Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse, who is also the country’s finance minister, presented the budget for next year to parliament on November 21. Following the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he has maintained the current wage freeze and imposed new burdens on workers and the rural poor, while making further tax concessions to big business. Read more>>>
The JVP was founded in the 1960s on the basis of a mixture of Maoism, Castroism and Sinhala populism. In the 1990s, it abandoned the “armed struggle” and has been thoroughly integrated into the Colombo political establishment. Amid plummetting electoral support, it is currently headed for another split. Read more>>>
The installation of Obama as president was backed by powerful sections of the American foreign policy establishment as the means of extricating the US from Iraq and Afghanistan and mounting an aggressive drive into the economically-dynamic Asian Pacific region. Read more>>>
By these mass struggles, workers and youth have made clear that they reject the junta’s “democratic transition” as a fraud. They sense that elections run by the military under emergency laws have nothing to with democracy. Such elections would only produce a legislature controlled by the junta and its imperialist backers, trying to lend false parliamentary legitimacy to further repression and right-wing policies by Mubarak’s old cronies. Read more>>>
The collapse of the eurozone would have disastrous economic and social consequences—on this point experts agree. It would plunge the continent into social upheavals and national conflicts similar to those in the first half of last century. Read more>>>
Since the global financial crisis began in 2008 the end to the crisis appears as distant as ever and in 2011 further cracks have appeared.To remind us of how we have got here – growth in Western economies in the last decade was driven by the real estate bubble which stimulated the remainder of the economies of the West. Read more>>>
The European Union was conceived after WW2 as Europe was ravaged from war. The European continent has a long history of wars as various rulers and empires attempted to conquer the continent. To ensure this never happened again and to contain Germany, perpetuator of two wars in the 20th century, a unified Europe was attempted. Read more>>>
The vast majority of countries categorized as having advanced economies—mainly in the United States and Europe—have seen a slowdown in employment growth in the most recent quarter, and more than half have seen employment declines. At the same time, about half of those countries categorized as “emerging or developing” have seen declines in employment, including Russia and Mexico. Read more>>>
