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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.
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
Peoples Dispatch | As Venezuela prepares to head to the polls in July, the US has already started drumming up suspicion and doubt around the electoral process.
Peoples Dispatch | Past efforts to ban the enormously popular app in the United States have failed. Recent success could be linked to the popularity of the Palestine solidarity movement
Peoples Dispatch | Israel has deliberately slowed the flow of aid to Gaza with hundreds of trucks stranded on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border at a time when over two dozen Palestinian children have died of malnutrition
The 2003 invasion of Iraq has been swept to the margins of collective memory. We must refuse to forget it — and seek to understand what led to it, who benefited, who suffered, and how it transformed the world.
Tricontinental | 8 March was not always International Women’s Day, nor has such a day always existed. This date became fixed to our calendars through decades of struggle – led by communist women.
Paris Marx | The Disconnect | The benefits of the internet are eroding. The AI boom is only accelerating their demise.
CADTM | The World Bank’s strategy in Turkey clearly recalls its policy towards Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship in the Philippines from 1972, Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile from 1973, and the economic model they promoted. Geopolitical reasons are once again a determining factor: a hinge between Europe and Asia, Turkey is an essential pawn on the Middle East chessboard. Consequently it is necessary to subordinate this country to Washington’s interests by giving full support to an authoritarian regime. The World Bank works in this direction when, in perfect agreement with the military leaders, it develops neoliberal economic policies that open the door wide to investments by transnational corporations and suppresses both trade unions and far-left parties.
The Law of Work | Valerio De Stefano | In March 2024, The European Union’s institutions reached an agreement to adopt a European Directive on Platform Work. To understand the content of this Directive, it is essential to know what European directives are and how they are adopted. I’ll try to explain this without boring non-European readers to death.
Communist Party of Ireland | The result of the double rejection of the government’s proposed amendments to the Constitution was not totally unexpected. The government tried to gain favour by removing outdated concepts of the family and the domestic role of women from the Constitution, while at the same time trying to place all responsibility for care within the family unit, completely absolving the state of any responsibility towards women as the primary caregivers, the disabled community, and other vulnerable members of society.
Jacobin | Apple’s battle with Epic is a reminder that today’s tech companies behave like 19th-century monopolists. Installing democratic control over these modern throwbacks to Gilded Age robber barons is the only way to curb their power.
Monthly Review | According to most Western commentators, North Korea is an “enigma” plagued by “irrational” leadership, poverty, and pervasive food shortages. Zhun Xu charts the evolution of North Korean industrial agriculture and the country’s efforts to feed its population from the Soviet era up until today. What, Xu asks, can we learn from the country’s efforts to industrialize its agricultural sector, and what do they tell us about the future of agriculture under socialism?
The Disconnect | The platform isn’t a national security threat, but a challenge to Silicon Valley’s dominance
Canadian Dimension | Big Media in Canada, which are ruthlessly squeezing every last loonie out of our once-profitable news media, used their remaining political influence to shake down the digital giants with the Online News Act in hopes of cashing in big on the runaway success of the platforms. In the process, they have put Canada’s emerging online media and niche publications in the emergency ward.
Haiti is in the headlines again and, as usual, the headlines on Haiti are mostly negative.
Haitian Prime Minister Henry Agrees to Resign as CARICOM Announces Formation of Presidential Council
CEPR | It was US and foreign support for Henry that pushed the situation to its dire state. But rather than letting a truly Haitian-led process play out, those same foreign powers have opted for a stability pact that, it would seem, is likely to lock in an unsustainable status quo at least in the short term.