The FT makes a point: “China’s central government is one of the least indebted in the world… If China is to sustain its long run of economic success, it is down to Beijing to act.” But the FT’s idea of action is for government to make cash handouts to households and ‘free up’ the private sector. But it’s not a turn to a consumer-led market economy that China needs to get the economy going again, but planned public investment into housing, technology and manufacturing.

The typical Canadian worker, whether earning minimum wage or an average income, cannot afford housing in any of the country’s major urban centers — which happen to be where most jobs are located.

The present interview with Éric Toussaint aims at constructing a common position about debts and their payment. It also helps to understand the part played by debt and its mechanisms in the extraction of resources of the South by the North at an international level, and in the transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich within each society. The interview is not limited to Lebanon, except insofar as the Lebanese situation can be seen as a model of what is happening in many other places in the world and other times in history.

Meta’s blocking of Canadian news is a direct response to Canada’s Online News Act, which mandates major tech firms pay local news organizations for using their media links. But the “link tax” furor underscores a deeper issue: media ownership and control.

Mythology about these mass civilian slaughters warps thinking about U.S. militarism.

The U.S. has used its influence to steal another country’s oil revenues. Venezuela is in the crosshairs because it dares to be socialist in the hemisphere the U.S. claims as it’s “backyard.”

In hooking themselves up to government subsidies and now government-ordered subsidies, the chains have apparently been willing to sell out press freedom in Canada to federal bureaucrats. But the chains overplayed their hand by failing to consider the possibility that Meta and Google might not sit still for such extortion and would simply walk away instead.