By Murray Smith
[The following document is the program of Slovenia's Initiative for Democrati
By Dale T. McKinley, Johannesburg
The Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA) is banned and its leaders were arrested and prevented from celebrating Workers' Day (May 1) this year.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon addresses the May 5, 2013, mobilisation in Paris. Part 2 below.
By Dick Nichols
Latin America's Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty-First Century Socialism
By David T. Rowlands
May 10, 2013 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Between January 31 and February 2, 1971, over a hundred ex-US service personnel who had served in Vietnam between 1963 and 1970 gathered in Detroit for a three-day media conference. Organised by the activist group Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI) was intended to educate the American public about the scale of US atrocities in Vietnam, emphasising the direct relationship between such atrocities and official military policies.
Most wore black to mourn the BN's killing of democracy. Photo by Lee Yu Kyung.
By Peter Boyle, photos by Lee Yu Kyung
May 8, 2013 -- Green Left Weekly -- Up to 120,000 people packed and overflowed a large stadium in Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur on May 8 to protest the fraudulent re-election of the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) government on May 5. The crowd defied a police threat to arrest all who attended the opposition-called rally. The police did not dare confront the huge crowd but since the rally have called in 28 rally speakers for questioning.
The crowd also had to brave BN threats to provoke ethnic clashes by branding the stronger opposition vote a "Chinese tsunami" – a slander against the multi-ethnic opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PR).
The opposition plans to hold more rallies in other cities in the following days.
May
13, 2013 – Links International Journal of
Socialist Renewal -- Europe is sinking
into crisis and social regression under the pressure of austerity, recession
and the strategy of “structural reforms”. This pressure is tightly coordinated
at the European level, under the leadership of the German covernment, the European
Central Bank and the European Commission. There is a broad consensus that these
policies are absurd and even “illiterate”: fiscal austerity does not reduce the
burden of the debt but generates a spiral of depression, more unemployment and
despair among the European peoples.
Yet, these policies are rational from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. They are a brutal way -- a shock therapy -- for restoring the profits, for guaranteeing the financial rents and for implementing the neoliberal counter-reforms. What is going on is fundamentally the validation by the states of the financial claims on future production and GDP. That is why the crisis takes the form of a sovereign debt crisis.