economy

Why Public-Private Partnerships are Not the answer to Philadelphia's Budget Crisis

Check it out. It's a special insert for issue 46 all about how we get screwed in the city of Brotherly Love.

By Milena Velis and Bryan Mercer

Philadelphia is in crisis. People across the city are feeling the effects of the global economic downturn and wondering what the future will bring for them and their families. The city has finally resolved a long, drawn out, and deeply unsettling budgeting process, and it feels like the dust has finally settled. But even though massive service cuts and layoffs are off the table for now, this economic crisis is far from over, and we in Philadelphia now have a clear idea of the kinds of solutions our city government is willing to present.

The lesson we can learn from a year of repeated deficit announcements, “civic engagement” budget workshops, and political negotiations, is that the poor and working people of the city are paying for this crisis. In a city rife with both wealth and poverty, it's clear that our government’s primary agenda is to attract and protect business, and not to make sure that the wealth generated here meets the basic needs of Philadelphia’s residents. If the city government continues down the path it has chosen, it can only lead us to a broken state that exists to serve business need before public need, abandoning the interests of the majority of Philadelphians. The only solution to the crisis we are currently facing is an independent politics that addresses the real roots of our situation.

Pennsylvania, along with the rest of the world, is in crisis. Many people do not have access to decent housing, education, healthcare, jobs, healthy food, transportation and communication. While we are told that there are not resources to provide for our basic needs, bankers and the ultra-rich get trillions of dollars in bail-out funding, and our services are cut and costly wars are waged.

Edited by Chris Spannos

Review by James Generic

"Real Utopia: Participatory Economics for the 21st Century", edited by Chris Spannos, is a collectionof essays by a multitude of authors who have developed Participator Economic (Parecon) theory, used it in real collective work, and have written extensively in defense of participatory economics.

The Philadelphia City Council passed the city's 3.8 billion dollar budget for Fiscal Year 2010 on May 21st, 2009. This budget, whether the Mayor and Council admit it or not , was a response to the popular pressure around cuts to services that began with Mayor Michael Nutter's Nov 6, 2008 announcement of a mid-year 'correction'—cuts that would have closed 13 libraries across the city. This year's budget, while avoiding the drastic cuts originally proposed, still balances the budget on working people by increasing taxes and cutting services.

FASINPAT a Step Closer to Permanent Worker Control

by Marie Trigona

reprinted from www.upsidedownworld.org

Wednesday, 27 May 2009

On February 2nd, the people of London responded to the global financial crisis...with snowballs! Taking advantage London's best snow in living memory, forty people gathered in the City of London--London's financial center--to challenging the workers of the recently bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland to a snowball fight.

Enric Duran, the Catalan 'Robin Hood of the Banks' has been released on 50,000 euro bail after being held in preventative detention for two months on fraud charges. Enric's upcoming trial for 'financial civil disobedience' offers another moment of publicity for Spain's 'We Can Live Without Capitalism' campaign that is gearing up for its September 17th launch.

How do we build radical movements?

Lessons from the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM) and from
revolutionary activist study groups

Friday June 5th * 7pm

Happy Birthday Suzy Subways!
The A-Space
4722 Baltimore Ave
south side of Baltimore Ave, between 47th and 48th

On SEPTA, #34 green line surface trolley. plenty of parking for bikes
and cars. http://www.the-aspace.org/

Join local writers/activists Dan Berger and Suzy Subways, with special guest speaker Kazembe Balagun, for a launch party for issue 8 of Upping the Anti and a discussion of current revolutionary organizing!

Check it out: A pamphlet on the crisis by Midnight Notes and Friends

After five hundred years of existence, capitalists are once again announcing to us that their system is in crisis. They are urging everyone to make sacrifices to save its life. We are told that if we do not make these sacrifices, we together face the prospect of a mutual shipwreck. Such threats should be taken seriously. Already in every part of the planet, workers are paying the price of the crisis in retrenchment, mass unemployment, lost pensions, foreclosures, and death.