This 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.

Co-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.

From 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.

Winnipeggers 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, Canadian Labour Congress President Maude Barlow and many more.

Crisis, stagnation and the longest investor strike in recent history will not be reversed through stronger doses of neo-liberalism. Substantial programs of public investment are needed to address mass unemployment, inequality, disintegrating public services and climate change. CETA and its flanking treaties effectively preclude them.

In the overlapping realms of cultural studies and critical theory, few scholars have made a more significant impact upon contemporary educational theory than Henry Giroux. In 2002, the American-Canadian academic was named by the British publisher Routledge as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.

Perhaps the most revealing words on the topic of globalization in recent years came not from the pen of Thomas Piketty, nor were they written by Robert Reich or Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman — rather, they can be found in the pages of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, written by the notorious New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement offers sweetheart legal protection for some of the richest people on Earth, making it easy for them to sue us for uncapped amounts, in closed tribunals adjudicated by lawyers with a financial interest in siding with the rich foreigners. Not even revulsion for Donald Trump will provide enough lipstick to pretty up this pig.

The Anglo-American drive to establish a global regressive social order has pushed billions of workers on five continents into destitution, insecurity and lifelong exploitation. The capitalist world rules by fiat and violence, declaring that social regression and worker repression are the ‘wave of the future’. For the elite, the proper order of the universe is being ‘restored’.

It is the nature of ideology that if the medicine doesn’t work, increase the dose. Unless more Canadians speak out on these investment protection agreements and get behind their counterparts in the United States and European Union, the Liberal government will keep prescribing the same medicine.