The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Alexander O'Riordan -
This week Greece elected into power the left-wing political party, Syriza, headed by Alexis Tsipras, who led the party to victory on an anti-austerity ticket, thus rattling financial markets by raising the spectre of a Greek exit from the Eurozone and snubbing the European Union (EU), European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund troika of lenders to Greece. As it turns out, I happen to be in Brussels this week, the city where the EU has its headquarters. The word on the...
Carl Rowlands -
The docks: the ghost of capitalism past.
Let’s start with a dockyard in the early twentieth century. In the first glimmerings of dawn, men queue by a wall, and a foreman walks up and down, selecting which men are going to be offered work on that particular day. This may seem almost a caricature of heartless capitalism, yet it is a deep folk memory within the labour movement. Mines, docks and countless factories were run on this basis until the first majority Labour government in...
John Feffer -
Back in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries of East-Central Europe all had a common vision. They wanted to join the Europe Community. Some wanted to join immediately; others wanted to join eventually. After half a century yoked to the Soviet Union, the people of this region saw membership in the common European home as a guarantee of democratic governance, economic prosperity, and social stability.
Twenty years later, membership in the European Union comes with no...
The Brussels Business is a feature documentary made by Friedrich Moser and Matthieu Lietaert. It is described as a film that delves into the shadowy world of lobbying, the secretive networks of power and big business influence on EU policy-making in Brussels. It tells the unofficial version of European Integration since the 1980s, the story of the neoliberal take-over in European politics."
Brussels is the second largest capital of industry lobbying in the world. The Brussels Business...
On Thursday, stock markets around the globe crashed again -- likely due to concerns about the crisis in Europe and perhaps profound concern about the growing recession around the globe.
Investors immediately started buying US dollars and American treasury bills. Thus, despite ongoing predictions about the crash of the US dollar, quite the contrary seems to be happening.
Helping to make sense of this latest development is Prof. Leo Panitch, author of the book, "In and Out of...
Mark Weisbrot -
The Euro is crashing today to record lows against the Swiss Franc, and interest rates on Italian and Spanish bonds have hit record highs. This latest episode in the Eurozone crisis is a result of fears that the contagion is now hitting Italy. With a two-trillion dollar economy and $2.45 trillion in debt, Italy is too big to fail and the European authorities are worried. Although there is currently little basis for the concern that Italy’s interest rates could rise high enough to put its...
