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Blog Dennis de Jong

12 April 2015

The Maagdenhuis Occupation: Brussels, universities, and resistance

Foto: Laauwen Media / Laauwen Media

In Amsterdam, the main admin building of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), known as the Maagdenhuis was occupied for almost two weeks by a group of students and staff demanding cancellation of planned cuts in spending, as well as sweeping reforms.

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22 March 2015

Blockupy right to protest against European Central Bank

This week some 17,000 people gathered in Frankfurt to protest against the European Central Bank (ECB). The protest culminated in acts of violence which of course attracted a great deal of publicity. As for the point of the demonstration, what you mostly heard was that it was aimed at the ECB’s flash new headquarters, built at a cost of €1.3 billion. That’s $1.4 billion, or £940,000. The demo was, however, about much more than that. We have created an institution with extensive political power, an institution with no democratic input. That has to change, and soon, was the message from the demonstrators gathered under the name Blockupy, and it is a message with which I wholeheartedly agree.

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15 March 2015

Boxing judges

Foto: Katrinitsa / European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg
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8 March 2015

Government is fiddling the books – Netherlands’ economy scores average for Europe

During this week’s televised election debate, everyone could see that right wing Prime Minster Mark Rutte and his Labour Party deputy Diederik Samsom would have us believe that we are the finest students in the European Union, that our economy is booming and that we’re doing a lot better than other member states. But if you examine the precise statistics, little survives of this scenario. Our performance is no better than average, and there seems to be a direct link between this average performance and the Rutte government’s e obsession with austerity. Time to get rid of the coalition.

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1 March 2015

Social exploitation – Brussels’ hard edge

The right-wing parties in the European Parliament love to talk about competitiveness. What they mean to suggest by using this term is that the European Union can only be competitive if labour costs are no higher than those of competitors or potential competitors. What sensible people call ‘exploitation’ these parties often view as ‘reform’.  All means are used to achieve this: the working of the internal market, restraints on enforcement of social rights, which are seen as ‘administrative burdens’, and even trade and investment treaties. In my view, we should reject these practices at the ballot box, and the first opportunity to do this in the Netherlands will be our provincial elections of 18th March. As our Senate is indirectly elected by the Provincial Assemblies, and as the government’s grip on power depends on continued Senatorial support, a big anti-government vote will represent another nail in the coalition’s coffin.

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22 February 2015

Time for an interparliamentary manifesto against tax evasion

The Finance Ministers who last Friday put the Greeks under extreme pressure to push on with the old neoliberal policies of the Troika came at one point under the influence of the Tsipras government, the first Greek government to really want to deal with tax evasion and corruption. Not only in Greece, but throughout Europe, prosperous people and companies ought at last for once pay their taxes and contribute their share to the costs of restoring employment and attacking poverty. In Paris this week we will be meeting with other parliamentarians from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – the group that represents developed countries – to discuss international measures to combat tax evasion. My aim is to have MPs from across the world commit themselves to a sort of manifesto and form a permanent pressure group demanding action.

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8 February 2015

Syriza versus the Christian Democrats: David against Goliath

The meeting between the Greek and German finance ministers was icy. The European Central Bank (ECB) is making it impossible for Greek banks to borrow cheaply. And to complete the picture, the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the European Parliament’s biggest political group, wanted the EP to adopt a resolution on the rise of extremism in the EU which would have included a specific mention of the new Greek government. It’s striking that in each of these instances the EPP, the home to Europe’s Christian Democrats and allied conservative parties, the group which includes the Dutch Christian Democrats of the CDA, played a leading role. Where we used to sometimes speak of the CDA’s ‘social face’, the mask has now fallen to reveal the grimace of merciless market fundamentalism under Angela Merkel’s command.

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1 February 2015

The success of the modern left in southern Europe

Foto: Bloco (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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