 UDAT and the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation are convening this conference because countries are suffering from the consequences of the debt crisis. The standard answer that governments have to the debt crisis is austerity policies, its bank bailouts, its credit or domination, and we want to discuss alternative solutions to the debt crisis, solutions which paid respect to social justice. Our organization works on debt crisis for 25 years now when debt crisis over indebtedness was mainly a problem of developing countries. We now invited people from these countries to come to us to tell us what they did, how they fought the debt crisis. We invited our partners from the Middle East and North African region who are suffering from debt crisis, similar as the Europeans are suffering from it. And we have activists and academics here from Europe who are fighting back against that, against austerity in Europe. We are discussing here what we need to do and how we can do it, basically. I mean the idea of this conference is to come up with a menu of options, with a menu of alternatives. Our governments tell us, the people who profit from the debt crisis tell us that there is no alternative and we want to show that there is actually not only one alternative but there are many alternatives and it is actually possible to implement them if there is pressure by citizens, if there is citizen activism, and if this activism creates political will by governments and international organizations. The second task is to find ways to find alternatives to countermeasures. We are actually there, we want to be there, we work ourselves, we are looking for corporate partners. So it is wonderful to have the EuroDAT and together with EuroDAT to organize a conference that deals with one of the main problems of the countermeasures, namely the massive forgiveness of states and the massive forgiveness of private people. The second task is, after we have collected the knowledge, to spread the knowledge, because we are an organization that stands for political education, i.e. actually turns into a citizen and citizen in Germany, in Europe and in the world. That means we want to spread the knowledge that we have collected together with partners, spread it over the media that we have available, publications on the Internet or discussions around and events. And the third goal that we have, of course, we want to bring together the forces that are interested in alternative developments, work and interest, and to put together a network that has the power, the conviction that they have gained from their knowledge, then also in political action and in political change.