The emergence of Occupy Central has recast Hong Kong’s political landscape over the last twenty-one months. Lively public debate over the polity’s governance developed in response to widespread concerns that Beijing would only commit to universal suffrage in 2017 if elections were restricted to party-approved candidates. Benny Tai Yiu-ting, who put the original call out for the campaign of civil disobedienc ...

Open letter Gaza – Dutch Academic and affiliates August 2014 We, Professors, teachers and staff of Dutch Universities, reply to the call of our academic colleagues in Gaza and condemn in the strongest terms Israel’s excessive and brutal violence against the population in Gaza. ...

De raket waarmee vlucht MH17 vorige week boven Oekraïne is neergehaald, is indirect afgevuurd vanaf de Amsterdamse Zuidas. De wapens zouden afkomstig zijn van de Russische wapenfabrikant Rosoboronexport dat via een web van bv's profiteert van de belastingvoordelen die Nederland biedt. Een vriend van de Russische president Poetin zit in de directie. Dat meldt 925 (nine to five), een nieuwssite die is opgezet ...

Isolation prisons are another modernisation of Greek “democracy”. The public outcry refers to them as the Greek Guantanamo. But to be fair, we must acknowledge that it was the “European legal culture” that first came up with the “white” cells, already since the '70s, in Germany, France, Spain and elsewhere, and today they have become a growing tendency in the whole area of the European Union. ...

Since the first bailout to Greece, in 2010, the Troika has been blackmailing Greek people with the dilemma “Memoranda or Bankruptcy”. Ever since, Greek people have experienced both: a total social bankruptcy that the adoption of Memoranda caused. “If you don't say yes to the Memoranda, you will have no gasoline for your cars, no food on the supermarket shelves, no medication in your drugstores, salaries and ...

Thessaloniki is a lively sprawling metropolis located in the north of Greece. As with the rest of the country, it is affected by increasing unemployment and poverty, a result of the government's Troika-dictated policies, which have driven the economy into a deep recession.   ...

On the 25th of May the citizens of EU member states are going to vote for the European Parliament. While people in countries of EU, and especially in Greece, face the hardest ever attack on their basic rights in the history of EU, the question that arises is what position in the elections can facilitate the end of the crisis. The last years EU has clearly demonstrated a repulsive face: Using the global econ ...

Yes, we’re nice people, and yes we have been sapped of our energy. But the main reasons we’re not protesting are deeper and must be targeted directly. Photo by Dimitris Michalakis.  Last week, two commentaries appeared in The Guardian — one by David Graeberand the other by Costas Lapavitsas and Alex Politaki — basically asking the same question: given that we’re under such relentless assault by the rich and ...

The Greek government and its creditors seem bent on imposing policy whose economic merits and democratic legitimacy seem rather dubious. A French company is especially active among the candidates for privatizing water in Athens and Thessaloniki: Suez Environnement. ...

The EU and the Greek government are manipulating the facts to cover up the results of the unsuccessful austerity policies in Southern Europe. “The policy which was based on austerity, privatization and liberalization deepened the crisis instead of bringing about any solutions.” ...