The Chinese economy has slowed down, and with it the demand for Australia’s exports. Anyway, the imperialist bloc wants Australia to disengage from China. The cost of living is rising sharply; rising interest rates risk a serious housing crisis; and global warming is out of control. Neither government nor opposition have any answers. Australia’s luck is turning for the worse.

Far from ensuring the safety of Canadians, the government’s prohibition against Huawei dangerously aligns Canada with the NSA and other members of the Five Eyes spy network. This coalition of settler-colonial states may parade as the epitome of liberal democracy, but in fact it is based on the ongoing sagas of Indigenous dispossession and imperialism.

The permanent war economy has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

Owen Schalk illuminates some important yet underemphasized aspects of modern Korean history, and Canada’s role in raising and maintaining tensions on the peninsula, by borrowing from the work of a number of respected scholars of both Korea and Canada, shining daylight on the ‘night of our ignorance’ and introducing some much-needed background information to discussions of the Korean War in Canada.

Historical poetic justice now happens to rule that Russia and Iran are about to sign a very important agreement, which may likely be an equivalent of the Iran-China strategic partnership. The three main nodes of Eurasia integration are perfecting their interaction on the go, and sooner rather than later, may be utilizing a new, independent monetary and financial system.

New South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s economic program is classically neoliberal. He supports ‘market-led approaches,’ including job creation led by the private sector rather than government projects. But these policies are unlikely to stem the tide of the country’s rising poverty rate and its income inequality, which are among the worst among wealthy countries, with youths facing some of the steepest challenges.

While some observers may endorse sanctions against Russia as a humanitarian alternative to military action, the supposedly bloodless and “targeted” punishment of sectors of the Russian economy has already had wide-ranging effects on people inside and outside of Russia who have committed no crime, and who simply want the best possible life for themselves and their family.

In this interview, Tariq Ali, the anti-war icon of the 1960s, reflects on some of the most important issues of our time: the situation in Afghanistan, the Western powers and the “war on terror,” political developments in Latin America, the global right-wing upsurge, digital surveillance and democracy, the challenges facing left movements, contemporary capitalism, lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, and much more.

Last week, the CBC ran a piece on “Chinese industrial espionage” during its flagship program The National. According to John Price, the public broadcaster owes the country, and Asian Canadians in particular, an apology for fanning the flames of bigotry and hate. And Justin Trudeau needs to call for a fundamental reassessment of Canadian foreign policy to avoid taking Canada down the road to war.

How China and its peoples handle the challenges ahead demands close and critical attention, but it’s time to lose the attitude. As Noam Chomsky recently suggested, either the “United States and China will work together on the critical issues that we all face, or they will expire together, bringing the rest of the world down with them.” Isn’t that what friends are for?