Nobody knows how it happened, but somehow a confidential EU Commission document has made its way through obscure pathways into the hands of the interested Brussels public. In this document titled “A Reform Agenda for Global Europe”, the previous debates between the Parliament, the Council and the Commission for a financial audit in 2008-‘09 are summarised, and suggestions for a reform of the budget starting in 2013 are made.
Witnesses of human rights abuses by European Transnational Corporations in Latin America presented their cases in the European Parliament at the 18th of November 2009. In preparation of the People’s Permanent Tribunal (TPP) at the alternative EU-LAC summit, 14-18 May 2010 in Madrid, e.g. Brazilian Fisher of a bay near Rio de Janeiro showed how a Thyssen-Krupp steel plant infringes environmental law with the result of displacing local fisher. The situation is tense: on the one side, the fisher are organising themselves; on the other side, the companies’ security service is enunciating death threats against the fisher.
By Barry K. Gills, Newcastle University – The causes of the present global systemic crisis are structural and long term. The origins may be traced to the 1970s and the “capital logic” and global restructuring that expressed the attempt by capital to circumvent the limits to capital accumulation imposed in the old core societies, in order to raise the rate of profit. This took the form of the “globalization of production”, the “financialisation of capital” and the “globalization of finance”, and was accompanied by economic doctrines emphasizing the “self-regulation” of capital and markets.
However, by “solving” one problem, these measures created others, including: intensified global asymmetries, social polarization and inequality; “uneven development” both within and between regions, generating serious structural imbalances such as between deficit and surplus country accounts; a “global underconsumption” tendency (caused by raising the rate of the global exploitation of labour and increasing the ratio of value appropriated by capital on a global basis); and accelerating environmental destruction and the impending global climate change scenario; thus overall greatly increasing the level of systemic instability and the “systemic risk” within the world system as a whole.
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