Geography Archives: Europe

About 25,000 people took part in a march in central Tel Aviv on Saturday evening supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. The march ended with a rally at the Tel Aviv Museum.  MKs Dov Khenin (Hadash), Daniel Ben-Simon (Labor), Nino Abesadze (Kadima), and Zahava Galon (Meretz); the Mayor of […]

Since early this morning, PAME members have symbolically occupied the Ministry of Economy and Finance, calling upon workers to rise up and stop the government’s barbaric anti-labor measures.  All out for the demonstration today, Omonoia Square, 7 PM.  General Strike! The All Workers Militant Front, PAME, is a coordination center of Greek trade unions, founded […]

The movement of citizens that has occupied Puerta del Sol and other plazas in diverse cities of Spain since the 15th of May has brought back political debate to the streets and put the role of political parties into question.  Should the movement now take down its encampments and look for other formulas to channel […]

Painful events have been continuing in Syria for nearly two months, since the emergence of a protest movement raising legitimate local and general demands among people in the governorate of Daraa. This movement threw light on the presence of major problems in the political life in Syria: the continuation of the state of emergency, the absence of laws governing political activity, and so on.

A sword of Damocles, we are told, is hanging over Greece.  Even the Greek EU commissioner says that Greeks must accept that their country will be run, nay micromanaged, by a committee of foreign creditors, or else Greece will be kicked out of the eurozone. This threat is found upon a flagrant lie.  Greece cannot […]

We have developed planes invisible to radars . . .. . . and victims invisible to justice. Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  The cartoon above was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 30 May 2011.  Translation by Yoshie […]

May our sun, the Puerta del Sol camp in Madrid, not be turned off!

The last thing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev did before departing for France to attend this week’s Group of Eight summit meeting in Deauville was place a call to Damascus. Prima facie, one may think the call made sense, since, as Reuters reported, “Syria’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests” is going to be high on the agenda […]

In the long and impressive catalogue of Michal Kalecki’s contributions to economics, the proportion of writings devoted to what is now called “development economics” is relatively small.  And most of his work in this area is concise to the point of being terse, in short articles that simply state some crucial principles, typically without much […]

Introduction by Carol Hanisch A group of international feminists is gathering support for the African immigrant woman hotel worker who was allegedly attacked sexually by (now former!) IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and who is now having her character assassinated in the media.  We have posted a statement “Feminists Demand Freedom from Sexual Assault and Harassment” […]

  May 24, 2011, 19:30 In continuation of the telephone conversation between the presidents of Russia and Syria held on April 6, 2011, and on the eve of his trip to France for a G8 summit, Dmitry Medvedev stated the principled position of the Russian Federation regarding the events in Syria and around it.  The […]

The current global capitalist crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007.  Welcome to Year Five.  A usual inventory of where things stand begins with the good news: the major banks, the stock market, and corporate profits have largely or completely “recovered” from the lows they reached early in 2009.  The […]

Every now and then . . . a fiesta of democracy In the meantime . . . a siesta of democracy Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  The cartoon above was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 25 May […]

  Ballot boxes are like black boxes. Upon opening them you’ll discover the causes of the accident. Juan Ramón Mora is a cartoonist in Barcelona.  This cartoon was first published in his blog on 22 May 2011 under a Creative Commons license.  Cf. <resultados2011.mir.es/99MU/DMU99999TO_L1.htm>; <resultados-elecciones.rtve.es/municipales/>; and “More revealing perhaps, however, is to examine votes relative […]

(Scene: an elevator, downstage right.  Stuck inside are ROY COHN and ETHEL ROSENBERG, characters in Tony Kushner’s landmark play, Angels in America.  McCarthyite lawyer, ROY prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of spying for the USSR and executed in 1953.  ETHEL now paces impatiently, pushing elevator buttons.  Above the stage, captions from recent […]

There is no doubt about it.  The wind that has electrified the Arab world in recent months, the spirit of the repeated protests in Greece, the student struggles in Britain and Italy, the mobilizations against Sarkozy in France . . . has come to Spain. These are not days of “business as usual.”  The comfortable […]

  Introduction We, the undersigned, are sponsoring a citizens’ debt audit for Ireland.  In the interest of transparency, we wish to know how the Irish debt — especially the bank debt for which the state has assumed responsibility — was incurred and to whom it is owed.  We sponsor this audit as organizations that have […]

  Tariq Ali: I don’t think sanctions work.  They are essentially a symbolic measure.  Usually when sanctions are applied against a country, they affect the poor people in that country more than the ruling elites, as we saw for years before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.  They had imposed a bloody sanctions regime, […]

  Address to the Conference “Debt and Austerity: From Southern Countries to Europe,” Athens, Greece, 6-8 May 2011 Honorable guests, Dear participants, Comrade activists, Fellow fighters, The Greek initiative for the establishment of a Committee for the Accounting Audit of Its Public Debt welcomes you to this very important three-day event for the exchange of […]

DAMASCUS, May 18 (RIA Novosti) The Syrian opposition’s calls to hold a general day-long strike on Wednesday have been largely ignored, Aljazeera reported. The Syrian opposition called for a general strike as the government denied reports that it has been burying anti-government protesters in mass graves. “Wednesday will be a day of punishment for the […]