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How Greece Could Change the Future of Europe

Source: Vice News

The Syriza party’s big win in Greece’s legislative election last weekend is a turning point in the long political fight over Europe’s botched recovery from the financial crisis and world recession of 2008-2009. The occasion presents a milestone for the eurozone, which has been plagued by mass unemployment and economic stagnation, but it remains to be seen how much this election will speed up the reversal of the destructive policies that brought the eurozone to its present state. read more

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Can Podemos Win in Spain?

Source: The Nation

Just a year after its founding, it’s the country’s leading party.

If the current poll numbers hold, Spain’s next prime minister will be Pablo Iglesias, a pony-tailed 36-year-old political scientist who cut his teeth in the Communist Youth and the anti-globalization movement—but whose party, Podemos, wants “to change the rules of the political game,” Iglesias told the journalist Jacobo Rivero. Left and right, he added, are metaphors that are no longer “useful in political terms”: “the fundamental divide now [is] between oligarchy and democracy, between a social majority and a privileged minority.” Or, as Podemos likes to put it, between la gente and la casta, the people and the caste. read more

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Money and Lies in Anti-Human Trafficking NGOs

Source: Truthout

The United States’ beloved – albeit disgraced – anti-trafficking advocate Somaly Mam has been waging a slow but steady return to glory since a Newsweek cover story in May 2014 led to her ousting from the Cambodian foundation that bore her name. The allegations in the article were not new; they’d been reported and corroborated in bits and pieces for years. The magazine simply pointed out that Mam’s personal narrative as a survivor of sex trafficking and the similar stories that emerged from both clients and staff at the non-governmental organization (NGO) she founded to assist survivors of sex trafficking, were often unverifiable, if not outright lies. read more