IV469 - February 2014

The road that connects the international airport of Rio de Janeiro with the city immediately reveals the beautiful form of that city to us. Also it reveals a “petista” government which boasts of its social advances and with walls alongside the highway wants to render invisible to the world the favelas which are one of the deepest expressions of the inequalities in Brazil.

When we mention the debt crisis the first images that come to mind are the marches and protests in the streets of Madrid or Athens. But the negative impact of the debt system on the lives of the people is felt all over the world. Not even the sunny and placid lands of the Caribbean are immune to the destabilizing power of that system. In this case the victim is the island of Puerto Rico, where the uncontrolled increase of the debt has placed it on the edge of bankruptcy.
The history of (...)

American discontent with the political status quo has shown itself in many ways in the last few years, principally in the major political parties. On the right, we have had the Tea Party movement which has become a significant force within the Republican Party. On the left, the most striking development took place last year with the landslide victory in the New York mayoral election (by a vote of 73.3 to 24.3 percent) for Democrat Bill de Blasio.

Two thousand issues since the start and 4 million distributed copies! The Swedish weekly Internationalen – the International – published by the Socialist party, Swedish section of the Fourth International, celebrated its 40th anniversary on February 1st with a revolutionary banquet in Stockholm. More than a hundred comrades and friends – including participants of the party’s winter school – gathered to show their commitment to the socialist and internationalist cause of the paper which today has around two thousand weekly subscribers. Among the older and younger activists were former editors, journalists and others who during decades have contributed to the collective effort of publishing news from the global class struggle and socialist analysis week after week.

Almost everywhere you look around the world, policy-makers are introducing big changes to university systems and pondering deeper transformation. It isn’t surprising that these changes take different forms on campuses in countries as different as Canada, Britain, the United States, Chile, Greece, and India, but there are also important common themes in the change agenda globally. These include rapid increases in tuition fees, new models of university governance, new ways of teaching, a significant shift in subject matter, an attempt to depoliticize campuses, and major alterations in employment relations.

This article was originally published by Global Frac News. It was republished by Solidarity preceeded by a new interview conducted by their editors.