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	20 Years of Witnessing by Yvette Alberdingk Thijm   It is hard to believe it has been 20 years since WITNESS was born in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident. It was during that moment in 1992 when our founders realized the undeniable power of video. Since then, WITNESS made it its mission to enable people to use video as a powerful tool in human rights advocacy and we are proud to have trained over 3,000 human rights activists and collaborated with over 300 groups in more than 80 countries. We’re proud of two decades of changing laws and policies and creating accountability for abuse around the world, one video at a time.   Our 20th anniversary is a victory for the many people and organizations who have supported us through the years, including founders Peter Gabriel, Human Rights First and The Reebok Foundation for Human Rights; our passionate and dedicated staff, past and present; our board members; every single supporter, large and small; and most of all the people who have shared their stories in the belief that it will make a difference.   Because while many things about the world have changed over the past 20 years – our deep belief in the power of a personal story to challenge injustice and wrongdoing – has not.   WITNESS started with a mission to give cameras to the world. Over time, we have evolved to provide training on filming and storytelling to our partners to ensure their videos would have impact in defending human rights. Now that we live in a “cameras everywhere” world, our dream has expanded: the safe and effective use of video by the millions of citizens around the world who are documenting and sharing their stories with the world.   Whether it is a mobile phone equipped protester in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, or a displaced mother fleeing an advancing army in Eastern Burma who is providing testimony on camera, it is the courage of individuals like these, who share their stories through video, that continues to inspire us. And it is our mission to make sure that their courageous stories make a difference.   Once our eyes have been opened, we are compelled to act and to change behaviors, perceptions and laws. For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), January, a former child soldier and survivor of abuse spoke out against warlords like Thomas Lubanga. With the help of that undeniable video evidence, the International Criminal Court pronounced Thomas Lubanga guilty of war crimes committed in the DRC. Near the U.S.-Mexico border, where more than 450 women have been murdered, the Cervantes family shared the loss of their own daughter Neyra on video. As a result, Mexico’s Attorney General and Minister of Interior have publicly committed to looking into the cases of Neyra and other women.   WITNESS is uniquely positioned to take advantage of a transformative moment in history to forever change the human rights landscape and foster a “video for change” movement to promote and protect human rights globally. Visit the related web page
	Views on Austerity in Europe by The Independent, Rolling Stone & agencies   May 2012   The Austerity Backlash Across Europe, by Owen Jones. (The Independent/UK)   When I first read Naomi Klein"s The Shock Doctrine a few years ago, I had no idea how prescient the book was. It was a polemic about "disaster capitalism", arguing that sudden crises are intentionally manipulated to push through extreme free market policies that were otherwise not politically possible.   But early 2008 was a completely different era: although Northern Rock had just suffered the first bank run for 150 years, it seemed like a bizarre blip. The US sub-prime crisis was rumbling away, but it was like sheet lightning from a distant storm. "The deficit" was not an everyday term of political debate. It was not at all clear that the world was about to be transformed.   And yet the past four years have proved a vindication of Klein"s argument. A crisis of the market was cleverly transformed by free market ideologues into a crisis of public spending. Across Europe, the biggest slump since the 1930s has been used to push through policies straight out of the right wing libertarian dream list: the slashing of taxes on the rich and major corporations; the selling off of public services; and a bonfire of workers rights and welfare supports. It is disaster capitalism on high volume.   But, this week, the backlash against the Shock Doctrine began, with the election of Socialist François Hollande in France, and the success of the anti-austerity left coalition in the Greek elections.   Before I am accused of a swivel-eyed left-wing conspiracy theory, it is worth pointing out that even some proponents of austerity are candid about their strategy. Last November, I was in Portugal, which – after being bailed out by the EU and IMF – is pushing through a far-reaching free market agenda.   The first wave of the most radical privatisation programme in the country"s history is under way, including the selling off of energy, water, and public transport public assets and the national airline. Value Added Tax (VAT) on electricity and gas has been hiked from 6 per cent to 23 per cent, driving up energy bills; many public sector workers are facing a drop in income of a quarter; and unemployment benefits have been slashed by nearly a fifth.   Austerity has plunged the country into a deep recession, and debt-to-GDP ratio is soaring: but that is not the point. Portugal is being remade in the image of the neo-liberal vision.   Free market economists in Portugal had long supported such policies, but knew they could not get away with them in normal circumstances. "The thing with deep reforms is that democracies have a strong bias in favour of the status quo," I was told by Professor Ferreira Machado, the Dean of one of Portugal"s leading business schools, who boasted that he was just a phone call away from the country"s Prime Minister.   When asked if there was a collision course between democracy and the radical reforms he thought necessary, he was candid. "I think there is a difficulty reconciling it," he said, and mentioned an opposition leader who had caused a political storm by suggesting the suspension of democracy for six months.   "Of course, she was not advocating that – she was actually expressing that collision course between the two things, and what she was saying was that it would be much easier to do the necessary reforms if we could put democracy in brackets."   Democracy in Europe has not been suspended, and the collision course is more apparent than ever. "Stop the world, we want to get off!" was The Wall Street Journal"s verdict on the mounting European anti-austerity backlash.   The truth is that the real world has paid the high priests of austerity an unwelcome visit. Their policies have sucked growth out of the economy, failed to tackle debt, dramatically increased unemployment, and devastated living standards. It would be utterly baffling if people did not fight back.   No wonder Greece is at the forefront of the backlash. A modern European society is being dismembered by austerity. The economy has shrunk by nearly a fifth, and the country"s debt continues to mount. Over half of young people are without work; the minimum wage has been slashed to desperately low levels; and wages have fallen by a third since 2009.   Then there"s the ultimate indicator of despair: the number of people taking their own lives. Greece had one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, but experts suggest it may have doubled since the crisis began. Austerity is literally killing people.   "This is a message of change, a message to Europe that a peaceful revolution has begun," declared Alexis Tsipras, the Greek leader of radical left coalition Syriza, which trebled its seats in Parliament and came second in the elections. Given the failure of any party to form a government, new elections beckon, and Syriza expects to do even better. The results have boosted the confidence of those taking on the austerity offensive across Europe. In the Netherlands, the anti-austerity Socialist Party looks set to stage a breakthrough in the upcoming elections. Those calling for a "No" in the upcoming Irish referendum on the EU Treaty – slammed as an "Austerity Treaty" by opponents – feel momentum is on their side, too.   "The people of France, the people of Greece are against the policies of austerity and it is now the moment for Ireland to add our voice to that," declared Mary Lou McDonald, a leading anti-Treaty politician.   For perhaps the first time since this crisis began, the momentum is shifting towards those who would take on the Shock Doctrine. It has the potential to change the whole political climate here in Britain. Polls show two-thirds reject the Government"s economic programme. The Tories and their Lib Dem allies fared badly in the recent local elections. Cameron"s approval ratings are in freefall.   Until now, Britain"s anti-austerity movement has been fragmented and lacking in direction. The new winds blowing from the Continent could change all of that. The attempt to use this crisis to transform society in the interests of the economic elites is floundering here and on the continent. It is a moment of transition: what happens is now uncertain.   May 2012   Italy’s elections, austerity, and the European Social Model, by Andrea Teti. (Italy)   The message that seems to emanate from local elections in Italy as well as the other European polls is a resounding mistrust in austerity first and foremost.   The shock results in Italy’s local elections have been variously dismissed by all major political parties – which is understandable, since the results for all of them ranged from bad to terrible. The main leftist Democratic Party (PD) more or less held, albeit wobbling amidst a crisis of legitimacy which has seen its recent ratings plummet as much as its centre-right counterparts’. The centrist coalition lead by former Christian Democrats has all but disappeared. And Berlusconi’s Freedom Party (PDL) has been virtually wiped off the electoral map.   The greatest surprise of all has been the performance of the Five Star Movement, or M5S led by figurehead Beppe Grillo, a political satirist and stand-up comedian. Polling at just above 5% a month before the elections, voters propelled it to a 15% national average.   Even more significant is the fact that these elections suggest more than a passing resemblance with the results of Europe’s ‘Super Sunday’, which also saw presidential elections in France, parliamentary polls in Greece, and Land elections in Germany, hard on the heels of the May 3rd local elections in the UK. The message that seems to emanate from all these polls is a resounding mistrust in and repudiation of ruling politicians, their methods, and their policies – austerity first and foremost. Traditional parties should beware the costs of ignoring it.   In Italy, the voters who have abandoned traditional parties perceive these leaderships as not only self-serving, but also profoundly unwilling to respond to the crisis by addressing its long-run structural problems: the subsidies given to the private sector, tax fraud and elusion, corruption, organised crime, and unemployment. Addressing lost tax revenues, for example –would pay for Italy’s budgetary problems– means investigating Italy’s wealthy, which successive governments have proven unable or unwilling to do.   The European landscape is hardly more heartening than Italy’s. In France, where recession has certainly hit less hard than in Greece or Italy, the presidential elections have been won by a moderate centre-leftist like Hollande in no small part because of his scepticism towards Euro-austerity.   In Germany, Land elections saw the Pirate Party make considerable inroads by gaining 7-9% of the vote in Berlin, Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein state elections. Even the possibility of Merkel’s slash-and-burn approach to austerity being challenged has driven “investors” to start buying up insurance on German debt. And although it is not part of the Eurozone, the UK’s governing Liberal-Conservative coalition has also imposed severe cuts which have affected unemployment and prolonged the recession, and contributed to the government’s recent defeat in local elections.   Ed Milliband’s Labour Party, although still not untainted by the neoliberal heritage of ‘Blair’s Britain’, made inroads into both Conservative- and Liberal-controlled councils. In particular, according to one Liberal Peer, the Lib-Dems now “face the prospect of political oblivion” precisely because they failed to act as the progressive force they’d been elected as.   But perhaps the greatest electoral protest against the ‘Merkozy medicine’ has come from Greece, where voters abandoned mainstream parties PASOK and New Democracy (ND) in droves. ND lost 14.6% of its share, mostly to splinter parties, PASOK bled a massive 30.7% leaving it at 13.2%, while the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) tripled its share of the vote to 16.8%, becoming Greece’s second party.   This collapse of traditional parties was no surprise after the massive protests against the method and content of the cuts which the ND-PASOK government forced through parliament.   Just like their counterparts in Italy, Greece’s mainstream parties are widely regarded as unfairly targeting the poorest and not doing enough to tackle long-term problems like tax evasion and corruption. It is worth noting that while leftist Syriza is against the ‘Merkozy medicine’, it is actually a pro-EU party. Syriza, like many emerging parties across Europe, wants to see things done differently, especially avoiding hitting the poorest and weakest the hardest, not least because austerity has not worked for Greece, with unemployment around 20% and its debt-to-GDP ratio actually worsening.   It is easy to focus only on Greece or Spain, but one should not disregard the situation in Italy. The official unemployment rate is near 10%, for example, masks much higher youth unemployment. In certain parts of the South, this reaches over 40%, and although not close to Greece or Spain’s levels of youth unemployment hovering around 50%, these remain dire figures.   Italy’s suicide rate has jumped since 2008, with suicide amongst the unemployed increasing by 40%. These days, Italy’s papers report ‘recession suicides’ on a virtually daily basis, the police report an increasing number of people who commit suicide after having set fire to banks.   Italy’s predicament appears today symbolic of Europe’s deeper political problems.   First, there is the problem of macroeconomic policy. The financial world and most mainstream politicians continue to argue that austerity is ‘painful but necessary’, and that there is no alternative. Apart from serious questions about whether the picture they present is accurate, and quite aside from local but crucial issues such as tax fraud in Greece or Italy, an increasing number of voices have been arguing that current solutions to the crisis are at best insufficient. Among those pointing out the limits of slash-and-burn economics are Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Jo Stiglitz. Even the IMF’s Poul Thomsen has argued that austerity is harming Greece. Without a recipe for growth – which the private sector has been unable to deliver – economic recovery is nowhere in sight. Krugman, amongst austerity’s most vocal critics, has called it “Europe’s economic suicide.”   Secondly, Europe has asked its traditional political classes to find solutions to its crises (economic, but also social) and found them unable to do much except repeat old slogans patently out of touch with their voters’ daily lives. Across Europe, parties advocating some variation of (neo)liberal economics – both on the centre-right and for some time now also on the centre-left – have come under attack from two directions: the first is typical of the xenophobic right, but the second is what could once have been called broadly progressive politics, both from the left and from the liberal right.   The disappearance of the ‘old left’ over the past two decades has been the subject of extensive debates. The disappearance of traditional liberalism and of a moderately progressive agenda – one of the hallmarks of post-World War II European politics – has been less frequently noted.   In the face of such a challenge, mainstream parties must adapt or face the prospect of rising social and political tensions as well as economic uncertainty. It is not enough to throw epithets at their new competitors, labelling them ‘anti-political’ or ‘demagogic’.   Nor are they doing themselves a favour by tainting all such new opposition movements as ‘extremists’. Although in certain cases this is certainly true (e.g. Le Pen in France, Golden Dawn in Greece) in many others this picture patently doesn’t fit: in Italy and Germany, alternatives are ideologically much closer to classical social democracy and the ‘European social model’, which Europe’s mainstream parties have, ironically, spent most of the last two decades undermining.   Calling for a different approach to growth and a different model for society which reigns in financial capital’s excesses over the past three decades is neither radical nor extreme.   * Andrea Teti is a Senior Fellow at the European Centre for International Affairs.   May 2012   Austerity can"t be just for Regular People, by Matt Taibbi. (Rolling Stone/US)   It didn’t take long to crank up the backlash against European voters. This is inevitable whenever a socialist wins a major election, but particularly now, when new French president François Hollande rode to victory shouting, "Austerity can no longer be inevitable!"   This sounds like the beginning of what will be a very heated debate over who has to pay for the excesses of the financial crisis. It was previously assumed that everybody but the actual financial services sector would have to pay, but voters in Europe now are refusing to go along, sparking a wave of eye-rolling editorials in the financial press.   Markets all over the world freaked out over the prospect of having ignorant European voters meddling in the recovery process the geniuses of the high finance world had already painstakingly laid out for them. The model for economic progress in the financial bubble era, after all, is supposed to go something like this:   1. Let banks inflate massive asset bubbles with the aid of cheap or even free government cash, and tons of leverage;   2. Before it all explodes, carve out gigantic sums for bonuses and compensation for the companies that inflated those bubbles;   3. After it explodes, get the various governments to bail those companies out;   4. Pay for it all by slashing services to what’s left of the middle and working classes.   This is the model we used in America. We had a monster asset bubble based on phony mortgages, which Wall Street was allowed to inflate to spectacular dimensions with minimal reserve capital, huge amounts of leverage, and tons of fraud for good measure. When that bubble exploded, we first rescued the banks who inflated the thing in the first place, and then our plan for paying for it mostly revolved around folks like Paul Ryan and Chris Christie, who made great political hay by trying to take an ax to "entitlements" like health care and retirement benefits.   They are replaying the same script in Europe, sort of. The causes of crises in places like Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy vary somewhat and are less simple to define, but a common denominator in all of them is weak growth mixed with high budget deficits.   In most all of these cases, you had large sums of money entering these countries in the middle and late 2000s as global financiers in the midst of the bubble boom looked for higher-yield investments around the world – Spanish real estate, Greek debt, etc. Then with the sub-prime crisis the bubble burst.   Now that it’s the next morning, and everyone has a severe hangover from the bubble, with the dominant narrative that these countries brought their troubles on themselves. The solution is going to be "austerity," slashing state budgets, reining in those wasteful citizens with their unreasonable demands for public services in return for their taxes.   Here’s how the "superstars" of the banking world sometimes earn their bonuses: they borrow trillions from the U.S. Federal Reserve at zero or near zero interest, then they turn right around and lend chunks of that free money to a place like Greece (ex-FDIC Sheila Bair, in a hilarious editorial on the subject, pegged the ten-year yield at 21%), then they pocket the proceeds and call it capitalism.   Conservative analysis of the financial crisis leaves out things like the $16 trillion in emergency loans the banks secretly got from the Federal Reserve Bank of America in the years since the crisis. It ignores quantitative easing, bailouts, and the trillions of dollars of bets Wall Street made on the unreal economy during the bubble years that we all ended up paying for, either through taxes or reduced home values or lowered interest on our savings.   The point is, when people talk about “austerity,” they only ever talk about the pain the general population should voluntarily accept, in the form of reduced services and curtailed “stimulus.” No one ever says the financial services sector should have to cut back on its access to easy money, and there hasn’t been much in the way of serious plans to restore some sanity and prudence to the lending and investing business.   Instead, governments have stood by and allowed banks to lend thirty and forty dollars for every one on the books, they’ve watched lenders almost completely do away with underwriting standards, they’ve allowed Wall Street to build giant sandcastles of illusory wealth using synthetic derivatives, all with minimal reserve requirements.   The result of all of this easy money is an endless succession of speculative bubbles that simply shift from one market to another as financial companies run around the globe in search of high yields. It was Spanish real estate yesterday, and Euro sovereign debt before that, and American home mortgages at other times, and then it was wheat and corn and other food commodities last year (which led to the social unrest in the middle East), and it was oil in 2008, oil in 2011 and so on.   In addition to the direct consequence of huge stunning losses when these bubbles collapse, the insane volatility of all of these markets creates panic in the business community, and puts a brake on real lending to grow real businesses.   Bankers have to find new ways of making money that don’t just involve betting the hot table and taking out instant billion-dollar profits. They have to go back to building real businesses and being content with gradual returns over time. If there’s going to be austerity, it has to be for everybody.
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