By David Swanson
There's a great deal of disappointment, even distress, in the air as news spreads that Dominique Strauss-Kahn might not be charged with rape (or attempted rape, or sexual assault). He's guilty, the victim's character is being attacked in order to protect him, and the Culture of Rape will emerge triumphant once again—or so I'm being told by various Emails, Tweets, etc.

At a press conference today convened by the United Left Alliance in response to the programme for government agreed by Fine Gael and Labour Joe Higgins, Socialist Party/ULA TD for Dublin West said: "As we predicted, despite the media palaver about Fine Gael and Labour being incompatible they rapidly split the minute differences in their respective manifestos and have presented the public with essentially a continuation of the Fianna Fáíl/Green Party/IMF cuts programme."

The ECB is currently building a luxury tower for itself in Frankfurt with an eye watering price tag of 1 billion. Meanwhile they continue to force austerity on the rest of us.

"Right now the ingredients for a 'perfect storm' are developing in Europe"
by Ben Jackson
The election results from Greece are in and the pro-bailout forces have won, but just barely. It is being projected that the pro-bailout New Democracy party will have about 130 seats in the 300 seat parliament, and Pasok (another pro-bailout party) will have about 33 seats. Those two parties have alternated ruling Greece for decades, and it looks like they are going to form a coalition government which will keep Greece in the euro. On Monday we are likely to see financial markets across the globe in celebration mode. But the truth is that nothing has really changed. Greece is still in a depression. The Greek economy has contracted by close to 25 percent over the past four years, and now they are going to stay on the exact same path that they were before. Austerity is going to continue to grind away at what remains of the Greek economy and money is going to continue to fly out of the country at a very rapid pace. Greece is still drowning in debt and completely dependent on outside aid to avoid bankruptcy. Meanwhile, things in Spain and Italy are rapidly getting worse. So where in that equation is room for optimism?

By Barry Hackett
What is the solution?

Throwing more debt, in the short or long run, at the problem will not solve the problem. At most it merely alleviates or postpones the problem. This is precisely because the source of the problem does not lie within the process of circulation (i.e. money and credit spheres). It is contained within the production process­­­.