Portions of this essay of my 2013 essay The Crisis in Greece and the Prospects of SYRIZA are reprinted here generally unchanged, particularly on the background to the crisis, since I believe the analysis stands.
There is an old children's story about a vain Emperor who hires two weavers to make him a grand outfit. The weavers swindle the emperor, claiming that they have made him an outfit of invisible fabric. When the weavers finish, the emperor parades before the court and his people wearing the new outfit. However, the emperor's subjects are too scared to say anything and keep up the pretense that he is wearing a magnificent suit.
“Change" in India, just about 6 months ago, was represented by the Aam Admi Party (AAP - The Common Man Party), a new political formation that emerged out of a public movement in India against corruption. Their party/election symbol, the common Indian reed broom (the “jhaadu”), stood for various things, but prominent among those was the “sweeping away” of the rampant corruption and malgovernance that had increasingly plagued the country.
David Graeber answers the provocative title question affirmatively in a recent Guardian op-ed, “Caring too much. That's the curse of the working classes” (3/26/2014).
About 3 years ago, on Oct 4, 2011, Soni Sori, a schoolteacher and a woman of indigenous heritage ("adivasi") in the state of Chattisgarh in central India, was arrested in New Delhi on charges of being a messenger for the outlawed Maoists .
For those of us inspired by mass mobilizations in Egypt's Tahrir Square, Turkey's Gezi Park, Greece's Syntagma Square, Spain's Plaza del Sol, and even our "own" Zuccotti Park, it is easy for protests in Venezuela to evoke the same emotions.
A new report by the international charity Oxfam has shone a critical light on global inequality, finding that the richest 10 per cent of people own a staggering 86 per cent of the world’s wealth.
Working for the Few was published by the NGO ahead of the World Economic Forum last week in an effort to raise the issue of inequality with political and business leaders at the meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
