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- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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"There is precisely zero chance of austerity working. It is the same as thinking you can escape from gravity by waving your arms up and down."
“Last week was an awesome warning of where go-it-alone austerity can lead. It produced some brutal evidence of where we end up when we place finance above economy and society. The markets are now betting not just on the break-up of the euro but on the arrival of a new economic dark age. The world economy is edging nearer to the abyss, and policymakers, none more than in Britain, are paralysed by the stupidities of their home-spun economics…
It could hardly be more sobering. Money has flooded out of Spain, Greece and the peripheral European economies. Signs of the crisis range from Athen's soup kitchens to Spain's crowds of indignados protesting in the streets against austerity and a broken capitalism. Youth unemployment is sky-high. Less visible is the avalanche of money flowing into hoped-for safe havens in the US, Germany and even Britain.
We live in the aftermath of one of the biggest financial and intellectual mistakes ever made. For a generation the world, with the London/New York financial axis at its heart, surrendered to the specious theory that lending and financial contracts could grow many times faster than the underlying economy. There was a blind belief that in a free market banks could not make mistakes. Free markets didn't make mistakes – only clumsy bureaucratic states made economic mistakes. Or so they said. Financial alchemists, guided by the maxims of free market fundamentalism, could make no such errors.”…
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- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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Dear Ms. Lagarde,
Recently you registered your utmost anger and frustration with the tax-dodgers in Greece. I say good for you. Everybody should pay their taxes. Those who dodge are the scum of the earth.
Please allow me to remind you of the gist of your remarks from the interview you gave to the Guardian on Friday 25 May 2012.
You blamed the Greeks collectively for causing their financial peril by dodging their tax bills. You stated that, "As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax".
You then remarked that, you “had more sympathy for poor African children with little education than for jobless people complaining about austerity measures in Greece”.
Before I put my questions to you, I wish to note that, while no one would deny that tax-dodging in Greece is a very serious problem, nonetheless you failed to make a distinction between those who pay their dues, the less well-off wage earners; the working class, who stand in contradistinction to the super rich who find legal and illegal means, to avoid paying their taxes. Therefore, I am sure you will agree with me that any attempt- perceived or otherwise- to stereotype any people, civilisation, or culture, is deplorable and should be avoided at all costs.
There are also those who are angered by your failure to mention the catastrophic shortcomings of those economic fools in Europe as a whole who kept silent, whilst the going was good and said nothing about the prevailing neo-liberalism, crony capitalism, debt-financed expansionism and more. They turned Greece into an ideal laboratory for the most brutal neo-liberal experiment, for which they, too, must be held accountable. To pretend otherwise and blame it all on the tax-dodgers alone is nothing but an affront to humanity and justice.
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- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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Can it be possible: Can there be sustainable development?
As it has been noticed “it is difficult to envisage a world in which nine billion people prosper if we continue to extract resources from the natural world with little consideration for their true value. With increasingly unsustainable use of resources and the effects of climate change and environmental degradation being felt across the planet, the need for decisive actionis more pressing than ever.”
These calls have been made before, so what needs to happen to see real progress? Are there any positive and inspiring examples of successful attempts in sustainable development? The answer is yes. See below for how it can be done: