Several dozen people filled the seats in a downtown storefront Tuesday night to plan how to
save a landmark they say belongs to the community - a 99-year-old post office the United States Postal Service wants to sell.
For several decades, governments around the globe have turned to privatisation as the best option to help relieve the world's destitute by providing them with health care services, water and electricity. By and large, however, this effort has failed.
In a world where governments are increasingly subservient to global finance capital, multinationals are gaining ground in the fight against state regulations that aim to protect the environment, public health or social policies.
After the Argentine Congress approved the renationalisation of YPF, the country’s biggest oil company, late Thursday, thousands of demonstrators from different political and social groups cheered the decision outside the legislature.
Almost six years after the nationalisation of gas and oil reserves in Bolivia, foreign companies maintain an active presence in the sector, and the government is now offering them greater incentives to increase oil production.
Ignoring widespread concern over the safety, efficacy and cost of pentavalent vaccines, India’s central health ministry has, this month, approved inclusion of the prophylactic cocktail in the universal immunisation programme in seven of its provinces.
Hundreds of Spanish companies continue to do business in Argentina, despite Madrid’s campaign in defence of Repsol, which controls YPF – the oil company that the government of Cristina Fernández plans to renationalise.
European civil society organisations continue to demand that international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund apply the same standards of transparency and accountability to their internal affairs that they demand for governments across the world.
The trend of privatisation and commercialisation of water services, which set in in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s, has come to a halt due to the process’ own failures, and has given rise to a return of those services into efficient public management, according to a new book.
Back in 2001, Gérard Mestrallet, CEO of the transnational water giant GDF- Suez, highlighted his company’s "commitment to fight for better access" to safe water and sanitation throughout the world, in order to put an end to all deadly water-borne diseases, from children’s diarrhoea to parasitic diseases to dysentery.
For the first time in its history, Serbia has bought back a company sold to a foreign investor almost ten years ago, for the symbolic price of a single dollar. But while the purchase has stirred a sense of national pride, it is hardly a success story for the Balkan economy; rather, it has exposed the failure of a decade-long effort to privatise the national economy.
Months of protest across the European Union, sparked by ‘indignant’ youth demanding an end to the brand of free market capitalism that has blighted the continent with an unemployment epidemic, finally bore fruit on Jan. 30 when Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, proposed an ambitious jobs scheme.
For more than a week, thousands have been demonstrating in cities across Romania. Participants from all walks of life bring to the fore the broadest array of demands in what looks like a celebratory discovery of street protest. The main call is against lack of transparency and accountability in decision-making.
Protests in Hungary and Romania are the first signs of anti-systemic mobilisation in the Eastern half of the continent. While protests in both countries indicate dissatisfaction with their governments’ authoritarian turn, their origins differ, as does the European Union’s reaction to them.
An increasing number of African countries are beginning to step away from aid dependency, as the domestic private sector becomes the engine of growth across much of Africa.
On August 26, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan resigned, taking responsibility for the disastrous meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was caused by the March 2011 undersea earthquake and ensuing tsunami.
Designated Drylands Ambassador, United Nations Convention for Combating Desertification (UNCCD), at its 10th Conference of the Parties (COP10) in South Korea in October, Dennis Garrity is mandated to raise awareness of land degradation.
Luc Gnacadja, in his second three-year term as executive secretary, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), is widely seen as delivering on his commitment to manage the world's drylands.
Workers striking in what has been described as the biggest organised threat to Kazakhstan’s authoritarian regime in the last decade are being beaten by hired thugs as the government ignores pleas for basic international labour rights to be observed.
In the Arab world, most trade unions are affiliated to governments, but independent labour organisations are starting to emerge.