Mike Davis: Spring Confronts Winter. New Left Review 72, November-December 2011 mike davis Editorial In great upheavals, analogies fly like shrapnel.
The electrifying protests of 2011—the on-going Arab spring, the ‘hot’ Iberian and Hellenic summers, the ‘occupied’ fall in the United States—inevitably have been compared to the anni mirabiles of 1848, 1905, 1968 and 1989. Certainly some fundamental things still apply and classic patterns repeat. But perhaps that will come later. Will a deepening economic crisis, now engulfing much of the world, necessarily speed a global renewal of the Left? First, we must pay homage to fear and panic at the high tables of capitalism. If the neo-liberal apocalypse is actually nigh, Washington and Wall Street will be seen as the chief exterminating angels, having simultaneously blown up the North Atlantic financial system and the Middle East (as well as scuppering any chance of mitigating climate disaster).
Speed and Control at Manesar: Why is the Maruti-Suzuki Management Keeping Workers Out of Its Factory. Protest Meeting at Maruti-Suzuki Factory, Manesar, September 01, 2011 Manesar is an emerging industrial hub roughly fifty kilometers from Delhi.
Factories rise along the co-ordinates of a neat grid, overshadowed by the rocky Aravallis. The world is made here – cars, bikes, semiconductors, automotive parts, electronics, telecommunications equipment. Manesar has a little bit of everything. Even a bomb data analysis centre and a brain research lab and a military school and a heritage hotel.
Really, it isn’t that far. Police Camp at Factory Gate The Automobile Industry in India is extremely competitive. It takes less than an hour to get to Manesar from Delhi. A few scattered reports appeared over the last days. Inside Maruti’s sprawling new factory in Manesar, its all about speed and control too. Videos or images of what a Maruti Factory looks like from the inside are hard to come by on the internet. China: Apple workers react to Steve Jobs leaving. Please support our site by enabling javascript to view ads.
BEIJING, China — As the rest of the world waxes nostalgic with tributes and accolades for Apple’s retiring CEO Steve Jobs, the factory workers in China who got sick while making Apple’s touchscreens remain unmoved. Six months ago, factory workers in Suzhou poisoned two years ago by toxic chemicals at the factory wrote to Jobs directly, asking for his help in getting medical care and compensation for their illnesses and lost work time. They never got an answer from Jobs. Two years after the chemical exposure and many months of medical treatment later, they still say they’ve never heard from anyone at Apple directly.
More from Globalpost: China's Silicon Sweatshops In fact, it took Apple more than a year to acknowledge that 137 workers got sick on the job in 2009 at a components factory run by the Taiwanese electronics supplier Wintek, working under contract with Apple. ~Jia Jingchuan, factory worker who appealed directly to Jobs. Households Pay a Price for China’s Growth. The capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011. AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears.
An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable. The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power.
The Zurich team can. 1. Relenting on Car Sales, Cuba Turns Notorious Clunkers Into Gold. Economics Professors Are Unshaken by Financial Crisis. OECD inequality report: how do different countries compare? UK income inequality.
Click image to view graphic Inequality across the world is rising fast, says a new report out today from the OECD which shows it getting worse. It is getting worse in the US, where the country's inequality score has risen in recent years. The report says: There was a rise in the share of top-income recipients in total gross income in the three decades from 1980 to 2010 in all countries, with considerable variation from country to country. It's particularly bad in the UK where the average income of the richest 10% of earners in the UK was almost twelve times that of the bottom 10% of the population by 2008, up from eight times in 1985 and above the European ratio of nine to one.
Author of the report Michael Forster says: Income inequality has risen to a record level over the past 25 to 30 years, although it has increased in both low and high income economies alike" Roll over bars for numbers. Nouriel Roubini: 'Perfect Storm' Coming for Global Economy in 2013.