AlterNet: The Financial Crisis Is Too Dire to Be Left to Politicians

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The Financial Crisis Is Too Dire to Be Left to Politicians

By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith and Tim Costello, AlterNet. Posted January 28, 2009.

Current leaders of the world's nations have utterly failed to develop a solution. Now it's up to ordinary citizens.



Editor's Note: As tens of thousands of activists from around the world gather in Belem, Brazil, for the World Social Forum, social movements everywhere are debating how to respond to the ever-deepening economic crisis. This article is excerpted from the longer discussion paper "Globalization From Below" Tackles the "Great Recession" prepared by Global Labor Strategies.

At the pit of the Great Depression in 1930, an American country music group named the Carter Family recorded a song called "The Worried Man Blues." It began:

"I went down to the river and I lay down to sleep,
When I woke up there were shackles on my feet."

Though many subsequent verses describe the horrific outcome, there is no explanation of what had happened or why -- just an awakening to a seemingly endless catastrophe. The song immediately became an unprecedented national hit. It's hard to imagine that its success didn't have something to do with capturing the sense of being the helpless victim of incomprehensible disaster that so many felt in the face of the Great Depression.

The seemingly sudden collapse of the global economy in 2008 has similarly left millions, indeed billions, of people all over the world victims of a catastrophe that appears both inexplicable and unending.

But what's now being dubbed the "Great Recession" is neither incomprehensible nor irremediable. On the contrary, it can be understood as an expectable result of a capitalism that has been globalized and at the same time "freed" by neoliberalism of control in the public interest. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/123158/the_financial_crisis_is_too_dire_to_be_left_to_politicians/