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This paper highlights a number of concerns about the nature of the EU-IMF loan agreement with Ireland. It is based on the experience of global justice organisations that have long monitored the impact of IMF policies in the Global South. The paper first takes up that experience and highlights the pernicious impacts the IMF — whose governance is skewed towards the interests of rich countries — has wreaked throughout the Global South.

  20 January 2011 19 January 2011 As 4 opposition ministers announced their resignation from the Unity Government, protesters once again took to the streets to express their rejection of any RCD involvement in the interim government.  Protesters shouted “RCD, Out Out!” and were greeted by tear gas, water cannons, and even live ammunition fired […]

  Calls are mounting for disbanding the Rassemblement constitutionnel démocratique (RCD) or at least banning it from participation in the transition government of Tunisia.  Amid streets chants of “RCD out,” the RCD leadership (such as it still exists) first kept a low profile and then felt compelled to do “something.”  That something translated into a […]

  Monique Renault, born in Rennes, France, is a feminist animator in the Netherlands.   var idcomments_acct = ‘c90a61ed51fd7b64001f1361a7a71191’; var idcomments_post_id; var idcomments_post_url; | Print  

“Crisis?  What crisis?  Every time they say we are in crisis, we pay, the same as usual.” — Kalvellido The day when all the businessmen commit collective suicide . . . I’ll believe that crisis thing. Juan Kalvellido is a Spanish cartoonist.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print

  Tegucigalpa, 19 January 2011 The National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) denounced today that, in Honduras, grave human rights violations persist under the Porfirio Lobo Sosa administration. According to Berta Oliva, Coordinator of the Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), her organization documented 1,071 human rights violations in just […]

Sandy Pope: For twelve years Hoffa has promised to restore the power of the union, and we have done nothing but go backwards.  We have lost thousands of members, thousands of good union jobs.  We’re not organizing [non-union] companies that are going up against our union competition. The members don’t have faith that the union […]

  Three death-sentenced men went on hunger strike in Ohio State Penitentiary on January 3 to win the same rights as others on death row in the state.  On Saturday January 15, the twelfth day of their protest, a crowd of supporters gathered in the parking lot by the tiny evangelical church at the entrance […]

  Mubarak to Ben Ali: “I’m coming to stay with you in a few days.  Get me reservations at a good place.” Le journal du ZABA / يوميات زين العابدين بن علي The videos above were released by Kharabeesh on 19 January 2011, 27 January 2011, and 3 February 2011.  For more information about Kharabeesh, […]

  Saturday, January 15, 2011 On the way downtown our cab had to stop.  The army and police were both outside the town liquor store arresting looters. The army was arguing with the police and eventually made them leave.  Then this happened. . . I wrote in the last page that, despite what I would […]

  1. The success achieved so far is only half the way, and the other half is achieving the desired democratic change and implementing it on the ground. 2. Democratic change cannot spring from the same party, figures, institutions, apparatuses, and legislations that maintained the dictatorship and deprived the people of basic rights for more […]

As the infamous dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier returns to Haiti after 25 years in exile in the south of France, the U.S. State Department and the French Foreign Ministry have been ratcheting up the pressure on the impoverished, earthquake-destroyed, and cholera-stricken country of Haiti. The pressure is not to prosecute the dictator for his […]

The regime is playing its last card today in Tunisia.  That last Card is the RCD (the party of the former dictator).  After the formation of a so-called “National Unity Government ” yesterday, and after the UGTT (the largest trade union in the country) supported and even participated in it with three ministers, alongside three […]

“Ben Ali left our place; has Sarkozy left yours?” Karak is a cartoonist based in Montpellier, France, who blogs at .  This cartoon was published in his blog on 16 January 2011; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print

Towards the close to what is arguably Karl Marx’s most well-known treatment of religion appears the following sentence: Germany’s revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation.  As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher . . . But if Protestantism was […]

A draft copy of the Organization of American States (OAS) Report on Haiti’s election, “Organization of American States Expert Verification Mission, President Election — First Round 2010 — Final Report,”1 was leaked to the press last week, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research posted a copy on its website after receiving it from […]

  The attack on the public sector through pay freezes, furloughs, layoffs, and proposed cuts is also an attack on Black and Latino workers. Cuts to social safety nets hit Blacks and Latinos hardest. Video by United for a Fair Economy. Read United for a Fair Economy, “State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom?,” […]

  On December 24, 2010, Dr. Binayak Sen was convicted of conspiring to commit sedition and other charges and sentenced to life in prison.  What is the evidence against Dr. Sen?  In this video, based on previously published analyses of the judgement and a 2008 People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) report, we dissect the […]

  No more censorship on YouTube! Restore CubaDebate! Iván Lira is a Venezuelan artist.  This cartoon was published in Rebelión on 16 January 2011.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  Cf. Javier Rodríguez, “Censura de Youtube a Cubadebate desató movimiento solidario” (CubaDebate, 13 January 2011); Ellery Biddle, “Cuba: Cubadebate’s YouTube Channel Taken […]

One aspect of “American exceptionalism” was always economic.  US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living.  Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption.  The rich got richer faster than the rest, but almost no one got poorer.  Nearly all citizens […]