis. Households (and countries) that were most prone to spend cannot borrow any more. To revive growth, others must be encouraged to spend – governments that can still borrow should run larger deficits, and rock-bottom interest rates should discourage thrifty households from saving.

Under these circumstances, budgetary recklessness is a virtue, at least in the short term. In the medium term, once growth revives, debt can be paid down and the financial sector curbed so that it does not inflict another crisis on the world.

This narrative – the standard Keynesian line, modified for a debt crisis – is the one to which most government officials, central bankers, and Wall Street economists have subscribed, and needs little elaboration. Its ...

The measures introduced by the European Central Bank last December, especially the Long Term Refinancing Operation (LTRO), have relieved the liquidity problems of European banks, but have not cured the financing disadvantage of the highly indebted member states. Since high-risk premiums on government bonds endanger the capital adequacy of banks, half a solution is not enough.

Indeed, that supposed solution leaves half the eurozone relegated to the status of Third World countries that have become highly indebted in a foreign currency. Instead of the International Monetary Fund, it is Germany that is acting as the taskmaster imposing tough fiscal discipline on them. This will generate both economic and political tensions that could destroy the European Union.

I have proposed a plan that would allow Italy and Spain to refinance their debt by issuing treasury bills at around 1%. I named it in memory of my friend Tomasso Padoa-Schioppa, who, as Italy’s central banker in the 1990’s, helped to stabilize that country’s finances. The plan is rather complicated, but it is legally and technically sound. I describe it in detail in my new book Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States.

"Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from George Soros, click here."

European authorities rejected my plan in favor of the LTRO. The difference between the two schemes is that mine would provide instant relief to Italy and Spain. By contrast, the LTRO allows Italian and Spanish banks to engage in a very profitable and practically riskless arbitrage, but has kept government bonds hovering on the edge of a precipice – although the last few days brought some ...

The markets (read: traders with big books at mega financial firms and hedge funds) weren’t particularly shocked by last week’s wave of heavily pre-broadcast S&P sovereign debt downgrades. For months, the question wasn’t ‘if’, but ‘when.’ True to form, just as with the US downgrade, S&P’s reasons skated the surface of prevailing wisdom – governments have too much debt, and not enough income. That’s only a fraction of the story.

Nowadays, when any sovereign (including the US) gets downgraded by a rating agency, it's not just because its debt repayment ability is questionable (the publicized logic of rating agencies), but because it incurred more expensive debt to float its banking system. It chose to subsidize banks over people.

The S&P likes moving on Friday nights. It was on a Friday night that it downgraded US debt to AA+ from AAA. On Friday night, January 13, 2012,  it downgraded France and Austria from AAA to AA+, and 7 other European countries, too; Cyprus, Italy, Portugal, and Spain by two notches; Malta, Slovakia, and Slovenia, by one notch. Portugal, Cyprus, Ireland and Greece are at junk status. Germany’s AAA rating is intact.

Nowhere in S&P’s statement about “global economic and financial crisis”, did it clarify that sovereigns were hit due to backing their largest national banks (and international, US ones) which engaged in half a decade of leveraged speculation. But here’s how it worked:

1) Big banks funneled speculative capital, and their own, into local areas, using real estate and other ...

Poised on the threshold of a new year, I’m again drawn to a metaphor for the challenges and opportunities we face in this urgent time of ours: the crossroads.

Two roads intersect, and now we confront an unavoidable choice. Do we carry on as we always have—or do we, with courage and imagination and verve, make a dramatic course correction?

While it may be too early to definitively rank 2011 as the year of the Great Nonviolent Turning (even greater things may be coming in the new year or in the years that will follow it; or, on the contrary, the passage of time may reframe this period entirely), the events of the past twelve months—from Tunisia to Egypt, from Greece to Spain, from Chile to Jeju Island, from China and Russia to a more or less Occupied America—have signaled a growing determination for a qualitative shift.

Here the symbol of the crossroads is especially apt. Traditionally it signifies, not an arbitrary or simplistic decision (Coke or Pepsi?), but a momentous choice: a turning point, a decisive situation, or a set of life-altering options. The worldwide movement for nonviolent change that has been gathering momentum this year seems to be placing before us such immense choices: Radical economic disparity or sustainable equality? Oligarchy or democracy? Militarized culture or a more nonviolent civil society?

These are not minor alternatives. Real change of this magnitude will require profound structural metamorphosis. This will not appear out of the blue. Nor will it happen merely because we wish it so. Instead, it will depend on movements that derive their power from a deep transformation of personal and social consciousness and identities; a willingness to let go of certain reliable (if debilitating) assumptions about how the world is ordered; and a commitment to face the consequences for taking these still as yet unclear steps for change.

The crossroads in its deepest sense may also be useful ...

At this point the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is almost getting boring. We’ve seen the same script played out over and over with country after country. The basic story is the markets begin a run on the debt of a country: Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain etc.

The troika, the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Union (EU), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) then demand a series of austerity measures. In addition, they sometimes demand measures unrelated to fiscal policy, such as a lower minimum wage in Ireland or weaker employment protection legislation in Italy, that are intended to weaken workers’ bargaining power. As a quid pro quo, the troika then arranges enough bond purchases or other supports to get through the immediate crisis.

Of course these measures don’t actually solve the underlying problem. If the troika took the steps needed to ensure that the indebted countries got past this crisis, it would lose the ability to demand further austerity and other steps that weaken welfare state supports for workers. The troika is not willing to give up its leverage at this point.

That is why the ECB repeatedly declares its refusal to guarantee support for sovereign debt any time it seems as though the financial markets believe that it is committed to supporting the debt of the troubled borrowers. This insistence by the ECB, coupled with the other policies it pushes to stifle growth, ensures that the crises will continue. The same countries will have to keep coming back for another dose of punishment and new countries will be added to the list as the contagion of slumping demand, deteriorating bank balance sheets, and dwindling confidence spreads.

The negotiating teams at the troika surely must know that the path they are following can only lead to further crises. Their medicine of austerity is irrelevant to the disease that is afflicting the debt-burdened countries.

Most immediately they are suffering ...

It looks as though the eurozone may be in a decisive meltdown, which is just fine in my book. The sooner we get back to francs, lire, punts, drachmas and the rest of the old sovereign currencies, the better.

It used to be as much a part of going to France to change money and be handed a bundle of notes featuring the devious Cardinal Richelieu as choking on Gauloise smoke. Instead, those francs are now replaced by the characterless but somehow always expensive euros.

The argument against the eurozone is that hard-faced Euro-bankers — their killer instincts honed at Goldman Sachs, Wall Street's School of the Americas — have the power to act as the bully-boys of international capital and impose austerity regimes from Dublin to Athens, scalping the poor to bail out the rich.

Now the end of the eurozone does not mean the end of the European Union. They're different. There are 17 nations in the former, 27 in the latter. Britain, for example, has never been in the eurozone, which is why the currency exchange in London will, in return for your worthless dollars, hand you bank notes with the Queen's portrait on them.

At the moment, the European Union has virtually no tax collecting powers. Its annual haul is about 1 percent of the EUs gross domestic product. By comparison, the U.S. government collects about 20 to 24 percent of GDP.

Throughout the entire Eurocrisis, there has been a basso profundo chorus from the Eurocrats that what's needed is a lot more centralizing. In the words of Wolfgang Munchau at the Financial Times on Nov. 28, the EU needs "a fiscal union": "This would involve a partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credible institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy, and hopefully wider economic policy issues as well."

I've read many editorial paragraphs with this same bullying timbre — that what the whole European enterprise needs is an ...

We write this letter as participants in the movements, and as an invitation to a conversation. We hope to raise questions about how we continue to deepen and transform the new social relationships and processes we have begun … to open the discussion towards a common horizon.

The evictions and threats to the physical occupations in the United States have again raised the question of the future of the movement. The question isn’t whether the movement has a future, but what sort of future it will be. For example, should our energy be focused on finding new spaces to occupy and create encampments? Should we be focused more in our local neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces? Is there a way to occupy public space with horizontal assemblies, yet also focus locally and concretely?

A look at the recent history of a movement similar to Occupy—the Spanish indignados or May 15 movement—can shed some light on the opportunities and urgency of this new ...

The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt, and then to Spain, has now become global, with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: a sense that the “system” has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right – at least not without strong pressure from the street.

In May, I went to the site of the Tunisian protests; in July, I talked to Spain’s indignados; from there, I went to meet the young Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; and, a few weeks ago, I talked with Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. There is a common theme, expressed by the OWS movement in a simple phrase: “We are the 99%.”

READ FULL POST 19 COMMENTS

The biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy.

The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent.

The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.

Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.

But the biggest question in our nation’s capital right now has nothing to do with any of this. It’s whether Congress’s so-called “Supercommittee” – six Democrats and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings — will reach agreement in time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its proposal, which must then be approved by Congress before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic $1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-the-board cuts starting in 2013.

Have your eyes already glazed over?

Diffident Democrats on the Supercommittee have already signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who won’t raise taxes on the rich – not even a tiny bit.

President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his “jobs bill” – which would, by the White House’s own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who’d rather have full-time ...

At first glance, the synchronized protests that took place in more than 900 cities around the globe on Oct. 15 seemed to indicate that Occupy Wall Street had achieved a kind of worldwide resonance.

But the truth is more complex. Many of the protests elsewhere grew out of movements that pre-date Occupy Wall Street and out of frustrations that, though similar in some ways, are also specific to their countries.

Here’s a look at the origins, demands and affects of five of these global protests, as well as the criticism they’ve faced.

In Chile, Students Protesting for Free Education Occupy Schools

The Santiago protest in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street took place during a week of ongoing national demonstrations. Since May, Chilean students have been staging protests demanding that the government make education free to all.

Secondary school students have occupied their schools, sleeping on the floor and holding their own classes. Last week, protesting students  READ FULL POST 6 COMMENTS

Since the summer, the continuing installments of the Greek crisis have concealed a worrying process of fragmentation in the eurozone. Indeed, there are several grim indicators of this development.

First, the spread between banks’ borrowing rate and the zero-risk rate has been climbing since July. Financial institutions with liquidity increasingly prefer to deposit their cash with the European Central Bank, which has had to resume its lending to banks. The same thing occurred in the 2007-2008 crisis, though the shift is less acute this time, and is confined to the eurozone. In London and New York, the interbank market is still working; nevertheless, there is reason for concern.

Second, cross-border banks are charging higher interest rates to firms in southern Europe than they are to comparable firms in northern Europe, which is worsening the situation for crisis-hit economies. This fragments Europe’s supposedly unified market. And, instead of combating this trend, northern European regulators are amplifying it by limiting financial institutions’ exposure to southern European banks.

READ FULL POST 1 COMMENTS

Too many Americans think the term "terrorism" only applies to Muslims. Christians, Jews, atheists, agnostics, Unitarians, or Quakers who commit unspeakable acts of horror often aren't deemed to be real terrorists.

Consider what happened after right-wing Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik killed 77 people in July. The first response from the U.S. corporate press to this savage bloodshed, including Washington Post blogger and columnist Jennifer Rubin, was that he must be a Muslim, maybe one affiliated with the al-Qaeda terrorist network. When that assumption proved false, he quickly became just another deranged young man.

Why do so many of us only worry about Muslims? For starters, there's a lot of oil, gas, and other high-value resources in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, right where many Muslims reside.

In the old days, Western powers simply went in and took whatever they wanted. There was no United Nations or world press to demand fair play. The great battles of the day were among those powers themselves, rather than with the natives who got trampled, colonized, and enslaved. For many years, the big struggles were between colonial powers like Britain, Spain, and France. For much of the 20^th century, the Soviet Union duked it out with the United States.

Times have changed. False conscience has intruded. Beginning around World War II, countries were supposed to have a good reason before invading or occupying other nations. The United States, currently a lone superpower, has become saddled with the bothersome task of finding excuses for attacking these oil-bearing lands, at least those whose leaders we haven't already bought off.

Paramount among the excuses for invasion is "terrorism." We used it to justify our wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, with Iran potentially coming down the pike.

The more Washington can equate terror with the residents of those countries, ...

The European Central Bank (ECB) is run by people who are not very good at economics. They continue to adhere to a fundamentally wrongheaded view of the economy and the central bank’s role within it. Unfortunately there is no internal pressure for change because, like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, acceptance of the ideology is the price for admission into the clique of economists who can influence the ECB.

The central tenet of ECB dogma is that the central bank should target a low inflation rate (2.0 percent) and pretty much ignore everything else in the economy. In the last decade this meant ignoring the massive housing bubbles that were driving the economies of Ireland and Spain. The bank was happy all through the period in which the bubbles were growing to ever more dangerous levels because it was hitting its inflation targets.

More recently, the ECB has been raising interest rates even as most of the eurozone economies remain mired with high unemployment. These interest rate hikes slow growth and job creation. Higher interest rates also exacerbate the fiscal problems facing heavily indebted countries, since they make it more expensive for them to service their debt.

In other lines of work, the disastrous consequences of the ECB’s recent and current policies would get people fired. However, no one is really in a position to fire the ECB bank president and top staff, so they could in principle continue their failed policy approach indefinitely.

But there is hope. Because the people running the ECB are not very good at economics, they keep running into difficulty with their plans to "rescue" Greece, Spain, and the other eurozone countries facing fiscal crises. As a result, they have to continually run back to these countries and work out new loan packages. Each package involves new and more onerous conditions for the debtor countries.

What the ECB has failed to recognize is that its own policies ...