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.

"It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them." Sadly, Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize for Literature lecture continues to be as relevant today as when he gave it in 2005. And nothing confirms the accuracy of the British playwright’s incisive words better than the ongoing U.S. intervention in Syria.

Public relations consultants now outnumber journalists by an astonishing ratio of 17:1

As the political crisis in Venezuela intensified in early 2019, Freeland claimed that “Canada and its allies are well down the road to crafting a long-term, post-Maduro recovery plan for Venezuela’s disastrous economic decline,” ignoring the role played by US intervention. “We are discussing with our partners now ways that sanctions list can be expanded in order to have even more bite.”

MIT economics professor Daron Acemoglu is the expert on the economic and social effects of new technology, including the fast-burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI). He’s won the John Bates Clark Medal, often a precursor to the Nobel Prize. But he is no techno-optimist. His research shows that major technological disruption — such as the Industrial Revolution — can flatten wages for an entire class of working people.

The Breach | In failing to defeat a ‘serial’ corporate lobbyist, Rachel Notley suffers her ‘Hillary Clinton moment’

“Major world powers need to shift from confrontation to accommodation soon; otherwise, we’ll go off the precipice together.”

AMLO’s mining reforms are an expansion of his efforts to reduce foreign domination of Mexico’s mineral reserves, and part of his wider “Fourth Transformation” program of securing national sovereignty over the country’s lucrative resources. Up until now, his actions toward the sector have taken the form of freezing new mining and water permits for foreign companies.

Dismissing Canada’s rental crisis as nothing but a supply-demand issue overlooks the fact that a small group of landlords dominates the rental market and exploits tenants. As rents become extortionate, Canadian landlords are reaping record profits.

By Nathan J. Robinson & Noam Chomsky | The United States’ destruction of Iraq remains the worst international crime of our time. Its perpetrators remain free and its horrors are buried.

With long experience of chaos, violence, and dysfunctional governance, Haiti looks now to be on the verge of a new crisis in the form of foreign military intervention. U.S. and United Nations decision-makers have held back, but now they look to be moving, again.

From the onset of the post-COVID surge in inflation, Canada’s new breed of right-wing populists has worked hard to pin the blame for higher prices on the federal government. They rightly sense anger about the impact of inflation on their living standards. But they hope to divert that anger into outrage at Justin Trudeau personally, and his government more generally.

Lula da Silva used his state visit to Britain to champion the interests of the Global South, urge diplomacy over militarism and condemn the persecution of Julian Assange – a sign of Brazil’s new role on the world stage.

The far right’s victory in elections for the Constitutional Council may be the death knell for a progressive constitution in Chile. It’s also a needed wake-up call for the Chilean left.

China’s recent pledge to send a peace delegation to Ukraine in the hope of resolving the country’s ongoing war with Russia is a hopeful sign the bloody conflict may soon come to an end. But the US’s general hostility to Chinese peace initiatives suggests there may be serious limitations to Ukrainian sovereignty. The choice between continuing the conflict, or suing for peace, may not be Kyiv’s to make.

If you are reading this newsletter on your smartphone, then you should know that this tiny instrument has billions of miniscule transistors that are invisible to the human eye. The scale of the developments in digital technology is staggering. Earlier conflicts took place over energy and food, but now this conflict has heated up over – amongst other matters – the resources of our digital world. This technology can be used to solve so many of our dilemmas, and yet, here we are, at the precipice of greater conflict to benefit the few over the needs of the many.

'The threat to privacy and data security posed by language models like ChatGPT is real enough. I frankly doubt that there's any practical way to contain them. The most effective means that I can think of…to counter the spread of malicious doctrines and ideology are education in critical thinking, organization to encourage deliberation, and modes of intellectual self-defense.' —Noam Chomsky

In an interview with The Breach, the scholar discusses Canadian imperialism, the dangers of NATO and building a better future

So-called ‘core inflation’ (excluding food and energy) remains ‘sticky’, so that even in a slump, inflation rates are likely to stay above the average rates prior to the pandemic slump. But it’s the slump that will end high inflation (as it did in the early 1980s), not interest-rate hikes or price controls.

The late historian Eric Hobsbawm recounts the history of International Workers' Day.