3 private links
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.
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.