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Why Aren’t Corporations Required to be Socially Responsible?
GlobalizationImagine if a corporation had to justify its existence beyond making money for capitalists. What would happen if a social balance sheet, as well as financial one, had to be filed every year and companies continually in a deficit position would eventually disappear? Consider Barrick Gold. Would the world be better off if the world’s largest gold miner ceased to exist?
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NAFTA Redux
GlobalizationThe new Trump administration has made the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the United States, a major issue in its relations with its two neighbours. Recently, Trump has threatened to tear it up. With his standard nationalist demagogy, he claims “previous bad trade deals,” have cost the United States many jobs as a result of American manufacturers moving plants off-shore.
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NAFTA Kills: Who will Speak for the Working Class?
Economic CrisisA recent report out of the US raises questions about politicians’ (in Canada and the US) obsession with the state of the middle class and highlights why Donald Trump won the US election. It is a sobering picture and an scathing indictment of neo-liberalism – particularly so-called free trade. While the authors don’t say so explicitly the conclusion is inescapable: NAFTA kills.
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Why the system will still win
Economic CrisisThat means facing the probability the EU is now so path-dependent as a neoliberal construction that reform of it is no longer seriously conceivable. It would have to be undone before anything better could be built, either by breaking out of the current EU, or by reconstructing Europe on another foundation, committing Maastricht to the flames. Unless there is a further, deeper economic crisis, there is little likelihood of either.
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The Liberal addiction to the Washington Consensus
Canadian PoliticsThis is the grim future under the corporate state. So grim, that the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s 2016 Annual Report was essentially a scathing denunciation of the whole Washington Consensus, blaming “[T]he entire edifice of liberal market finance…” The UN’s solution, only hinted at by those still struggling to overcome their addiction to this pernicious ideology, is as clear as neoliberalism is brutal.
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Alternatives to Capitalism: the Transition Movement meets Degrowth
Economic CrisisCo-founder of the Transition Movement, Naresh Giangrande in conversation with Richard Swift, author of SOS Alternatives to Capitalism and an editor of the New Internationalist Magazine. Brought together in the Caribbean island of Dominica, with Earthbooktv’s Jessica Canham and Timothy Speaks Fishleigh at the Earthbook retreat centre in the mountains of Dominica.
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World’s eight richest people have same wealth as poorest 50%
GlobalizationThe report added that since 2015 the richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet. It said that over the next 20 years, 500 people will hand over $2.1tn to their heirs – a sum larger than the annual GDP of India, a country with 1.3 billion people. Between 1988 and 2011 the incomes of the poorest 10% increased by just $65, while the incomes of the richest 1% grew by $11,800 – 182 times as much.
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What’s left of neoliberal globalization?
GlobalizationFrom a Canadian vantage point, it is easy to lose track of the sheer volume of discontent, if not outright resistance, around the world to the structures and policies of neoliberal globalization. People everywhere are chaffing at the limits imposed on their capacities to democratically shape and plan their own political and economic lives.
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Tell Trudeau to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership!
GlobalizationWinnipeggers attended a townhall meeting at the University of Winnipeg about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral trade agreement that threatens our jobs, our environment and our sovereignty. Hosted by the Canadian Labour Congress, the panel included President Hassan Yussuff President, Canadian Labour Congress President Maude Barlow and many more.
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The Building Storm Against the TPP
GlobalizationIf these agreements were simply an attack on ‘state sovereignty’, it would not explain why states have supported them. They are an attack on popular sovereignty in the form of democratic practices that seek to develop and extend popular rule and control. The TPP and other such agreements make it easier for states to do what they wanted to do anyways for corporations.
