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Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has outsourced billions of dollars’ worth of contracts, including $100 million to McKinsey. Instead of shoveling money into the private sector, the Liberals could make the novel choice of investing in state capacity.

Ottawa has plowed significant resources and diplomatic energy into advancing Canadian mining interests in the Andean nation. The federal government has supported many individual mining projects and worked to provide the industry with a profitable investment climate. Since the early 2000s Ottawa has channeled tens of millions of dollars into Peru’s Ministry of Energy and Mines and mining related initiatives.

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has insisted that government plans to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 are “no longer negotiable,” even as unions prepare for a mass walkout this week.

Critics of U.S. interference in Latin America and the Caribbean may soon realize, if such is not the case now, that Peru has a compelling claim for their attention. The massive popular resistance emerging now amid the political crisis looks to be sustainable into the future.

Prabhat Patnaik | A “rent good” is one whose supply cannot be augmented at will, simply through investing more on its production; its supply is subject to constraints imposed by nature, because of which there is a certain maximum rate of long-run growth which is exogenously given and cannot be altered at will.

It is now crystal clear that the US, enabled by a bipartisan consensus in Washington, is determined to stop China upgrading technologically. China is now treated as “an enemy” of the US. Without the involvement, backing and control of workers organisations, the Chinese CP government is leaving itself open to imperialist encirclement. So the zig zags of CPC policy are wasteful, inefficient and dangerous to China’s future.

If we think that markets usually work, and governments should just step in to address failures, we’ve accepted the free market fundamentalist view of the economy without realizing it. We have framed the question in a way that ignores the ways that private, public and unpaid sectors interact, and the possibilities for co-creating healthier economies. So none of the answers are going to give us what we want - inclusive societies with shared prosperity.

Private surgeries and medical imaging are big business in BC. Over the last two decades, this for-profit sector has benefited from increased outsourcing of publicly funded procedures and unlawful patient extra-billing.

There are better approaches to easing the strain on the public system.

This week, the jamboree of the rich global elite of the World Economic Forum (WEF) has started again after the COVID interregnum. Top political and business leaders have flown in on their private jets to discuss climate change and global warming, as well as the impending global economic slump, the cost of living crisis and the Ukraine war. Their mood is apparently downbeat.

The left's response to the OPSEU scandal must counter the big business narrative that unions and union leaders are inevitably corrupt. We have to aim to build the confidence and capacity of rank and file members to not only assert themselves in their unions, but to take on the bosses. The best way to prevent union corruption is to build class struggle unionism from below.

According to the Jeju Today newspaper, the Yoon government is claiming that screening the North Korean film "The Story of Our Home", shown in South Korea in February 2019 as part of a national reunification festival, violated SK National Security Law. It is now investigating the organizers of the film screening three years later.

In a major escalation of the ongoing anti-trade union witch-hunt in South Korea, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) was raided by the National Intelligence Service on charges of violating a Cold War-era national security law 

Donald Trump expressed his belief in the power of the U.S. propaganda machine by infamously claiming that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing a single voter. In our perverse and decadent society of the spectacle within the imperialist core, much the same applies to the poster child for the global theory industry. Žižek could take the most reactionary political positions imaginable, have them broadcast around the world by the capitalist cultural apparatus, and still be presented as a towering intellectual of the Left. As a matter of fact, he has done precisely that.

Ford endlessly claims that all services will be paid for through OHIP, but research conducted by the Ontario Health Coalition clearly shows that for years private clinics took public funding and extra-billed patients. The Ford government has done nothing to stop this—although it is contrary to the Canada Health Act and limits access to care, particularly for lower income families and elders.

We cannot view the Ukraine conflict in isolation, writes University of Manitoba professor Henry Heller. It is negatively impacting the global economy as well as international relations across the board. At a time when the world urgently requires more international cooperation and integration it has once again become divided into antagonistic camps.

The military and its private sector offshoots desperately want to portray themselves as good guys fighting against dark forces. To accomplish that, they’re increasingly leaning into nerd fantasy like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings.

At the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos this week, elites will try to address problems from climate change to the threat of worldwide recession. But these elites’ endless thirst for profit created these problems — and will doom their efforts to fail.

Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech. The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved, including parody accounts. The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other tech companies.