IV495 - April 2016

Antonis Davanellos is a member of the Greek socialist group Internationalist Workers Left and a leading voice in Popular Unity, the left-wing alliance formed by members of the Left Platform of SYRIZA after the ruling party capitulated to the demands of the European blackmailers and approved the latest "Memorandum" package of austerity measures. In this article, published in French at the A l’encontre website and translated by Tom Gagné, he looks at the consequences as the scope of the Third Memorandum becomes clear.[socialistworker.org]

IVP 495 April 2016 PDF magazine

30 years ago, at 1.23 am on the morning of 26 April 1986 the number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear generating site near Pripyat in Ukraine went on SCRAM alert. Within 3 seconds all of the reactors safety systems had failed and with control rods jamming the reactor core, the temperature rose by 10 times its design level. The resulting first explosion destroyed the 2,000 tonne concrete containment plate and blasted it clear of the reactor building. And it was in that instant that station operator Valery Khodemachuk, his body impaled on control rods, became the first Pharaoh of the nuclear age, entombed in a sarcophagus even taller than the great pyramid of Giza and for the eternity required for the radiation to recede to safe levels.

The approval of the opening of the impeachment process of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff by the Chamber of Deputies with a significant majority is a big defeat for the government and the PT.

A proposed abortion ban in Poland would subject women to surveillance, criminalization, and even more economic hardship.

At first sight the Tale of 1916 seems a simple one. On the one hand there was a small band - an alliance of socialists and revolutionary democrats. On the other hand the British imperialists and their Unionist supporters.

Evo Morales committed himself to what was seen, from the beginning, as the most difficult ballot for an administration marked by a succession of electoral triumphs over a decade. As if electoral “abstinence”" proved unbearable for a leader who has need of the continuous approval of the masses, the Bolivian president launched a referendum to get the opportunity to exercise a fourth term even though four years remain to be to completed of his third. And the very government that he had constructed decided, six years after it had been approved, to amend the constitution which founded the bases of the pluri-national state in 2009. The question was: “Do you approve the amendment of Article 168 of the Constitution of the state to ensure that the President and the vice-president of the state can be re-elected two consecutive times?” [1].

“In a neoliberal universe, where markets are the gauge of value, money becomes, more straightforwardly than ever before, the measure of all things. If hospitals, schools and prisons can be privatised as enterprises for profit, why not political office too?”

Perry Anderson in London Review of Books, 2014, 36:10, pp. 5

Mass protests have vigorously and consistently spread across Macedonia for over ten days now. The spark of citizen revolt was caused by a Presidential blanket amnesty acquitting 56 officials from charges ranging from election rigging, embezzlement of public money and property, to corruption and party capture of state institutions. This act has confirmed that the presidential office is only another one on the list of institutions privatized by an elite of capitalist politicians in service of their interests. As such it represents a manifestation of a specific form of Balkan neoliberalism, born out of a symbiosis interlocking profit and politics, and built on three mutually supportive pillars: privatization of institutions, privatization of the commons, and privatization of the electorate/demos. Rather than an ephemeral crisis caused by a political elite gone rogue, it represents a symptom of the ongoing logic of neoliberalism, which has in fact created the ideological background against which criminal politics have thrived, whilst suffocating the rule of law, democracy, equality and social justice.

A massive repression of the most militant but peaceful peasant movement in Pakistan —the Anjman Mozareen Punjab (AMP)—is underway. Most of its leadership has been arrested under false anti-terrorist laws. Dozens are missing while over 50 remain behind bars. All have been declared “terrorists” by the Okara district police, working hand in hand with the Military Farms administration, which mainly serves military officers.

At a Democratic debate last month, Bernie Sanders was asked about his sympathy for the Sandinistas — a Nicaraguan revolutionary movement that in 1979 ousted the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled the small Central American nation for over forty years.