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Leftnews.org is a collection of daily news and views from the political left-wing found around the web.
Leftnews is a project of the Citizens' Press.
For Global South economies deep in unrepayable debt, the current choice is: rescheduling often on even harsher terms; or forced stagnation of the economy to pay back foreign creditors. From the Magnificent Seven to the Desperate Hundred.
The Breach | Professor Jemima Pierre dissects Canada’s participation in a 20-year debacle of military occupations and failed elections in Haiti
The Maple | HonestReporting Canada’s campus media fellowship offers $1,000 to students, including journalists, to advocate for Israel.
Jacobin | Many observers of Haiti’s social disorder today maintain that the island country has always been dysfunctional. But the poverty and chaos in Haiti is of recent vintage, the product of disastrous decisions by political elites and heavy-handed US interference.
Jacobin | At a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a Mercedes factory in Vance, Alabama, the United Auto Workers have filed for union elections. If the UAW wins, it would be a major victory against anti-union bulwarks.
Tricontinental | Amid the intensifying water crisis that plagues billions of people across the world, Israel is using water as a weapon in its war against Palestinians by denying access and destroying infrastructure.
Declassified visits Belfast as Ireland appears on the edge of something truly historic, with most agreeing that Brexit was the game-changer.
This lyrical vignette from the recently departed Paul Burkett is the author’s final, posthumously published piece for Monthly Review. In it, the eminent ecological economist and jazz musician muses on the nature of creativity, technology, and the corporatization of music—and the struggle to decommodify it, freeing musicians and their craft from the confines of capitalism.
CADTM | Eric Toussaint | The World Bank claims that, in order to progress, the Developing Countries should rely on external borrowing and attract foreign investments. The main aim of thus running up debt is to buy basic equipment and consumer goods from the highly industrialised countries. The facts show that day after day, for decades now, the idea has been failing to bring about progress.
As head of state since March 2022, elected with the hope of reorienting his country on the path of progressivism, Chile’s young president Gabriel Boric (38) seems rather to have refocused his politics, unable to compete with the conservative bloc or to unite the left around his government. At mid-term, Boric has not yet been able to carry out the expected far-reaching reforms. Luis Reygada interviewed Franck Gaudichaud, a specialist in Latin America, for the French newspaper L’Humanité.
Jacobin | In granting Julian Assange only the most limited appeal rights, the UK High Court has deliberately closed its eyes to the press freedom issues at stake and shown a grotesque indifference to Assange’s basic human rights.
It is rare for the Bank of Canada to say that we face a national economic emergency. But that is exactly what Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers did on March 26. She was referring to Canada’s dismal record on labour productivity, which is indeed a major, albeit long-standing issue. Her widely publicized speech put a sharper focus on very weak Canadian economic performance, especially relative to the US.
The answer is not regulation (before or after the event), but the banning of fictitious capital investment. Close down hedge funds, bitcoin exchanges and exchange trade funding. Instead, banking should be a public service for households and small companies in order to take deposits and make loans – not funding for a massive financial casino where criminals and swindlers gamble away our livelihoods.
Part One: The Question of Being. By Colin Bodayle - MIDWESTERN MARX INSTITUTE
Jared Kushner joins the chorus calling for Israel to expand its occupation to Gaza's waterfront through forced displacement, but, if history is any judge, Palestinians will remain.
Profitability has been falling from pre-pandemic levels and total profit growth has also stopped rising. Already that is having an effect on investment growth and employment. Rising margins do not show this.
Canadian Dimension | The following article by Sol Littman (1920-2017), a sociologist turned journalist and community activist who tracked Nazi war criminals and was the Canadian representative for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, originally appeared in a 1987 edition of Canadian Dimension. It casts a critical eye on the Deschênes Commission, officially known as the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, which was established by the federal government in 1985 to investigate claims that Canada had become a haven for Nazi war criminals. As Littman writes, the commission played a role in whitewashing Nazi crimes while showing a seeming indifference to the thousands of alleged war criminals who slipped through Canada’s post-war immigration screen and found refuge here, almost entirely free from prosecution.
Prabhat Patnaik | There is a paradox at the core of the efflorescence of science that has occurred over the last millennium.
Peoples Dispatch | Health activists and scientists in Europe met to develop strategies to build regional public pharmaceutical infrastructure as pandemic lessons seems lost on governments and producers