3/22 (NYC): Talk on “Crisis, Austerity & Resistance in the Euro Zone”

Crisis, Austerity, and Resistance in the Euro Zone: A View from Finland
A talk by Antti Ronkainen
Tuesday, March 22^nd at 7:00 PM
TRS, Inc, 44 East 32nd Street, 11th Floor
(Between Madison & Park Avenues)
New York, NY 10016

In the spring and summer of 2010, crisis gripped Europe, highlighting the continued instability of the capitalist system across the globe. Financial meltdown was averted only by means of a massive bailout package, totaling as much as €750 billion, and the European Central Bank’s move to begin purchasing sovereign debt of the weaker Euro zone countries to prevent a breakup of the zone. Will the patch hold?

Antti Ronkainen will give special attention to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), established last summer to help safeguard financial stability in the Euro zone. He will argue that the EFSF is not designed to solve the Euro crisis, but rather allows the European Central Bank to engage in potentially risky lending and provides a mechanism for redistributing income from taxpayers to banks. Ronkainen will also discuss the European workers and students’ demonstrations and strikes against new austerity programs, especially the current situation in Finland. Will the resistance succeed in saving the unions and government benefits?

Antti Ronkainen is a student of social sciences in Finland. He is an editor of and writer for Megafoni, a Finnish autonomist web journal (http://megafoni.org).

Presented by Marxist-Humanist Initiative & the New SPACE (https://web.archive.org/web/20100925012624/http://new-space-nyc.org/).