A World of Trouble: Meet the ground truth of the global economic crisis

[marmar]

from GlobalPost:



Special Report: A World of Trouble
20 correspondents, 20 countries and a world of pain. Meet the ground truth of the global economic crisis.

By Thomas Mucha
Published: February 12, 2009 16:22 ET
Updated: February 17, 2009 13:29 ET-A +A


Forget the clamor and compromise in Washington, D.C. over President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan.

A more troubling chapter of the rapidly deteriorating global economic crisis is playing out quietly in dark corners — and crowded fast food joints — across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and beyond.

Use this map to see what our correspondents have uncovered: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/commerce/090212/special-report-world-trouble


Viewed collectively, the numbers are staggering:

* Consider the 65,000 Chinese factories now shuttered, and the thousands of poor, rural villages bracing for the return of 20 million unemployed migrant workers.

* Or what’s happening on the streets of Japan — the world’s second largest economy — where 1.6 million are now living on welfare, the highest number since 1965.

* Or deep inside South Africa's platinum mines, where 10,000 workers are set to lose their jobs due to the collapse of the global auto industry (fewer cars mean fewer catalytic converters, which use the metal).

* Or in crumbling Moscow tenements and frigid villages across Russia, where the Kremlin is warning of a surge in alcoholism — and that official unemployment could hit 2 million.

* Or in smoke-choked Cairo cafes, where tens of thousands of young men who have given up looking for work congregate and commiserate.

To understand what’s unfolding we asked 20 GlobalPost correspondents in 20 countries to report on the ground truth of this deepening crisis. In other words, what’s really happening, and how are people being affected by a world of trouble? ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/commerce/090212/special-report-world-trouble

[Peace Patriot]

1. Well, I can only say that it was almost exactly these condtions that spawned WW II.

It is a very scary situation.

Maybe the U.S. economy can be re-tooled. Can Egypt's? China's?

Are we looking at virtually inevitable war, set up in the exact same way, by the exact same kind of assholes who have been running things here these last eight years (and more--back to Reagan)? Set up deliberately this time, while they, among other things, profited from arming the world to the teeth?

I guess we need to remember what W.B. Yeats said about history repeating itself. History does not repeat itself, he said--history is instead like a gyre--a spiral: certain themes keep coming back back round, from time to time, whereby we have the opportunity to learn the lessons from the past, and NOT repeat those mistakes.