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.

“The existence of tax havens does not add to overall global wealth or well-being; they serve no useful economic purpose,” the letter reads. “Whilst these jurisdictions undoubtedly benefit some rich individuals and multinational corporations, this benefit is at the expense of others, and they therefore serve to increase inequality.”

The just-released Panama Papers—filled with titillating details involving the shady dealings of world leaders and violent traffickers of drugs and slaves—should give a strong boost to US and global campaigns to crack down on these global secrecy jurisdictions and practices.

The new law of human evolution is that people are required to compete for more money and commodities for themselves as “necessary to survive,” with the borderless system de-regulated and structured to increasingly impoverish the great majority while multiplying the wealth of the rich.