Not Synced
Goooooooooood morning slaves, and welcome to another sedition of It's the End of the World as we Know it and I Feel Fine, the show that supports police officers' right to strike.
I am your host the Stimulator, and it seems like any time you turn on the news these days you hear...
Ever since the financial shit-storm of 2008, when a cabal of crooked investment bankers, sub-prime mortgage lenders, and coked-out Wall Street traders gangstah-crashed the global financial system, the economic forecast has hovered somewhere between pretty shitty and completely fucking bleak.
Seven years later, millions of broke peeps can't find work, while countless others have seen their hours and wages slashed, and their pensions gutted. In the United Snakes, more than 4.4 million houses have gone into foreclosure, throwing hundreds of thousands of families into the streets. More and more young people are finding themselves buried under mountains of student debt, with no idea how they'll pay it back. Meanwhile, greasy fucking politicians have seized on the panic and chronic uncertainty to push through painful cuts to social programs, and to siphon trillions of dollars in public skrilla towards bailing out their banker buddies, and equipping local police forces with tanks and armored fucking trucks.
For many regular folks, one of the worst aspects of this lingering economic malaise, aside from being forced to eat mac and cheese for every other meal, has been the sinking realization that things aren't getting better. Despite the constant talk of economic recovery and the return of record-breaking corporate profits, for the vast majority of us proles, things are still pretty fucking rough. So it's no surprise that all around the world, a movement against austerity has been growing steadily, as more and more people have taken to the streets to demand a bigger slice of the proverbial pie.
Buuuuuuuut... despite these inspiring appeals for social and economic justice, there are few signs that rampant rates of global inequality will be improving any time soon. If anything, life under capitalism is gearing up to get even worse.
Recently, a number of prominent financial analysts have gone on record as predicting that another global economic crash will likely take place in 2015, with some experts pointing to the over-inflated US stock market as a potential trigger, others to declining global commodity prices, or to the bursting of China's massive real estate bubble. Now.... I'm no fucking economist...
[PLAY SHOCKED GASP]
.... aaaaaand, as even the eggheads who make their living doing it will tell you, economic crises are hard to predict. That being said, with the sheer number of warning signs pointing to a looming financial meltdown, now might be a good time for peeps to be careful with how they invest their hard-earned duckets.
One of the main economic indicators that currently has financial analysts' panties in a bunch, is the price of oil, which has been steadily dropping for months, and is now sitting at around $50 per barrel. While this means that it's a great time to be a douchebag with a hummer...
...it's NOT a great time to be one of the millions of people living in countries where social programs are funded through oil revenue. This is a serious fucking problem right now in countries like Iran, Venezuela and Russia, where everyday folks have found themselves caught between the geo-political brinksmanship of their own political elite and the cynical maneuvering of the Saudi royals, who have been flooding the market in a deliberate act of economic warfare that hearkens back to their 1973 western oil embargo.
Buuuuuut things are not all doom and gloom. In a serious case of politics making strange fucking bedfellows....
the Saudi-engineered drop in oil prices has been great news for all those resisting THE MOTHERFUCKIN' TAR SANDS. Because of the high costs of refining tar sands bitumen into synthetic crude, oil prices need to be above $68 a barrel in order to turn a profit. In other words, oil companies exploiting the tar sands are currently producing at a serious fucking loss, which may well put the freeze on proposed expansion projects such as the Keystone-XL and Energy East pipelines. While it's in no way an ideal, or even long-term solution, any delays in tar sands expansion give peeps fighting this ecocidal mega-project more time to refine their strategies and tactics, and to start putting their attack plans into action.
MUSICAL BREAK
Since 2010, Greece has been ground zero for the global economic meltdown. Unable to pay back its debts to its wealthy neighbours, such as France and Germany, the country famously known as the birthplace of democracy has since been transformed into a laboratory for brutal economic shock therapy.
For years now, public anger has been mounting over declining living standards and the bleak fucking prospects for economic recovery, and on January 25th, the country voted in a new left-wing coalition, Syriza,
who have promised to renegotiate Greece's national debt and to end the regime of austerity. While leftists worldwide have been treating this victory as the second-fucking-coming of Hugo Chavez,
anarchists in Greece are skeptical that Syriza’s leadership will be able to make good on their promises. To learn more about this situation I caught up with Antonis Vradis, editor of the UK-based, anarchist-autonomous collective, Occupied London.
How the fuck are you?
So a lot of lefties out there are creaming their shorts cuase Syriza swept the Greek elections. But you wrote “Syriza won’t save you” just what the fuck do you mean?
But wouldn’t a Syriza government open up more space for anarchist and anti-authoritarians to organize? IE Less political repression?[Ne Vivons Plus Comme Des Escalves:36min27sec to 36min43sec; also works for economies and structures of solidarity]
In you article you write “be wiser to strengthen and build “economies and structures of solidarity” just what the fuck do you mean by “economies and structures of solidarity”
[Ne Vivons Plus Comme Des exclaves:Starting at 40min02sec to 41min17sec; images of self and community organizing during interviews, try to avoid women cooking and men sitting around dynamic]
Do people think that there’s gonna be a coup propellled by European banks or governments, if Syriza decides to renege on the debt?
A few years ago Neo Nazi political party Golden Dawn was making waves. What’s the deal with them now that their leadership has been neutralized?
Many people believe that the economic clusterfuck that Greece is going through, is gonna hit the US and Canada in a similar way. How can peeps prepare for that?
Anything else you want to add?
