Germany

Germany Deserves A Big Share Of Blame For The Disaster In Ukraine

March 10, 2022 Dave Lindorff, This Can't Be Happening!. Educate! Germany, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, Wars and Militarism

Nobody is talking about the blame that must be shouldered by the German government for the crisis and humanitarian disaster in Ukraine. Sure Russia is guilty of a huge war crime in invading Ukraine, Surely too, the US must be blamed for creating the situation which led Russia and its autocratic leader Vladimir Putin to decide it had to invade to prevent Ukraine from being pulled into the US orbit with the goal that it would ultimately become a base for US offensive weapons — even nuclear weapons — on Russia’s border — something the US would never allow to happen anywhere in its self-proclaimed “backyard” of Latin America and the Caribbean. But Germany, the largest country in NATO after the US, is almost as guilty for this current war in Europe as is the United States.

Rethinking Land And Relation In Berlin’s Struggle For Housing Justice

February 13, 2022 Amanda Priebe, Resilience. Strategize! Affordable Housing, Berlin, Germany, Privatization

Across Europe, affordable housing is being pushed farther and farther out of reach. Homes are increasingly owned not by the people who live in them, but by companies who rent them out for profit. Housing is no longer treated as a public good, but as a commodity and vehicle for wealth and investment. In Berlin, which currently boasts some of the fastest-rising housing prices in the world, the situation is particularly extreme. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1992, private investors flocked to the city to capitalize on the state-supported financialization of the housing market. As of today, more than a quarter of Berlin’s roughly two million apartments are owned by private companies. According to researcher Christoph Trautvetter, more than half of the city is owned by fewer than one thousand multimillionaires.

Germany One Step Closer To Nuclear-Free Future

January 1, 2022 Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams. Create! Energy, Environment, Germany, Nuclear Power

Green groups on Friday celebrated as Germany prepared to shut down three of its six remaining nuclear power plants, part of that country's ambitious goal of transitioning to mostly renewable energy by the end of the decade. The nuclear phaseout—which was proposed by the center-left government of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the turn of the century and accelerated under former Chancellor Angela Merkel following the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan—is a key component of a plan by Germany's new Social Democrat, Green, and Free Democrat governing coalition to produce 80% of the country's power from renewable sources by the end of the decade. Renewables accounted for 43% of German electricity consumption through the first three quarters of 2021, down from 48% during the same period last year, according to Clean Energy Wire.

Berliners Win Vote To Expropriate Housing From Corporate Landlords

December 27, 2021 People's Dispatch. Resistance Report Germany, Housing

On 26 September, Berliners voted to expropriate housing from corporate landlords. This referendum became possible after years of struggle to make housing in the city affordable and available to all again. To understand the issue and the movement that led to this vote, Peoples Dispatch spoke to Anisia Petcu, an activist in the expropriation campaign. She works primarily in the working group Right to the City for All, which focuses on facilitating and amplifying the voices of people without German citizenship within the referendum campaign.

Berliners Vote On Expropriating Housing From Powerful Landlords

September 27, 2021 Progressive International. Create! Affordable Housing, Germany, Landlords, Privatization

Most international coverage of the German elections is focused on who will replace Angela Merkel after her 16-year term as chancellor ends, but for everyday Berliners, just having the resources to pay the rent is a bigger concern. Berlin’s efforts to lower the fast-rising rents in Germany’s capital city have led to a referendum which could expropriate and socialize almost a quarter of a million apartments primarily from Deutsche Wohnen, the largest real estate company in Europe and one of the largest companies in Germany. After years of rising rent forcing many Berliners out of the city, activists led by Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen, or DWE) received nearly 350,000 signatures from Berliners and managed to force a vote on whether to allow the expropriation of housing owned by landlords with over 3,000 units on the Sept. 26 election ballot.

For A Workers’ Olympics!

July 23, 2021 Nathaniel Flakin, Left Voice. Create! Germany, Olympics, Sports, Women's Rights

We need a Workers’ Olympics as an alternative to the bourgeois Olympics! This might sound like an empty slogan, but the International Workers’ Olympiads took place from 1921 to 1937. The workers’ movement had always organized its own sports competitions. The Workers’ Olympiads let workers from all over the world exercise and compete together. Participants did not march under national flags — instead, everyone used the same red flag as the universal banner of labor.

Housing Should Not Be A Luxury

July 23, 2021 Katharina Hofmann De Moura, Consortium News. Create! Europe, Germany, Housing rights, Renter Rights

Unfortunately, access to private space has become increasingly unequal in Europe. This discrepancy has been exacerbated by the pandemic. A lockdown spent on a terrace or in the garden is not the same as one confined in an apartment block. Ever since the end of World War II, sufficient housing supply has been a high priority in the modern market economies of Europe. But after several decades of neoliberalism and a decade of strict austerity, Europe now faces the challenge of how to tackle today’s housing inequality.

US Peace Activists In Germany Join Call For Withdrawal Of Nuclear Weapons

July 16, 2021 John LaForge, Popular Resistance. Resist! Germany, Nuclear Abolition, Nuclear Weapons, US Foreign Bases

A group of US peace activists has again joined protests at the Büchel Air Force Base in Germany, demanding the withdrawal of the remaining US hydrogen-bombs still deployed there. On July 12 the anti-nuclear and anti-war campaigners, together with colleagues from The Netherlands and Germany, began an “International Week” of protests focused on ousting the last approximately 20 US Air Force nuclear gravity bombs known as B61s kept at the base.* In the depths of the cold war, there were 7,000 US nuclear weapons in Germany, so this remnant seems like hardly more than radioactive waste. With the German group Gewaltfreie Aktion Atomwaffen Abschaffen (Nonviolent Action to Abolish Nuclear Weapons), the US activists will participate in vigils, blockades, and other demonstrations at the gates of the German air base.

Renters in Berlin have a radical plan to seize apartments from landlords

May 22, 2021 Thomas Colson, Business Insider. Resist! Finance and the Economy, Germany, Landlords, Tenant Rights

Like many cities around the world, rents in the German capital of Berlin have soared in recent years, doubling in the last decade alone. But unlike many other cities, the people of Berlin are actually doing something about it. First residents persuaded the local authorities to bring in a rent cap that instructed landlords to freeze rents at 2019 levels. However, that was overturned by Germany's federal court in April, which ruled the measures unconstitutional. Now local campaigners are planning something even more radical: a bid to nationalize thousands of privately owned apartments in the city. Specifically, campaigners want the government to take apartments from real estate firms that own more than 3,000 apartments, place them into public ownership, and rent them out at more affordable rates.

I’m Still Here, Though My Country’s Gone West

May 2, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Communism, Germany, Privatization, Socialism

A full generation has elapsed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed in late 1991. Two years earlier, in 1989, the communist states of Eastern Europe dissolved, with the first salvo fired when Hungary opened its border. On 3 March 1989, Hungary’s last communist prime minister Miklós Németh asked the USSR’s last President Mikhail Gorbachev whether the border to Western Europe could be opened. ‘We have a strict regime on our borders’, Gorbachev told Németh, ‘but we are also becoming more open’. Three months later, on 15 June, Gorbachev told the press in Bonn (West Germany) that the Berlin Wall ‘could disappear when the preconditions, which brought it about, cease to exist’.

Court Rules Germany Must Tighten Climate Law

April 29, 2021 Thomas Escritt, Reuters. Create! Carbon emissions, climate crisis, Germany, Legal System

Berlin - Germany must update its climate law by the end of next year to set out how it will bring carbon emissions down nearly to zero by 2050, its top court ruled on Thursday, siding with a young woman who argued rising sea levels would engulf her family farm. The court concluded that a law passed in 2019 had failed to make sufficient provision for cuts beyond 2030, casting a shadow over a signature achievement of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s final term in office. “The challenged provisions do violate the freedoms of the complainants, some of whom are still very young,” the court said in a statement. “The provisions irreversibly offload major emission reduction burdens onto periods after 2030.”

Blinken Threatens Germany With Sanctions

March 26, 2021 Dave DeCamp, AntiWar.com. Educate! Germany, Nordstream pipeline, Russia, US Sanctions

While meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated the US’s opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will connect Russia to Germany and warned Berlin about possible sanctions over the project. “President Biden has been very clear in saying that he believes the pipeline is a bad idea; it’s bad for Europe, bad for the United States,” Blinken said. “Ultimately, it’s in contradiction to the EU’s own energy security goals. It has the potential to undermine the interests of Ukraine, Poland, a number of other close partners or allies.”

Germany’s Anti-BDS Resolution Violates The Right To Free Expression

January 9, 2021 Adri Nieuwhof, Electronic Intifada. Educate! Anti-BDS Law, Free Speech, Germany, Palestinian rights

German cultural institutions have criticized the German parliament’s anti-boycott, divestment and sanctions resolution for creating a legal gray area and undermining the right to free expression. The 2019 resolution urges German institutions and public authorities to deny funding and facilities to civil society groups that support the BDS movement. But in December, major German art and academic institutions denounced the resolution as “detrimental to the democratic public sphere” and warned of its negative impact on the free exchange of ideas. That prompted an investigation, also in December, by the Bundestag’s scientific service department – an advisory body to the federal parliament – which reached a similar conclusion that the anti-BDS resolution...

Penguin Climate Activists Block Berlin Airport Opening

October 31, 2020 Stay Grounded, Popular Resistance. Resist! Airport, climate crisis, Germany, Transportation

Berlin - The climate justice group 'Am Boden bleiben', a member of the international Stay Grounded network, today blocks the opening of the new airport in Berlin with protest actions. The opening of the BER had been delayed for nine years, after a series of expensive construction and corruption issues. Am Boden bleiben carries out an action of civil disobedience and says that there is no room for new airports in times of climate crisis. You can follow the action live on the Twitter accounts of Am Boden bleiben and Stay Grounded.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

assetto corsa mods

Daily movement news and resources