IV495 - April 2016

Americans today face a dual crisis: rising rents and increasingly unaffordable housing markets. The housing crisis, far from being over, has metastasized. This new set of problems is confounding economists, who are left to view the situation through the narrow lens of mainstream orthodoxy—one that is highly colored by the ever-present notion of the American (Delusion) Dream. If the country is to deal with this new normal, it must embrace new economic tools and question the veracity of a system that swings from one crisis to the next—a system that is proving incapable of providing individuals and families with affordable housing, a basic need.

Nobody should expect a settlement of accounts or internal gossip on Podemos in this article. We believe that what is rather required is quite the contrary: to calm down, regroup, discuss, explain and prepare. The people, the strength of the bloc for change, look at what is called the “crisis of Podemos” with amazement, without understanding what has happened. Have Iñigo and Pablo clashed? Is there disagreement in Podemos? It is not enough to answer that it is an invention of the press when it was served up to them on a plate. We must make the effort to discuss and try to understand in order to advance. It is necessary to abandon the intellectual laziness of tiffs on Twitter or pontifications on Facebook.

Margaret Belafonte fled her home on a small Caribbean island to escape a violent and abusive common-law spouse (her name has been changed to protect her identity). The country she fled is one in which social services, such as they were, have been drastically cut. There is one temporary shelter in the country for women escaping violence, which houses only 15 women. The police are indifferent — and sometimes hostile — to women seeking protection from their violent partners. As a result, bail conditions and restraining orders that are supposed to protect women are ineffective.

Pope Francis, during his six-day visit to Mexico in mid-February, criticized the country’s political and economic elite as well as the Catholic Church hierarchy for their preoccupation with wealth and power, while simultaneously expressing support for the country’s working people and the poor. The Pope’s presence in Mexico constituted an indictment of Mexico’s ruling elite and of the society of inequality, violence, and corruption that they have created.

Nine years after the outbreak of the financial crisis that continues to produce damaging social effects through the austerity policies imposed on victim populations, it’s time to take another look at the commitments that were made at that time by bankers, financiers, politicians and regulatory bodies. Those four players have failed fundamentally in the promises they made in the wake of the crisis – to moralise the banking system, separate commercial banks from investment banks, end exorbitant salaries and bonuses, and finally finance the real economy. We didn’t believe those promises at the time, and for good reason. Instead of a moralising of the banking system, all we’ve had is a long list of misappropriations that have been brought to light by a series of bank failures, beginning with that of Lehman Brothers in 15 September, 2008.

A multi-party conference arranged by the Awami Workers Party on Saturday vowed to wage a joint struggle against attempts by the religious right-wing to pressure the provincial and federal governments into withdrawing or amending the Protection of Women Against Domestic Violence Act in accordance with their wishes.

The Panama Papers’ revelations about the rich and powerful hiding untold billions in ‘offshore’ tax havens may be shocking, but it’s hardly a surprise to anyone who knows the first thing about the way that big business works. We are living through a blitzstorm of allegations and controversy about corruption. In the few years alone we’ve had:

The March 13 regional election results were a bitter setback for Die Linke and everyone fighting for social justice and democracy in Germany. The results of the parliamentary elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Baden-Württemberg, and Rhineland-Palatinate signify a major shift in the political landscape.

A new round of mass protests is shaking France under the slogan "Nuit Debout" (Rise Up at Night). The nightly demonstrations, similar in some ways to the Indignado protests in Spain in 2011 and the Occupy movement in the U.S., follow several massive mobilizations to protest the government’s plan to rewrite the country’s labor laws.

The conference for a plan B, which was held in Madrid from 19 to 21 February 2016 (for the Appeal see below, for the Statement from the conference see Declaration For a Democratic Rebellion in Europe), is the most important international policy initiative in the Europe of austerity, following on other meetings of this type, whose profile and audience were more restricted. It aimed to articulate political and social alternatives and to project strategic debates on a European scale. As necessary as it is difficult, the international arena has been a space for struggle, exchanges and reflection in the chiaroscuro period that followed the year 2011, "the year in which we dreamed dangerously" as Slavoj Žižek has baptized it.