It may be time to remind ourselves of the parallels between today’s IMF-Merkel-Cameron package for Europe’s nations in the red, and the structural adjustment policies of the 1980′s. Meanwhile, the centre has everything to gain from the misery of the periphery if only everyone can be persuaded to hold their nerve.
Tanto en Catalunya como en el Estado Español hay un aumento de un déficit del cual se habla mucho menos que del financiero: el déficit democrático. Hay déficit democrático cuando, por ejemplo, el poder político, en lugar de responder a los ciudadanos, se dedica a la adulación de unas divinidades animistas llamadas “los mercados”.
A year after the revolution of the indignados in Spain, the 15M movement promotes novel solutions to boost democratic participation.
Professor Philippe Van Parijs argues that we don’t need to wait until the Eurocrisis is over, if it ever is, to imagine and reinvent more sensible and humane forms of urban life than those imposed by the tyranny and the waste of private car traffic. And perhaps, one could add, it will be only through projects like this that the different schools of ‘indignados’ will be able to bridge the current gap between their rich capacity to organise and express protest and disafection, and the scarcity of viable initiatives to impose effective political changes, as well as to show that there can be life –a better life– outside ‘the markets’.
The last thirty years has seen the re-emergence of a civil economic challenge, side by side with the advance of globalisation, as a distinct strand in the development of global civil society. Don’t underestimate its longterm significance in the glacial shifts now taking place in the world economy.
This book shows how citizens must not wait for government to solve the crisis, but to take the initiative through innovation and collective civic action. It is a call for citizens to swift from passive consumers to co-producers.
Témoignages de l’autre côté (Testimonials from the other side) is a film of 33 minutes whose main characters are African immigrants living in Spain, mainly from Senegal. They tell us their experience since they arrived to the country, offering us a personal recollection of everyday realities as seen “from the other side”, that is, the Spanish coast known in Senegal as “El Dorado”.
Interview with Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, president of Iceland since 1996, or how a large financial sector can ruin a nation, and how to avoid it.
Europe has had several years of experience with harsh austerity programs, and the results are exactly what students of history told you would happen: such programs push depressed economies even deeper into depression. Rather than admit that they’ve been wrong, European leaders seem determined to drive their economy — and their society — off a cliff.