What has Washington actually most worried about Lula is the reemergence of a powerful non-aligned movement, writes Steve Ellner. The majority of the world’s population has not joined the sanctions regime against Russia and are gradually coalescing around an a new and emerging economic, financial and commercial system alternative to the West.

The US has gambled big in its latest sanctions on Chinese companies in the semiconductor industry, believing it can kneecap China and retain its global dominance. From the slogans of globalization and “free trade” of the neoliberal 1990s, Washington has reverted to good old technology denial regimes that the US and its allies followed during the Cold War.

It remains to be seen whether it is legally possible to confiscate and redistribute Russian funds. But even if it is, one may doubt whether it is wise. Little by little, such acts have the effect of sending a message that the international financial system is subservient to Western political interests, writes professor Paul Robinson.

Jerome Powell, Vladimir Putin, and Mohammad Bin Salman are on the verge of throwing the entire world into a massive depression. Powell’s interest rate increases are compounded by the action taken by Russia and Saudi Arabia, leading the OPEC+ meeting in Vienna, to cut oil production by two million barrels a day. These two leaders of OPEC+ have a visceral hatred of both President Biden and democracy itself.

Shock doctrine was the term used by Naomi Klein to describe the destruction of public services and the welfare state by governments from the 1980s. Now the major central banks are applying their own ‘shock therapy’ to the world economy, intent on driving up interest rates in order to control inflation, despite the growing evidence that this will lead to a global recession next year.

The OECD estimates that, under a “business-as-usual” scenario, plastic waste will triple globally by 2060. Until policymakers, voters, and consumers exercise their muscle to reduce plastic pollution at the source, the petrochemical industry will continue feeding the global plastic dependence regardless of the consequences for public health and planetary well-being.

Professor Richard Wolff discusses the powerful economic partnership of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). “They are the engine of the world economy in a way that was once said of Western Europe, North America and Japan. The engine, the powerhouse, the growth mobile, all of that. That’s moved, friends. And it’s moved in large part to the BRICS.”

As the head of the World Bank’s committee to review and criticize the development goals of the Bretton Woods institutions, Lester Pearson had the opportunity to foreground an alternative form of Northern engagement with the South. Instead, he reaffirmed all the most harmful aspects of these institutions and argued for their greater involvement in the lives of people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

It is incumbent upon us as a species, especially us in the Global North, to seriously consider alternative futures from an anti-capitalist, dialectical, ecological point-of-view, writes CD columnist Owen Schalk. This will unavoidably entail challenging the ideology of growth that pervades the political institutions of Northern countries.

In contrast to the simplistic notion that capital unilaterally imposes consumption upon us, German scholars Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, authors of The Imperial Mode of Living, emphasize a dialectical analysis in which capitalist domination “draws on the wishes and desires of the populace … becomes a part of individual identity, shapes it, and thereby becomes all the more effective.”