Month: December 2013

In Moscow this week Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich accepted Russia’s offer of a $15-billion bailout loan in addition to reduced gas prices, the combination of which (if managed smartly—not inevitable given Yanukovich’s track record) should be sufficient to prevent at least the direst scenarios in an already economically depressed country facing crises of credit default and further monetary deflation.

To our knowledge there are no significant strings attached to this deal—Putin has called it an “act of brotherly love”—though what was said behind closed doors to extract a handshake from Vladimir Putin is not known and may yet become clear.

Yesterday evening, South Korea’s 2nd largest national trade union center, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), announced a general strike, which is due to commence on December 28, 2013. This most drastic move by KCTU, a leftist organization that unites roughly 700.000 South Korean workers under its umbrella, came at the end of long day full of dramatic escalations. Thousands of riot police stormed the headquarters of KCTU in Seoul on December 22 – an unprecedented event in South Korea’s post-dictatorship history, through which the country’s current president Park Guen-hye proved to the public how far she is willing to go in her attempt to crush labor and its democratic organizations.

There are not many occasions on which  the daily news from Croatia can be spotted in the blurred waters of Western media. Unfortunately, last week one of that occasions occurred.  Croatian voters decided to prohibit marriage equality, or to be precise – to constitutionally define marriage as a union only between a man and a woman. After processing all of the ballots, the State Election Commission announced that 65.87% voted yes, 33.51% no and 0.57% of ballots were disregarded as invalid.

by Gabriel Levy

Oil workers in western Kazakhstan in 2011 mounted one of the largest-scale strike movements in post-Soviet history, and then suffered one of the most brutal massacres in post-Soviet history – in Zhanaozen on 16 December 2011, when security forces killed at least 16 people and wounded at least 64. The workers’ revolt inspired such paranoia in the Kazakh elite that, after suppressing it, the government went on to mobilise the courts and police in an unprecedented clampdown on trade union activists, the political opposition and journalists.

A large group of aggressive young men smash windows and fiercely throw bottles and stones. Behind them there’s a huge crowd shouting ‘We want in the EU’. The picture should apparently frighten people in the EU countries. Some comments in the western media suggest, as a joke, that the picture resembles barbarians amassing near the EU borders – ready to enter. Moreover, it may seem irrational that there are far-right and even sheer neo-Nazi’s forces at the forefront of the protest.