“The day I realised music could change the world”

Billy Bragg – among my heroes, and definitely one of the reasons I critique (and, fair to say, criticise) the US to its face – has an article in today’s Guardian.

Back in the late 70s, I was working in an office, a place of casual racism and homophobia. I never spoke out against it because I felt I was in a minority and didn’t want the grief. On the streets, the National Front were marching through immigrant neighbourhoods, stirring up trouble and trying to divide communities.

I may well have carried on turning a blind eye were it not for the Clash. When their name was added to the bill of the first Rock Against Racism carnival in April 1978, I knew I had to be there. When I arrived at the rally, in east London, I was amazed to see 100,000 young people just like me – one for every vote the National Front had won in the council elections the year before.

It is brief, and it is specific to the UK (the BNP, specifically), but it is still the man who wrote The Great Leap Forward

EU to China and the US: sort your shit out

Also from the AP, via Yahoo:

Europe is starting to feel the bite as the U.S. dollar plummets, making French wine, Italian fashion and German cars expensive purchases for the EU’s main export market in the U.S.

Last week, the employers federation BusinessEurope said that, by crossing 1.40 against the US dollar, the euro exchange rate had reached a “pain threshold” for European companies. It also complained the euro was appreciating too fast against the Chinese yuan and Japanese yen.

While echoing their concern, the finance ministers of the 13 euro-zone nations will reiterate Europe is an innocent victim of others and that the euro-dollar exchange rate issue is part of a broader set of problems triggered by China’s trade surplus and America’s huge debts that require concerted steps to undo.

Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker set the tone last week when he said the Europeans should not have to bear the consequences of other countries’ inaction.

As opposed to anybody else on Earth? Are we to suppose that we should have to bear the consequences of other countries’ actions (or inaction)?

This is called foreign exposure, for Cliff’s sake. Other countries act according to their self-interest. I’m sure, even in Luxembourg, we can find, say, one man being mightily inconvenienced by the inaction of a neighbour, or a local authority.

Also a part of the overall story, including the growth rate of the US (2.5%? No problem, right? I mean inflation in the US is only 1.7% anyway – it’s not as though the economy in the real world isn’t growing at all), are the seeming advances the EU finance ministers are making, relative to the rest of us, in closing down how debt is packaged and sold (Germany was hit particularly hard, but I haven’t come across the sorts of dodgy rule-changing in for which British, Australian and US central banks are going).

This will, of course, most likely close up significantly one of the outlets for repackaged debt. How much impact this may have on the US economy remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the appreciating Euro, making everything in the EU expensive, also may tempt yet more of them to come over here and make the trade deficit worse.

Speaking, further, of the resilience of the Euro in the face of the Summer’s oil ’shortage’ – China’s oil imports are up 18%, as it invests in refining capacity of its own (more of which means China can really play for crude, the way the US does – they have boatloads of cash, and didn’t the Saudis recently not, for the first time, follow US interest rates? I’m just saying).

UAW on to Chrysler, now

I saw the strangest story (from the Associated Press, via Yahoo! and the Huffington Post).

The United Auto Workers put Chrysler LLC on notice that a strike is possible if contract talks stall, a person briefed on the talks said, but a labor expert said the union’s action could be a bargaining tactic.

…

A strike notice could be a tactic by the union to put pressure on the company as the talks intensify, said Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in labor issues.

“The union wants the deadline to encourage a settlement sooner rather than later,” Shaiken said.

Uh-huh. Note to self: begin marketing self as labour expert. Here’s a tip: every industrial action by a labour union is a bargaining tactic. That’s why they exist – remember? Collective bargaining? Anything?

Anyway. In the end, it didn’t have much of an effect on the bottom line (i.e. shareholders) over at GM:

An indication that Chrysler (80-odd percent held by Cerberus still, as I recall) shouldn’t face too great a threat – as long as it signs the right dotted lines. I think GM benefitted from the strike, actually, being able to sell off some unwanted inventories (Economic Principles: unplanned investment occurs during an economic slowdown. When firms plan on selling a certain amount, they build/stock-up-on that amount. When the don’t sell that much, inventories build up. Unplanned investment).

So. Suppose you’re an auto manufacturer and you perceive the game as this: you’re not selling so well but, by dragging your feet a bit, you can make your own workforce take their own few days off…