1 Banks close in Greece as crisis deepens (Ian
Traynor, John Hooper & Helena Smith in The Guardian) Greeks find their
savings blocked and their banks closed for a week from Monday morning following
a fateful weekend that has shaken Europe’s single currency.
The Greek government decided on Sunday night it had
no option but to close the nation’s banks the following day after the European
Central Bank (ECB) raised the stakes by freezing the liquidity lifeline that
has kept them afloat during a six-month run on deposits.
The Athens Stock Exchange will not reopen on Monday
either. The dramatic move, after 48 hours of sensational developments in
Greece’s long-running battles with creditors, was sparked by the country’s
prime minister, Alexis Tsipras’s Friday night call for a referendum on its
creditors’ demands. That prompted finance ministers of the eurozone to
effectively put an end to his country’s five-year bailout by the International
Monetary Fund, the ECB and the European commission.
Greek banks will not open until July 7 in an attempt
to avoid financial panic, after ECB capped the emergency funds keeping them
running The prime minister said that Saturday’s move by the eurozone’s finance
ministers to halt Greece’s bailout programme was unprecedented. He called it “a
denial of the Greek public’s right to reach a democratic decision”.
During a marathon parliamentary debate that ended in
the early hours of Sunday morning, opposition leaders argued that it was, in
fact, a vote on whether Greeks wished any longer to be part of the eurozone. It
will be Greece’s first referendum since the country voted to abolish its
monarchy in 1974.
“We are millimetres away from the total collapse of
the Greek financial system,” warned Herman Van Rompuy, until last year the
president of the European Council and heavily involved in years of Greek rescue
negotiations. “It’s actually suicide that’s taking place in Greece right now.”
2 Why we should care about inequality (Andrew Leigh
in Sydney Morning Herald) Dutch economist Jan Pen once suggested a simple way
of visualising the amount of inequality in a society. Imagine, he suggested, a
parade in which each person's resources were represented by their height.
Suppose we were to conduct such a parade in
Australia. People of average wealth would be average height. Those with half
the average wealth would be half the average height. Those with twice the
average wealth would be twice the average height. Let's suppose the parade took
an hour to pass you. What would you see?
For the first half a minute, people would be
literally underground. By the 10-minute mark, people are the size of a child's
doll. They might own an old car. Twenty minutes have gone by, but still the
marchers are no taller than a newborn baby. Ten minutes to go, the marchers are
two and a half metres tall, and their heights are rising fast. Five minutes
till the end of the parade, and the marchers are four metres high. Now come the
giants. Ten metres high, then fifty, then one hundred metres high. Their shoes
are as big as the watchers; their faces as high as office buildings.
One-thirtieth of a second before the end of the
march, and we're into the BRW rich list. The poorest person on the BRW rich
list is twice as high as Centrepoint tower. The rest are taller still. Now,
their heads poke into the clouds. The tallest person in the parade is over 30
kilometres high – well on the way to outer space.
Maintaining pro-growth policies, improving our
education system and ensuring our welfare spending is targeted to the neediest
are good first steps at closing the gulf between the rich and the rest. But
this isn't all that needs to be done. Here are three more egalitarian ideas
that governments and policymakers should consider:
A. Put new policy ideas under the equality lens. B.
Encourage ethical behaviour by firms and executives. C. 3. Consider inequality
in competition policy. Our current competition law is silent on the issue of
equity. Inequality is fast becoming a central issue of our age. Pen's Parade
reminds us that the disparities between rich and poor are significant. A richer
conversation about inequality is not only in the interests of the
disadvantaged, but of all Australians who want to maintain a fair society.
3 The perils of being an Indian journalist (Zubair
Ahmed on BBC) Shahjahanpur in India’s Uttar Pradesh state may be a small town
by Indian standards, (population 400,000 as of 2011) but it boasts of no fewer
than 150 journalists. Poor communications and woefully inadequate
infrastructure have not deterred them from their chosen profession.
They are currently working on a story that saw their
town catapulted into the national spotlight. Ironically, it is about the death
of one of their fraternity, Jagender Singh, who succumbed to burn injuries
following a police raid on his house in early June. Mr Singh ran a Facebook
page with thousands of followers, where he posted largely unconfirmed stories
on corruption involving government officials and ministers.
Mr Singh's son Rajan told the BBC that his father
was regularly harassed by police officers at the behest of a state minister,
Ram Murti Singh Verma, who was reportedly a regular subject of Mr Singh's
stories. He alleged that, on the day his father died, a group of policemen
acting on Mr Verma's orders set him on fire during a raid on their home.
In another incident not long after the death of Mr
Singh, another journalist, Sandeep Kothari from Madhya Pradesh in central
India, was also burnt to death. Like Mr Singh, Mr Kothari wrote on corruption,
but he specifically targeted the mining mafia.
The two deaths are the latest in a number of attacks
on journalists working in towns outside India's big cities. They say their
confidence is shaken and that they fear for their lives. The Press Council of
India (PCI) says 79 journalists have been murdered in India over the past 25
years.
Sardar Sharma was Jagender Singh's boss for three
years. He lamented the loss of respect for journalists and blamed reporters
themselves for the situation. "There is a criminal nexus between many
journalists, politicians and police. Such journalists are fake. They indulge in
extortion and blackmail. They have let us down", he said. When reporters
are not attached to a specific media organisation, it is much easier to
intimidate and threaten them.
No comments:
Post a Comment