From Guernica to Iraq
There is undoubtedly a historic feel to the impending arrival here of the new American president.
But despite the ascent of Barack Obama, Grosvenor Square, in London’s west end, together with the looming hulk that is America’s embassy, will be the focus of anti-globalisation protesters tomorrow.
As a clapped-out old protester myself – to my shame I never made it to the Vietnam demo in the same square in 1968 – I know the difficulties of focusing protest.
When I was sent down from university on the heels of a six-week sit-in over Liverpool University’s investments in apartheid South Africa, I seem to remember that in order to bind a large enough protest movement, we had to include no fewer than 10 disparate causes in our campaign.
Thinking of the Stop The War movement which will be part of this week’s G20 demonstrations, today sees the arrival in London of the wonderful tapestry version of Picasso’s Guernica (to be hung at the Whitechapel gallery for its reopening).
It is quite a coup. The UN building in New York is being refurbished and someone had the wit to grab it for London.
It was, of course, notoriously covered up whilst the UN debated the war in Iraq. It wasn’t seen as an appropriate backdrop for the warrior diplos to appear in front of.
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There are 4 comments on this post
Protesting is so difficult to do. Our everyday lives involve keeping jobs and budgeting money – so standing up to the wrongs of world government doesn’t get to be the priority it should be.
High travel costs combined with work and family demands must keep the majority away from these demonstrations.
I created a protest when I realised how wrong the Iraq war was and how many lies took us into it… my protest involves wearing a white armband to show we agree with the statemnt ‘I want an end to the war in Iraq’.
It was an attempt at protesting that didn’t cost anythng, didn’t require time off work, didn’t require anything except a willingness to wear an opinion.
I am so grateful to those who can take the time to protest… each one represents someone who can’t make it.
Well thank you to the Rockerfeller family (or rather a member of) for the commission of the tapestry and lend/gift to the UN (so I’ve heard) – what this has to do with protesting and anti-globalisation maybe remains a ? Anyway, welcome home the troops.
Guernica was a truly illuminating painting .
Thankyou, Jon Snow, and Channel 4 for good news!
Congratulations on your and Feisal Islam’s feature on the banks yesterday on Ch 4 News. It probably achieves more than street protesting. Pleasel press it further with the financial experts.
Who laid down that 21st-century societies must depend for their supply of money on commercial banks creating it for their own profit? Not God; no Faith teaches it. Not Nature; winds, tides, plants, trees, animals – none use money. Humans made this system work as it does. Intelligent humans can reform it.
Who should create the Money Supply? Most of the money now used in the international economy is money created as debt in the currency of one country, the US dollar. In national economies most of the money now used is created by commercial banks as debt, written into their customers’ accounts as loans. In the UK, for example, less than 5% is created as coins and banknotes by public agencies, and over 95% by commercial banks. Central banks try to use changes in interest rates to control how much money the banks create.
It isn’t effective. All the ninety recent credit booms and busts in various parts of the world have taken a similar form. The banks have hugely profited by creating too much money in the booms, and have then received huge bail-outs in the busts in order to reactivate their privilege of providing the money supply.
The conventional response to the present crisis is now combining a massive increase in future debt with new top-heavy regulation in order to reactivate the banks’ privilege again. These features of the new “financial architecture” ignore what first-year students of architecture know: make sure the foundations are sound before you construct extensions to the upper floors and overload them with heavy burdens. The foundations of “financial architecture” are, of course, money and how it is created.
International monetary reform has now been proposed by Brazil, Russia, India and China, to replace the US dollar with a more genuinely international currency administered by an international authority.
Could national monetary reform follow that model? Could it:
1) normalise “quantitative easing” by transferring responsibility to a nationalised central bank to create the debt-free additions to the national money supply which it judges to be in the public interest;
2) by requiring the central bank to give the money to the government to be spent into circulation under normal democratic budgetary procedures;
3) make it a crime, like forging coins and counterfeiting banknotes, for anyone other than the central bank to create bank-account money; and
4) denationalise recently nationalised commercial banks to compete unsubsidised in the market for borrowing and lending existing money?
7. For practical details, including safeguards against governments misusing the central bank’s new function for their own political purposes, see
http://www.monetary.org/ (American Monetary Institute) and
http://www.jamesrobertson.com/newsletter.htm Newsletter 22 and links.
I agree with James above that an exceptional news report or a good video can sometimes achieve more than a protest itself. I’m amazed by the number of activists who still don’t make the most of video. Even now, some grassroots events come and go and don’t get recorded or photographed at all. Doing it isn’t on the radar. Which means they miss out on having an ongoing effect online, potentially forever.
However that wasn’t the case yesterday. Watching live, there were so many cameras that, a couple of times, it was almost as if it was a protest by photographers and film-makers.
In a video on the Telegraph site I spotted one protester who had a stills camera and camcorder mounted on a home-made support so he could use both simultaneously. Be warned Channel 4 News staff – this could be the future face of ‘multi-skilling’.