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Growing poverty is also evident, including "5 million impoverished landless rural workers and the 10 million families living on a one-dollar-a-day food-basket handout (as well as) tens of millions of minimum wage workers living on $250 a month."
As the crisis deepens, new investments have stalled. Private credit evaporated. Foreign investment plunged, consumer spending declined, and what's true for Brazil affects other regional economies, especially in Central America and the Caribbean. Being "highly 'integrated' with the US and world economy (they're) experiencing the full force" of its collapse, including rising poverty, crime, and "a potential for popular social upheavals against the incumbent right and center-left governments....The depression demonstrates with crystal clarity the pitfalls of imperial-centered globalization and the stark absence of any remedies for its collaborators in Latin America."
It also augurs change with hard times "spurring the return of the nation-state, as 'de-globalization' accelerates." It's for Latin America to refocus, declare globalization dead, and democratically generate wealth and employment broadly, not shift it upward to the usual recipients.
Eastern Europe and the Ex-communist Countries
These nations experienced hardline shock therapy full force - a destructive cocktail of deregulation, mass-privatizations, state enterprise closings, wage cuts and loss of benefits, wealth transfers to the rich, millions thrown out of work, repressive laws to contain resulting unrest, unrestricted access for foreign corporations to pillage local economies, and arranging their need for foreign investment and credit under terms they negotiate for their own benefit.
As a result, when Western economies crashed, so did Eastern European ones, leaving them dependent on the IMF and other international lending agencies "on onerous terms" favoring capital over people. The same pattern played out globally, including in America where the Fed and Treasury direct public wealth to the top, mainly the giant Wall Street banks that plundered the country and are free to keep doing it, given that Obama facilitates the process.
Asia: The End of the Illusions of De-coupling and Autonomous Growth
"The Great Depression of 2009 (hit) every economy in Asia," including Japan, China, India, and Tiger countries showing even the mighty aren't immune, given their dependency on export, financial and commodity markets. The global crisis left them vulnerable to lost trade followed by production cuts, bankruptcies, negative growth, mass-unemployment, and millions thrown overboard into deep poverty. Large public capital injections haven't been able to turn sick economies around.
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