Why not make slaves out of unemployed people? Unpaid work by unemployed people is the suggestion of the ex finance deputy minister, Petros Doukas. Mr Doukas outlined on his personal webpage a number of suggestions in order for Greece to exit the crisis. One of his brilliant suggestions is that unemployed people should offer unpaid work wherever the State needs them to. Also enterprises could be asked whethe ...

 The New York times LONDON — Last month, the European Commission’s top economic official in Brussels, Olli Rehn, received an intriguing e-mail. Greece, under pressure from its European creditors, wanted to retire some of its debt by buying back its bonds at a deep discount to their face value. A senior executive at Deutsche Bank proposed that Europe take a tough negotiating stance toward private hedge funds ...

Pharmaceutical companies bend or withhold scientific data and lie about their drugs, in ways which endanger, harm or kill sick people, to make a profit. That is the shocking reality laid bare in Ben Goldacre’s new book, ‘Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients’. This is  a prime example of the way the profit motive rewarded by Capitalism stands in front of human progress. ...

112 dead after preventable fire at Bangladesh garment factory   Update Dec 6, 2012: Sometimes, you read something, and it makes your blood boil. Like this quote from today's New York Times, about Walmart's connection to the fire in a Bangladesh factory that killed 112 people two weeks ago: "[T]wo officials who attended a meeting held in Bangladesh in 2011 to discuss factory safety in the garment indust ...

A worldwide research effort in collaboration with BBC Panorama and the ICIJ reveals the people behind these anonymous companies       The existence of an extraordinary global network of sham company directors, most of them British, can be revealed. The UK government claims such abuses were stamped out long ago, but a worldwide joint investigation by the Guardian, the BBC's Panorama and the Wa ...

I am sitting in front of my pc trying to organize my thoughts while at the same time trying to overcome the shock I am under. Its impossible…No matter what kind of language I will use, how much superlative expressions I will put in the paper,  is still difficult  for me to express myself the way I would like to. Hence, I will try to be as simple as possible describing the facts that I experienced and hoping ...

photos: Alexandros Michailidis text: Dina Batzia Conflicts, arrests and injuries was the scenery of the protest in Skouries yesterday,   where hundreds residents and supporters gathered to protest gold mining activity. From the morning yesterday committees struggle against the gold mines in Halkidiki started protest and 6 km march to Skouries. Several hundreds of residents of the nearby village of Ierissos, ...

A new letter was sent today signed by more than 20 organizations that belong to the European Water Movement to Commissioner Olli Rehn and the European Commission after the very late response of his directorate (over a year!) on their first letter. Our concerns are shamelessly confirmed since in this text, it is clearly stated that the Commission policy is indeed to impose the privatization of water services ...

The first-ever strikes by Walmart retail workers have spread to Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Washington D.C., Sacramento and San Francisco. Walmart workers are striking in at least six cities, according to a release sent out by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union on Tuesday morning. Until last Friday, when about 60 Walmart employees walked off the job for a day in Los Angeles, no Walmart retail workers ...

On the 24th August 2012 Samsung was ordered by a court in San Jose, California to pay Apple just over $1 billion in damages for patent infringement. Apple is now seeking to ban the sale of certain Samsung products in the USA and a hearing is scheduled for 20th September for that claim. This long-running dispute between these technology giants over infringement of smart phone patents shines a spotlight on th ...