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Let's be friendsFinancial Crisis: It's Time for a Change
Jim & Juliette from the Support Office report back from a Paris conference on European civil society mobilisation around the financial crisis, highlighting events and actions P&Pers can get involved in, including 1 April's Financial/Fossil Fools' Day.
Key Mobilisation Dates
Saturday 28 February
P&P is helping to organise a day exploring the causes and finding solutions to the interlinked global crises: financial markets in turmoil, energy price rises, food riots, violent conflicts and environmental disasters.
Friday 27 March
Youth for Fairtrade Conference
If you’re 16-19 come to our Youth for Fairtrade conference, put on jointly with the Fairtrade Foundation. The conference will be jam-packed with activities, workshops and talks exploring trade justice in the context of the financial crisis, as well as practical campaigning actions, laser graffiti, live filming, stencilling, and, obviously, lots of chocolate!
Saturday 28 March
Put People First: March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate
Mass rally in London’s Hyde Park, aiming to expose the undemocratic governance of the world’s most powerful economic institutions, challenge the misguided belief in unregulated ‘free’ markets which has led to the current crisis and show that there are effective alternatives and turn world leaders’ overtures about the need for change in the economic system into concrete actions to benefit people and the environment.
Wednesday 1 April
Financial Fools’ & Fossil Fools’ Day
A nationwide day of action exposing unaccountable financial power and promoting democratic control of finance. P&P’s focus will be on RBS-Natwest, as part of Fossil Fools’ Day, supported by other networks including Climate Camp and Rising Tide.
The current financial crisis exposes a vast array of problems with the global financial system, ranging from its environmental impacts, to its failure to secure equality on a global scale, to its failure to protect domestic economies and jobs.
A variety of NGOs are devoted to campaigning on these issues, but usually they remain distinct from each other. In January, we attended an inspiring conference in Paris aimed at achieving European-wide co-ordination and mobilisation between the whole of European civil society.
Environmental activists and trade unionists sought to overcome the old divide between them — a divide that has been at the forefront of UK politics recently with trade unions supporting the third runway at Heathrow — by collectively calling for people to democratically take back control over the financial system and its institutions for the sake of social justice and the environment.
Only in this way, through proposals such as those included in the Green New Deal, can we address the various crises we face today: not just economic and financial, but also crises of global justice, food, climate, energy.
However, governments’ proposals to deal with the unfolding economic crisis totally fail to address these issues, leaving little hope for the outcome of the meeting of the G20 major economies on 2 April in London.
An estimated 100,000 people will join a mass rally in London’s Hyde Park on 28 March, insisting that twenty governments cannot be allowed to decide upon the future of the global financial system and demanding a fair, just and green future.
See the key mobilisation dates on the right for other actions and events you can get involved in, seeking to expose the illegitimacy of the G20 and contribute to building long-term and sustainable mobilisation of social movements and civil society organisations, aimed at realising a democratically, socially and environmentally sustainable world.
Jim Cranshaw & Juliette Daigre, People & Planet Support Office
Financial Fools’ & Fossil Fools’ Day
P&P’s Ditch Dirty Development campaign targets RBS-Natwest as a bank whose dirty investments directly undermine a green future, and European campaigners will be joining our actions against RBS on 1 April as a joint ‘Financial/Fossil Fools’ Day.
Our key demands: that the banks are brought back under our control and end their destructive funding of climate catastrophe.
Email Hannah to get involved in planning these actions now.
