Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites

[Sapiens]

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...lobal+business

Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites
As the financial crisis hits Eastern Europe particularly hard, riots take place in Lithuania and Bulgaria, and other countries are at risk

Civil unrest is spreading in eastern Europe as the economic crisis hits the region harder than western states, with anti-government riots kicking off in Lithuania and Bulgaria in recent days and with Estonia and Hungary at risk.

On Friday (16 January), demonstrators attacked the Lithuanian parliament building in Vilnius with stones, smoke bombs, eggs and ice, breaking windows and calling on the government to resign.

Police dispersed the crowds - estimated to number some 7,000 according to authorities, with tear gas and rubber-tipped bullets - while Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius to hold called an emergency cabinet meeting. A total of 86 individuals were arrested.

Organised by the Lithuanian Trade Union Confederation, the protest denounced public sector wage cuts and increases in taxes aimed at aiding the country's battered economy.

The violent protests come two days after similar events shook Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, and follows on from riots protesting International Monetary Fund (IMF)-agreed austerity measures in Latvia earlier in the week.

In Sofia last Wednesday some 2,000 students, farmers and green activists also took up stones, snowballs and bottles against their parliament building and demanded the government resign. A total of 150 were arrested and around 30 injured.

Last week also saw saw the biggest protest Latvia has witnessed since the demonstrations that led to the country's independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. A crowd of young people broke away from around 10,000 peaceful protesters, overturning a police van and breaking windows at the finance ministry.

Lithuanian President Adamkus has suggested that the Vilnius riot was organised by outside elements.

"The idea arises that disturbances are organised from the outside. They started in Estonia with 'the Bronze Soldier'," he said according to the ELTA news agency. "Then followed the event in Riga, and today it was Vilnius. It makes one think about certain sorts of thoughts."

The Bronze Soldier riots broke out in 2007 after Tallinn moved a Soviet-era WWII memorial, amid accusations that clashes between ethnic Russians and Estonians were organised by the Kremlin.

GREEK INSPIRATION
But Latvian officials dismiss the idea that the protests are anything other than citizens frustrated at the collapse of their economies.

"It was just spontaneous," Inese Allika, Latvian diplomat, told the EUobserver. "Latvians are normally very quiet, and people obviously are seeing what is happening in other countries in the rest of Europe, such as Greece, and they thought 'Why are we so calm?'"

"There had been a huge economic boom in recent years, then all of a sudden, everything stops."

The riots are not isolated events but a wave of predictable reactions to the economic crisis, Dorothee Bohle, a political scientist at the Central European University in Budapest told this website.

"After a few years of relatively high growth and social advancement, it's all come to an abrupt end and they've been slapped with a very harsh austerity package," she said. "This is essentially a return of the 'IMF riots' we were used to from Latin America in the eighties and nineties."

In mid-December, the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, warned such civil disturbances were likely.

"Social unrest may happen in many countries – including advanced economies," as a result of the crisis, he said at the time.

HUNGARY NEXT?
Estonia could also be hit by the unrest, despite holding relatively high currency reserves, and Hungary is "deeply unstable," the expert warned.

"While Hungary has not hit the headlines in recent weeks, this is only because the country hasn't really stopped having riots since 2006. It keeps coming back sporadically. During national holidays, there has been street fighting regularly since 2006."

In Hungary, as in Greece - where a police shooting sparked violent protests in December - the riots have unique domestic political reasons that combine with the wider economic background, Ms Bohle explained.

"In Hungary's case, it was the prime minister's being caught lying that social supports could continue and then delivering an austerity package," she said.

"[There is] a mistrust and lack of legitimacy in the government. On top of this is the existence of the far right, which may make it into parliament. Hungary is deeply politically unstable."

Provided by EUobserver—For the latest EU related news

Remember folks, stock the bunker with lots of booze. It is as good as cash...

[metalman]

Re: Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites











and so on...

[kingcopper]

Re: Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...lobal+business




Remember folks, stock the bunker with lots of booze. It is as good as cash...

Thank God I'm within 30 minutes of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail! I'll get my booze one way or the other!

[Quincy K]

Re: Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites

I used to think that a Rodney King riot would happen here in the U.S. by the end of the year(2009). Now I believe that it will happen by the end of the summer.

For many if not most Americans, it's nine months of UE benefits, followed by a termination of credit access and it's lights out and the fat lady sings.

13-17 pecent U-3 UE is a very precarious proposition for any major urban city. Most especially areas that have a high concentration of govenrment-subsidized individuals.

[GRG55]

Re: Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...lobal+business




Remember folks, stock the bunker with lots of booze. It is as good as cash...

To each their own...:p

I just wonder if all these dissimilar forms of protest across Europe aren't violating some sort of EU policy intended to bring uniformity to all member nations...:rolleyes:

Arsonists Torch Berlin Porsches, BMWs on Economic Woe

Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- When Berlin resident Simone Klostermann returned from vacation and couldn’t find her Mercedes SLK, she thought it had been towed. Police told her the 35,000- euro ($45,000) car had been torched.

“They’d squirted something flammable into the car’s engine block in the gap between the windshield and the hood,” said Klostermann. “The engine was completely destroyed.”

The 34-year-old’s experience isn’t unique in the German capital. At least 29 vehicles were destroyed in arson attacks this year, most of them luxury cars, according to police. The number is already about 30 percent of the total for 2008.

The latest to go up in flames was a Porsche, on Feb. 14, two days after a Mercedes was set alight in a public car park.
While youths in Athens protest by throwing Molotov cocktails, in Paris by toppling barricades, and in Budapest by hurling eggs at politicians, protesters in Berlin rage at their economic plight by targeting the most expensive cars -- symbols of German wealth and power.

A group calling itself BMW -- the initials stand for Movement for Militant Resistance in German -- has claimed responsibility for several attacks in left-wing magazines and Web sites...

...Likewise, arson attacks on cars are not new: a Web site, “Burning Cars,” was set up to track the incidents in May 2007, one month before a summit in the northern German resort of Heiligendamm of the Group of Eight industrialized nations. There have been 290 attacks on cars since then, among them 55 Mercedes and 29 BMWs damaged or destroyed by fire, the site records.

“I wouldn’t advise someone to park their Porsche on the street” in Kreuzberg...

[Uno]

Re: Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites

LA Powder Keg? There are as many illegal Mexican gang members in Southern California as there are Taliban in Afghanistan!!!

"A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico"

Plus 1 million law abiding LA illegal immigrants that get no food stamps, health care, unemployement, ... that is close to the entire population of an Estonia or Latvia living illegally in LA ...

"Accounting for the magnet that Los Angeles has been for illegal immigration, the Almanac suggests an estimated illegal immigrant population closer to one million in Los Angeles County (with close to 400,000 in the City of Los Angeles).

[petertribo]

Re: Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites

Most especially areas that have a high concentration of govenrment-subsidized individuals.

So stay away from Luxury Condo Towers, the Hamptons, Palm Beach, Beverly Hills, Offshore Tax Havens. Tipoffs to dangerous areas are Five Star Restaurants, Doormen who look like Five Star Generals, Limousines, Automobiles you can't recognize, Goldman Sachs Offices.

[goadam1]

Re: Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites

I asked my friend in Prague (he is an expat who has lived there for 20 years) how eastern europe look. He does projects for Soros and travels all around eastern europe. He was responding to a blog post about the coming riots of the east.

Here it is:


Generally, yes, they're right. Apparently there are a lot of Swiss Franc-denominated mortgages in Poland, and possibly in Hungary. But the Czechs and Slovaks are actually really resenting being lumped in with these countries, as are the Slovenians; they don't have these issues and their economies are doing relatively better.

But it's more complex than this guy's making it out. It's not like all 1.7 trillion is going to go into default all at the same time. That's the problem with people sitting in their big offices in Manhattan; they look at a region and put everyone in the same bucket.

For example, the economic slowdown will in many cases mean that more of the production will be shifted eastward from more-expensive Western factories.

And some sectors are showing signs of revival already. Kia and Hyundai, for example, have twin factories just across the Czech-Slovak border from each other. The implementation of government incentives to junk old cars in Western Europe means that people are buying cars again, so those workers went back to full shifts today.

The Slovaks and Slovenes both are on the Euro, too, which should help them especially with exports.

Ukraine is thoroughly fucked; a lot of the Western banks went in there expecting that the reforms that the Central Europeans had would take root there. But endemic corruption and a political deadlock have meant that little real change took place.

The Czechs and Croats have a large part of their economy based on tourism, but that will be a non-starter this year. But comparatively, even with a relatively high rate of mortgage lending in the past few years, overall indebtedness is still a fraction of what it is in Western Europe; it's still really hard to get a proper credit card, which was a pain in the ass before, but is turning out to be a blessing in disguise because it meant that people didn't go on the massive debt-fueled buying sprees they did in the US.

Will it be hard? Definitely. The shock waves are just starting to hit here.

Already it's interesting and scary to see a rise in xenophobic attacks throughout the region; people want easy scapegoats, and people who don't look like they do make easy targets.

Personally, though, I have a lot of hope for a couple of things: While there isn't an EU Federal Reserve to prop up bad banks, stimulus from the EU is on the way, albeit very slowly. Because it's so excruciatingly slow, the first wave of real EU funding, approved after enlargement in 2004, is just starting to hit the region, which means that there's a lot of infrastructure work being done. The second is that capital cities like Prague will probably be better off than the post-industrial regions, where there aren't as many opportunities. That could be bad, too, as lots more people move to the cities in search of jobs.

But will the entire region suddenly go dark? Unlikely. Like most other regions, I expect there will be brighter and darker spots, and that in general people will muddle through.

It may sound crass, but as opposed to most Americans, Eastern Europeans have had real and recent experience with poverty and probably have better coping mechanisms - everything from being able to fix broken stuff to being able to switch rapidly to barter-based economies if necessary.

Banks to avoid: Unicredit, Erste Bank, Raiffeisenbank, Societe Generale are the ones that come most quickly to mind; they have big exposure, especially in Romania and Ukraine. As it turns out, I have my pitiful bank account with Raiffeisenbank and my mortgage (in Czech crowns) is with Unicredit. But they're insured up to EUR 250,000 by the government, so it should be fine.

Will things hold out? Who knows? But it probably won't be as monolithic as that author said.

[goadam1]

Re: Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites

I remember the L.A. Rodney King riots degenerating into people of little means (I'll let you fill in the blank) looting Safeway for diapers. It was no coincidence that riot came at the end of the 90's recession.

[occdude]

Re: Riots in Eastern Europe as Crisis Bites

Didn't the Lithuanian government quit shortly after this? Same thing happened in Iceland.

I think the economies of the world are so exhausted that the government knows its impotent to stop whats going to happen. So rather than try to stay in office, they say "the hell with it, you guys run this sh*t". The same thing may happen here, which would open up the door to the only type of person who would want to run things in such an environment, the tyrant. The tyrant uses nationalist sentiments to gain support for making a lot of malcontents (namely socialists and anarchists) "disappear". Once thats done, he can focus on a facist economic partnership with industry to make what would have been a normal economic cyclic recovery look like he was responsible for it cementing his position in power.