Saksittua 28.6.2010
Mielenkiintoista muualla:
- New Hampshire Tries Work Share Idea | New Hampshire Public Radio – Work Share gives a company an alternative to layoffs. Rather than firing workers, it can reduce hours for everyone and state unemployment benefits will keep employees’ take home pay close to what it had been.
- Naomi Klein: Sticking the Public With the Bill for the Bankers’ Crisis – How else can we interpret the G20's final communique, which includes not even a measly tax on banks or financial transactions, yet instructs governments to slash their deficits in half by 2013. This is a huge and shocking cut, and we should be very clear who will pay the price: students who will see their public educations further deteriorate as their fees go up; pensioners who will lose hard earned benefits; public sector workers whose jobs will be eliminated. And the list goes on. [...] They are happening for a simple reason. When the G20 met in London in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, the leaders failed to band together to regulate the financial sector so that this type of crisis would never happen again. All we got was empty rhetoric, and an agreement to put trillions of dollars in public monies on the table to shore up the banks around the world.
- Why co-operatives are cool again | Money | The Guardian – "mutual manifesto" puts the emphasis on people running many of their own services, from health and social care to council estates and Sure Start centres. The Liberal Democrats would go even further, introducing a new mutuals, co-operatives and social enterprises bill to bring the law up to date and give responsibility for mutuals to a specific minister…Critics have accused all three parties of using the plans as a way to cut public-sector costs, but supporters of the movement argue that now, more than ever, the mutual model is needed to bring about a real change in the way organisations and services are run.[...] It is ironic that the focus is on the public sector, when it is private industry that has failed so disastrously in recent times.
- Workers of the world, co-operate! – Red Pepper – ‘The democracy is important as it allows you to work to a different logic. Personal and group development is also a big thing for me. It allows us to practice how we can work together with a focus on health and wellbeing, not profit.’ [...] ‘All the people who are involved with our co-ops are involved in wider social movements. The co-op opens up a common space to allow you to provide for yourself but the flexibility to engage in and explore other avenues [such as] social justice and local community activism. The work itself is not primary, it is secondary to all the other things we do.’
- As Canada’s Democracy Trembles, a New Global Architecture Emerges – IPS ipsnews.net – Arbitrary and sometimes preemptive arrests became the norm as the weekend progressed, drawing denunciations from several prominent human rights organisations. Amnesty International decried the "curtailment of civil liberties" that accompanied "high fences, new weaponry, massive surveillance, and the intimidating impact of the overwhelming police presence". [...] group of elites are making decisions that concern all peoples around the globe largely in secret – appeared to be flaunted by members of the corporate elite, dubbed the 'B20' (Business 20), who were on hand. [...] Offering an indication of the B20's influence, South Korean Finance Minister Jeung-Hyun Yoon told, "I sincerely hope the business summit can serve as a platform for public-private collaboration and the starting point of the new normal in the global economic architecture." [...] many fear that Toronto will become known as the staging ground for the security model that will be deployed to protect this new architecture.
