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Leftnews.org is a collection of daily news and views from the political left-wing found around the web.
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Jacobin | Israeli officials just rejected a cease-fire deal that could have brought hostages back because Israel wants to continue waging war. This should be a scandal — but American mainstream media isn’t reporting on it.
Jacobin | Canada boasts one of the world’s highest assisted-death rates, supposedly enabling the terminally ill to die with dignity. However, this suicide program increasingly resembles a dystopian replacement for care services, exchanging social welfare for euthanasia.
CADTM | In the second half of the 1990s, it was clear that the 1982 debt crisis had not been resolved. Measures to reduce the debt had failed. Structural adjustment policies had made countries vulnerable to financial speculation. This led to a succession of financial crises for the major indebted countries.
The official justification for targeting TikTok is the unfounded allegation that it’s a Chinese spy tool because its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China. But Romney’s comments suggest the real purpose of the renewed push to ban the app after a similar effort failed years ago was to censor news coming out of Gaza and pro-Palestinian content.
Labor Notes | For three and a half decades, lean management drove the production and movement of goods. But now logistics and manufacturing employers are shifting to a new model. To maximize our leverage, workers should understand it.
NewsClick and Prabir Purkyastha have not been involved in any terrorist act. Nor is there any evidence for the same. Prabir does not have links to any terrorist group.
Superficially in the recent period the U.S. has attempted to display two apparently contradictory sides of its policy to China. ... In reality, this “soft cop/hard cop” U.S. approach is not contradictory. It was two sides of the same coin. In particular it is rooted in the real situation, as opposed to the myths regarding, the U.S. economy and the implications of this for U.S. foreign policy and domestic policy. These are rooted in the inability/refusal of the U.S. to abandon its aggressive military and foreign policies and a similar refusal/inability to carry out rational domestic transformations even of a reformist kind. By these the U.S. dooms itself to defeat by China in peaceful economic competition—with consequences which are examined at the end of what follows.
The Breach | What should the Canadian government do to address the ongoing crisis in Haiti? The answer, says Professor Jemima Pierre, is simple: “Leave Haiti alone.”
The Haiti Action Committee is honored to send out this transcript of a presentation by Fanmi Lavalas executive committee members, Dr. Maryse Narcisse and Joel “Pacha” Vorbe, delivered via zoom during our April 6th event at Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland, California. In their presentation, the two Lavalas representatives analyze the current disastrous situation in Haiti, revealing its roots in the 2004 coup d’etat against President Aristide and the series of illegitimate right-wing governments that were put in place by the U.S and the Core Group of foreign powers in the aftermath of the coup. They discuss the devastating impact of the paramilitary violence that has left thousands of people dead, with hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes and millions more facing famine. And they share their perspective on how to move forward in this next period, including their viewpoint on the new transitional presidential council being formed in Haiti.
African liberation struggles not only won independence in their own countries; they also defeated Estado Novo colonialism, which spurred the Carnation Revolution 50 years ago.
Chris Kanthan | World Affairs | Four years ago, I wrote an article explaining how there were ulterior motives behind the US allowing Indians to become CEO’s of big American corporations. Now, India has gone further down that path and has almost definitely sealed its fate as a satellite of the US. The consequence will be that India will be stuck in the middle-income trap forever and won’t have much sovereignty in the spheres of economics or foreign policy.
In recent years, the rightful rejection of the policies promoted by the traditional imperialist powers (North America, Western Europe and Japan), followed by the announcements made by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), have aroused great interest and expectations of major changes, including the creation of a common currency to challenge the US dollar as the dominant currency. But what has actually happened? What has been achieved by the New Development Bank and the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA)?
Until the debt crisis broke in 1982, the World Bank held a double discourse. One, destined for the public and the indebted countries, claimed that there was nothing to worry about and that if there were problems, they would be short-lived; that was what appeared in official documents available to the public. The other discourse took place behind closed doors at internal meetings.
FAIR | With the encouragement of the state, universities are taking draconian steps to silence debate about US-backed violence in the Middle East.
Despite the fact that China’s economy continues to far outgrow all major Western economies the Western media is energetically promoting a myth of “peak China”—i.e. that China’s economy either has or is about to drastically slow down.
People's World | By almost a three-to-one ratio, Volkswagen workers at its Chattanooga, Tenn., plant gave the Auto Workers their first big win in their new drive to break the anti-union stranglehold in the Deep South. The final tally was 2,628-985 in the three-day vote.
An interview with Estela Aranha | After Elon Musk boosted conspiracies about the persecution of Bolsonaro supporters, Brazil’s far-right was given a shot in the arm. The lawyer who debunked the story speaks about the new threat to Brazilian democracy: Big Tech.
Russian political prisoner Boris Kagarlitsky writes in Jacobin from his jail cell at Zelenograd SIZO-12. He discusses the need for an alternative to the “individualist logic of modern liberalism and the totalitarian aggressiveness of the new conservatism.”
The Breach | Riding by riding, a cross-country network of Palestinian solidarity organizing pushed Liberal MPs to respond to their constituents
If the carbon tax is a dead corpse that keeps on dying, let’s make livelier offers. The transition to a sustainable energy system should have been rooted in class from the start. Let’s stop playing rhetorical tricks on ourselves, and fill the political void with actionable proposals. Along the way, we might even heal social wounds as well as environmental ones.
More and more ECEs and care givers are leaving the sector in search of better paid work. Current early childhood education students are uncertain about their futures. Many are opting out of pursuing a career in this field altogether. Indeed, the province could be short 8,500 ECEs by 2026. Ontario needs to do better and pay its ECEs and child care workers a decent wage.
Media co-ops and employee-owned media have been growing around the world in recent years. Majority shareholders of the leading French daily Le Monde announced last year that they would donate it to a foundation controlled by its journalists and other employees. As news media in Canada continue to crumble, going the co-op route makes increasing sense for their displaced workers.
The great science fiction fear has always been of AI escaping human control and the machines taking over, as in The Matrix films. The story of Lavender suggests, on the contrary, that the real danger arises when the awesome data-crunching capacities of AI are put in the hands of human beings. Derek Sayer on Israel’s human targeting software and the banality of evil.
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
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.
Michael Hudson | CounterPunch | When interest-bearing commercial and agrarian debt came to be incorporated into civilization’s economic structure in the third millennium BC, it was accompanied by clean slates that liberated bondservants and restored to debtors the rights to the crops and land that creditors had taken.
Monthly Review | The recent arrest of Newsclick editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha is a chilling development in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign of repression…
The annual meeting of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) is underway right now. The NPC is officially China’s highest deliberative body, ostensibly deciding economic and social policies each year. In reality, those policies have been drawn up by the Chinese Communist Party leaders in advance and then presented to the NPC to vote on (unanimously). Nevertheless, the NPC meeting offers the CP leaders an opportunity to spell out their policy answers to deal with the current economic and social problems of the country.
Democrats are losing working-class votes. A new study from Jacobin, ASU’s Center for Work and Democracy, and the Center for Working-Class Politics shows how few Democratic Party candidates use populist rhetoric, propose progressive economic policies, or come from working-class backgrounds.
Canada’s former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney reshaped the country with a mix of free trade enthusiasm and privatization. Lionized in his passing by Canada’s press, his legacy of undermining the country’s working classes shouldn’t be whitewashed.
An unpublished report from UNRWA said some of its employees released from Israeli detention were tortured into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the 7 October attacks, Reuters reported on 9 March.
CADTM | After the Second World War, in a growing number of Third World countries, policies diverged from those of the former colonial powers. This trend encountered firm opposition from the governments of the major industrialised capitalist countries whose influence held sway with the World Bank (WB) and the IMF. WB projects have a strong political content: to curtail the development of movements challenging the domination/rule of major capitalist powers. The prohibition against taking “political” and “non-economic” considerations into account in WB operations, one of the most important provisions of its charter, is systematically circumvented. The political bias of the Bretton Woods institutions is shown by their financial support to dictatorships ruling in Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Congo-Kinshasa and Romania.
There Will Be Reading and Singing and Dancing Even in the Darkest Times: The Tenth Newsletter (2024)
Amidst the genocide against Palestinians and the war in Congo, human beings cling to hope. Saleem, in Rafah, dreams beyond the present, of Red Books Day and a brighter future.
Canadian Dimension | Aaron Bushnell’s supreme sacrifice cuts like a knife through the Orwellian doublethink—mass slaughter of innocent civilians is “self-defense,” the IDF is “the most moral army in the world”—that allows us to continue to live with what the highest court in the world has described as a plausible genocide.
Jacobin | The South has long remained a nearly impenetrable citadel for labor. Fresh off of the success of its Big Three strike last year and looking to organize an Alabama Mercedes plant, the United Auto Workers wants to storm the castle.
Jacobin | The conflict between Evo Morales and Luis Arce for the Bolivian presidency in 2025 has not only split the ruling MAS party but also the social movements and labor unions that form its base.
Jacobin | Since Labor PM Paul Keating’s early ’90s privatization spree, Australian governments have been obsessed with public-private partnerships. It’s a model that spends public money to subsidize private profits — often with disastrous outcomes.
Jacobin | Finance’s dominance over the economy isn’t a deviant evolution of a “good” industrial capitalism. Finance and industry are interdependent — meaning solving problems like inequality and climate change will require a far-reaching democratization of the economy.
Professor Ilan Pappe spoke at IHRC’s annual Genocide Memorial Day in London, UK on 21st January 2024, on the need to understand that the genocide of Palestinians we are currently witnessing, as brutal as it is, is also the demise of the so-called Jewish state. We need to be ready to imagine a new world beyond it.
Morning Star | The two-day hearing in London’s Royal Courts of Justice is considering Mr Assange’s application to appeal against the dismissal of most of his case that he should not be extradited, which was heard in 2020. Should this application fail, Mr Assange will face 17 charges in the US under the Espionage Act and one for computer hacking. If convicted, he could be jailed for up to 175 years.
Jacobin | International talks aimed at creating a treaty to prevent another COVID-19 catastrophe are nearing collapse. This impasse is due to the refusal of countries such as the US, Canada, and Germany to compromise on Big Pharma’s intellectual property rights.
People's World | Former Republican Oval Office occupant Donald Trump not only committed massive financial frauds to build his real estate empire, but his “complete lack of contrition and remorse” about them—when New York state caught him—“borders on the pathological,” the state judge who decided the case declared.
Canadian Dimension | Ten years since the Maidan massacre, nobody is in prison for the murders and attempted murders of activists and police officers, or for shooting at foreign journalists. The silence on the part of those who deny the false-flag event, or who call these claims a “conspiracy theory” and whitewash the mass murderers of the far-right, is both deafening and revealing.
Canadian Dimension | For-profit media ownership has decimated journalism in Canada and continues to gouge us with some of the highest prices in the world for telecommunications services such as cellular phones, cable TV and Internet access. The private equity players and US hedge funds that own most of our largest newspapers are now harvesting them for hundreds of millions in cash.
CounterPunch.org | Late 2023 marked a notable transformation in North Korea’s longstanding pursuit of peaceful reunification with South Korea after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un noted the failure of the policy in his end-of-year speech. This sentiment was reiterated during a January 15 meeting of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), where the country’s constitution was ordered to be rewritten to label South Korea as its “principal adversary.”
The Maple | The results of a recent Angus Reid poll should be cause for concern among unions and labour supporters alike.
At a time when the Ecuadorian government’s social disinvestment has wrecked the country’s economy and security sector, Canada is arguing for its right to deprive Ecuador of even more public money. Ottawa’s main concern is Ecuador’s resources: how to access them, and how to ensure Canadians can bring home as much profit as possible while exploiting them.
CADTM | China has been demonized by several commentators: it is said to be the main creditor of many countries of the South and to get the most of them through ruthless exploitation whereas the World Bank, the IMF, the Paris Club, that bring together traditional creditor powers, are supposed to do their best to help those countries burdened by too much debt.
China also uses propaganda. It parades as an ally of countries of the South, regularly announces debt cancellation and debt relief, and claims that it does not enforce neoliberal conditionalities as do the IMF and the World Bank. It also stresses its efficiency.
The Breach | If Canadian universities were not permeated by anti-Palestinian racism, why would police need to check out my small lecture?
The Breach | Celeste Trianon explains what Alberta’s new law means for the anti-trans movement in Canada
Jacobin | Colombian elites are determined not to let leftist president Gustavo Petro serve out his full term. As top judicial officials target him and his cabinet, drug cartels and their links to the far right remain uninvestigated.
Jacobin | A new Pentagon policy bars the US Defense Department from working on films that cooperate with Chinese censorship demands. It’s a new front in the economic battle with China — and it ignores the Defense Department
The nations that brag the most about "democracy" routinely ignore the will of their people. Support for Israel's war crimes in Gaza is but one example of this phenomenon.
As the second anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war nears, public support for the war has reached an all-time low. Nonetheless, NATO is escalating tensions along Russia’s border with a four-month military exercise involving 90,000 troops from 32 countries. For the Global North, it is not the Ukrainian people’s wellbeing that matters but the geostrategic necessity to ‘weaken’ Russia and China. In reality, there will be no military triumph in Ukraine, which is why the war must end and negotiations commenced.
The widespread ownership of crypto currencies in countries like Turkey and Argentina has created the grounds for a very reactionary economic understanding among broad social segments, especially among young people.
Indonesia has got the classic formula for development in poor countries in the world of 21st century imperialism. Its economy is founded on basic commodity production that is highly capital intensive, severely damages the environment and does not provide many good jobs for the people, while the rich pay little tax and public services are limited. And the old Suharto elite remain in control.
Tribune | On the same day that climate scientists announced the world had breached the warming limit of 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, Starmer effectively announced that he had given up the fight against climate breakdown.
Vijay Prashad | CounterPunch | On February 9, 2024, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.” As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south—often on foot—they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage.
Jacobin | Each February 14, tourists flock to Terni, Italy, hometown of third-century martyr Saint Valentine. Yet Terni’s “city of love” identity is itself rather new, as politicians seek tourist dollars to replace its once-mighty steelworks.
CADTM | Series: 1944-2024, 80 years of interference from the World Bank and the IMF, that’s enough!
Canadian Dimension | Canadians are fed up with the private sector’s encroachment on health care as much as they are with backroom corporate deals that would negatively affect their rights as consumers. It took less than one week to kill what may have been an incredibly lucrative financial agreement. Progressives would be mindful to remember the power of sustained direct action and bad publicity.
Cory Doctorow: "So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it."
Tricontinental | This February marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, when Hugo Chávez took office in 1999. In 2024, Venezuela will hold its sixth general election since that time. Already the US has begun to delegitimise the vote and destabilise the country with the reimposition of sanctions. Such measures are illegal as they are imposed unilaterally, in contravention of the UN Charter. As one US official recently stated, Washington believes it is ‘the police of the world’.
Labor Notes | For decades, foreign-owned auto companies have flocked to the US South to exploit cheap, nonunion labor. It’s been a disaster for autoworkers and organized labor.
Prabhat Patnaik | There are well-known problems associated with the concept of gross domestic product as well as with its measurement.
CADTM | In July 2024, the World Bank and the IMF will be 80 years old. 80 years of financial neo-colonialism and the imposition of austerity policies in the name of debt repayment. 80 years is enough! The Bretton Woods institutions must be abolished and replaced by democratic institutions serving an ecological, feminist and anti-racist bifurcation. To mark these 80 years, we are republishing a series of articles every Wednesday until July, looking in detail at the history and damage caused by these two institutions.
Pakistan’s adults vote today but with no prospect of obtaining an end to the disaster that it is Pakistan capitalism and landlordism and its military rule.