Vijay Prashad says the expanding IMF-driven debt crisis, which has converted the idea of “financing for development” into “financing for debt servicing,” bears watching while China waives debt to 17 African nations.
Amnesty lamented that governments have turned to “repression and unnecessary and excessive use of force” against struggling demonstrators instead of addressing their core concerns, such as high food prices and paltry wages.
Orthodox economics is the ideology of the rich and powerful, writes Dian Maria Blandina. Poor countries such as Sudan, that are trying to develop, cannot afford a regime of free trade.
Lower interest rates and longer-term paybacks that match the pace of underlying social progress are key to successful development finance, writes Jeffrey Sachs.
The class struggle is alive and well, writes Vijay Prashad. Although one of the weaknesses of our time is that massive mobilizations have not been easily converted into political power.
From criminality during Perestroika and privatizations to the problem with Russia’s “imperialist war” designation, Natylie Baldwin discusses a wide range of subjects with the author of The Catastrophe of Ukrainian Capitalism.
Both the late singer and his close friend Martin Luther King Jr. saw their civil rights advocacy as the cutting edge of a still broader struggle for equality, writes Sam Pizzigatti.
The longer the corporate state erodes the social bonds that provide a sense of purpose and meaning the more inevitable an authoritarian state and a Christianized fascism becomes.
American universities are appendages of the corporate state. Educators are increasingly poorly paid, denied benefits and job security while senior administrators pay themselves obscene salaries.
Oxfam estimated that “for every $1 the IMF encouraged a set of poor countries to spend on public goods, it has told them to cut four times more through austerity measures.”