CADTM - en

Let us begin with an image: a naked white man pursuing a low-wage Black female asylum seeker down the corridors of an expensive Manhattan hotel in order to force her to have sex with him. The man, of course, is the then-director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the woman, thirty-three-year-old Nafissatou Diallo, a housekeeper at Strauss-Kahn's hotel who was also at the time seeking asylum in the United States from her native Guinea, a (...)

The citizens of the European Union are called to vote this week for the European Parliament. It is not a real parliament, and it lacks prospects for becoming one, since all important decisions are taken by the unelected heads of the European Commission and the European Central Bank, dubbed “the worst-run Central Bank in the world”.
These elections capture however the general mood of exasperation with current policies. Conservative and extreme Right parties will rise, reflecting widespread (...)

This text is the short version of the “Manifesto for a New Popular Internationalism in Europe”, which was published on 21 March 21 2019 in English, French and Spanish.
This Manifesto has been drawn up by a group of activists and researchers from a dozen or so countries in Europe who wish to propose a blueprint to be carried out by the popular Left forces. It is part of the ReCommonsEurope Project which was initiated by two international networks, the CADTM and EReNSEP, and the Basque trade (...)

The US Federal Reserve governor Lael Brainard, in a speech in Washington, revealed the extent of rising inequality in the US. Using the latest income and wealth data, she outlined that the incomes and wealth of working-class (the American establishments like to use ‘middle-class') households in the US have been squeezed in the last 50 years and particularly in the last 20 years.
Average American households have still not fully recovered the wealth they lost in the Great Recession. At the (...)

Mr. Lenín Boltaire Moreno Garcés President of the Republic of Ecuador 21 May 2019
Regarding the Chevron-Texaco Case in Ecuador
Mr. President,
We who belong to many international civil society social organizations and networks who are committed to human rights and social, economic and environmental justice are writing to you because we are deeply concerned about the Chevron-Texaco case in the Ecuadorian Amazon region.
The case is irrefutable proof of the way the system whose purpose is to (...)

Press release Amsterdam/Geneva/Quito May 21st 2019
268 organisations, networks, social movements and trade unions from different continents, representing more than 280 millions of persons, are mobilised to denounce the Chevron's impunity in Ecuador and ask the president of Ecuador to support the Chevron case in favour of the indigenous and peasant communities.
After 15 years of litigation in Ecuador on the remediation of the major oil pollution in the Amazon, a coalition representing over (...)

In 2019, the World Bank (WB) and the IMF will be 75 years old. These two international financial institutions (IFI), founded in 1944, are dominated by the USA and a few allied major powers who work to generalize policies that run counter the interests of the world's populations.
The WB and the IMF have systematically made loans to States as a means of influencing their policies. Foreign indebtedness has been and continues to be used as an instrument for subordinating the borrowers. Since (...)

As we have seen in the previous part of this study, despite the government's spectacular stimulus plan, growth has been continually slowing over the past decade. Massive investment and growing corporate debt can no longer maintain a high rate of growth. Some party leaders have euphemistically dubbed this trend the “new normal”. Slower growth is not only the result of a complex international situation, but the consequence of the structural change and the necessity to enter a new stage of (...)

The citizens of the European Union are called to vote this week for the European Parliament. It is not a real parliament, and it lacks prospects for becoming one, since all important decisions are taken by the unelected heads of the European Commission and the European Central Bank, dubbed “the worst-run Central Bank in the world”.
These elections capture however the general mood of exasperation with current policies. Conservative and extreme Right parties will rise, reflecting widespread (...)

A new movement is demanding solutions. They may just be in time to save the planet.
On April 15, thousands of activists from a movement called Extinction Rebellion started occupying several sites in central London, shutting down major roads and demanding the country's politicians take immediate, drastic action in the face of climate change.
For more than a week, the streets were awash with an infectious sort of hope. Beyond the potent symbol of popular power represented by their presence (...)

The ecofeminist movement was born a few decades ago from the observation that there is an analogy between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of nature. In the current context of urgency and collapse and as the concept of the convergence of struggles resurfaces, interest in this feminist movement is resurfacing. For Marijke Colle, an ecofeminist from the first, who is better situated than women to become aware of the interconnection between nature and human life, and the urgency (...)

In 2019, the World Bank (WB) and the IMF will be 75 years old. These two international financial institutions (IFI), founded in 1944, are dominated by the USA and a few allied major powers who work to generalize policies that run counter the interests of the world's populations.
The WB and the IMF have systematically made loans to States as a means of influencing their policies. Foreign indebtedness has been and continues to be used as an instrument for subordinating the borrowers. Since (...)

In 2019, the World Bank (WB) and the IMF will be 75 years old. These two international financial institutions (IFI), founded in 1944, are dominated by the USA and a few allied major powers who work to generalize policies that run counter the interests of the world's populations.
The WB and the IMF have systematically made loans to States as a means of influencing their policies. Foreign indebtedness has been and continues to be used as an instrument for subordinating the borrowers. Since (...)

Report on the CADTM International mission to South Africa 31 March – 12 April 2019, part 2. First part available here
Wednesday 3 April: Cape town and Cape of Good Hope: highly visible social and racial segregation
The fourth day was spent seeing Cape Town and its region out to Cape of Good Hope about 70 km (55 miles) away. This time our guide was Hamied a retired doctor whose grand-parents had arrived in South Africa, from Ratnagiri (state of Maharashtra) in India, early in the last (...)

The European Union is currently negotiating a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with Tunisia. The EU wants its companies to get open access to the Tunisian market, and aims at imposing its norms, standards and procedures. Such an agreement would most probably worsen the socio-economic problems faced by Tunisia to benefit only to European corporations, and especially French ones.
As European organisations and movements, we denounce this DCFTA as a violent neo-colonial (...)

In South Africa, public debt has recently been back in the news through a nationwide debate over the future of Eskom, the public electricity company. Major power cuts affected the country's social and economic life in February 2019, drawing attention to this company.
The poorest sector of the South African population does not have easy access to electricity. In the townships, many residents set up makeshift electricity connections. Others manage to get a connection going again after Eskom (...)

I reached Kenya on my way back from South Africa on April 13, 2019. This visit was a follow up of the earlier initiatives including a training on debt audit held at Nairobi, Kenya from July 29-30, 2018 in collaboration with the Kenyan Social Movements for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debts. The idea was to reinforce the initiatives taken in the previous years and advance the campaign against illegitimate debt in the country. According to a Oxfam report, “extreme inequality is out of control (...)

Last March, I posted that the global economy seemed to be in a fantasy world where stock markets hit new highs but output of goods and services, investment and trade was stagnating in the major economies. This week, the US stock recorded yet again new highs. As the Financial Times described it: “The US economy appears to be enjoying the fabled Goldilocks scenario. Its porridge is neither too hot nor too cold”.
This financial market rally is founded on the decision of many central banks to (...)

The World Bank and the IMF were accomplice of the apartheid for decades. They violated the UN embargo against the racist regime at the helm of South Africa.
Between 1958 – 1968, the World Bank loans made possible the financing of the “pro-White” projects : a thermal power plant (Eskom) which supplied electricity only to the whites and, a section of the railway network (South African railways/harbours) which was only accessible to the Blacks if they could prove that they were employed in a (...)

After the documentary “Golden Dawn a personal affair” which was about trying to understand how the Greek neo nazi party functioned, which is still the 3rd political force of the country, now we go on with “Golden Dawn a public affair” which tries to investigate all the possible forms of resistance to this ideology that spreads all over Europe.
The shooting for this second documentary already started more than one year ago and will last several more months. It will be completed after the trial (...)