Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, mayor of Marinaleda plans to march across Andalusia and persuade local leaders to skip debt payments! A Spanish mayor who became a cult hero for staging robberies at supermarkets and giving stolen groceries to the poor sets off this week on a three-week march that could embarrass the government and energise anti-austerity campaigners. Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, mayor of the ...

Since July 4, we have been reading in major world newspapers and in statements by legislators, central banks, and judicial authorities, that there is a “scandal” about something called LIBOR. Before that time, few persons outside the group concerned with banking had even heard of LIBOR. Suddenly, we were being told that major banks in Great Britain, the United States, Switzerland, Germany, France, and proba ...

Far from embodying some timeless ‘Olympic spirit’, the 2012 Games reflect the injustice and inequality of the current economic system, writes David Renton. Long before John Carlos stood beside Tommie Smith to give their famous clenched-fist salutes on the podium at the 1968 Olympics, he was a boy growing up in Harlem. ‘When I first learned about the existence of the Olympics,’ he recalls, ‘my reaction was d ...

Some think that the sole aim of the ruling class is to save the banks. That is too simple. There are contradictions between different sections of the capitalist class, and the bankers represent only one section. In Britain the weight of finance capital is very great because of the destruction of British manufacturing industry. But even in Britain the Tory-LibDem coalition has been forced to put pressure on ...

Comment by the creator: I edited this small video in homage to those who fight against the tyranny worldwide. A radical, viral video. I am shocked by the violent and systematic repressions of the authorities on the protesters defending our rights, indignant by irresponsible and not democratic political decisions. While trying to be optimistic, I cannot refrain from thinking that we arrive at a point of no r ...

As Greece faces the most important election in a generation, its public healthcare system is on the verge of total collapse, with many hospitals forced to cancel operations. Greek documentary maker Aris Chatzistefanou, whose films Debtocracy and Catastroika have made him one of the most exciting young voices in Europe was given access to Nikaia hospital to meet the doctors struggling to keep their patients ...

By Lupax 1st of May, 1962. The dictator Franco organizes a pompous and festive spectacle for workers from all over the State for Labor day. In this way, the Regime presents itself as a machine for peace between social classes. But behind this apparent harmony, the miners in Asturias have been striking for already a month. This social conflict became one of the biggest challenges that the dictator had to con ...

Gethin Chamberlain guardian.co.uk,   Workers in a factory supplying sportswear to the west. Photograph: Institute For Global Labour And Human Rights for the Observer While Adidas, Nike and Puma make millions out of the Games, their employees are claiming exploitation Workers producing sportswear for Olympic sponsors Adidas, Nike and Puma are beaten, verbally abused, underpaid and overworked in Banglade ...

US radicals came up a century ago with sound proposals for a maximum income, enforced through progressive taxation, to ensure that the rich couldn’t so easily buy political influence, as well as to adjust inequality. The Occupy Wall Street movement hasn’t yet demanded a cap on individual income but it probably will. Ever since the “golden age” after the Civil War, great American popular surges for economic ...

Living in the new dispensation By Harvey Cox A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised t ...