Europe

In less than 24 hours, the image of Air France's director of human resources (DRH) with his shirt torn was seen around the world. The corporate world and the government has used this to bludgeon public opinion into thinking that the Air France workers are “thugs,” in the words of the Prime Minister.

Some 250,000 activists from all over Germany marched through the city of Berlin last Saturday in protest against the envisaged free trade agreements TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement). This event had been called by a broad alliance of over 100 organisations and groups—including trade unions, ecologists and environmentalists, consumer and welfare organisations, farmers associations, the Greens and DIE LINKE (Left Party), as well as many other left-wing and pressure groups.

Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the Labour leadership opened the lid on the seething anger against austerity and the whole political establishment within society. His landslide victory was a political earthquake that left the right wing visibly shaken.

Here we provide an analysis of Popular Unity’s first steps, its programmatic statement and the political tasks facing the party. This was written before the recent Greek elections, in which the party failed to win any MPs, but its criticisms of the party programme and methods remains valid.

The announcement of 2,900 job cuts by Air France management fell like a thunderbolt on employees. Over the past decade they have already made many sacrifices in terms of pay and working conditions. Many positions have already been cut: the company's workforce decreased from 65,000 in 2004 to 52,500 today. The frustrations of many employees  have now started to bubble over, as shown in the video below.

The latest revelations from Lord Ashcroft’s biography of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, have once again lifted the lid on the sordid and sleazy world of the rich and the elite. At the same time, the airing of such dirty laundry in public is yet another demonstration of the crisis of the Establishment, which is rapidly losing all moral authority and legitimacy in the eyes of the masses following one scandal after another.

US regulators have discovered German carmaker Volkswagen has been systematically cheating its emissions tests on diesel vehicles, in order to increase its profits. The scale of the scandal is huge, with Volkswagen subsequently admitting to installing “defeat devices” on 11 million of its vehicles.

"When you sell the American or European Dream to the rest of the world, while at the same time turning the lives of the peoples outside those continents into the darkest nightmares imaginable, it is really no surprise that at some point you’ll have a mass movement towards the self-proclaimed promised lands."