Labor/Economics

Debt is an important source of finance for development. But if the debt situation turns burdensome and it may even threaten the very sovereignty of a nation. That’s what happening today with a majority of nations in Africa. I learned how rich Africa is in mineral wealth from my students who come to study in our institution from different African nations. Africa is rich of mineral wealth but its people are very poor. Former Western colonial powers are chiefly responsible for the present state affairs. Even after liberation from colonial repression, the continent continues to struggle to develop and appears caught in a debt trap.

This argues that if we look at the US as being the homeland of the US Empire, then we can see what Trump is trying to do: recognizing that the US Empire is failing, Trump was to end “soft power” programs by the US Government around the world because they are not working, and to re-channel those freed-up funds into traditional imperialist operations, as the Republican party has just added $150 billion to the war budget, increasing from $800 billion last year to $950 billion this year. By considering the closing of the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, which has served the US Empire well, this claim is supported by evidence from it’s demise; over 400 people have been laid off recently, yet the AFL-CIO has remained quiet about it. Links to recent articles and videos on these subjects are provided to readers to add to their understanding.

Looks at the impact of the January 2025 fires in Los Angeles, and discusses rebuilding efforts.

[I]t seems that nowadays humanity is producing much more than it can consume, while insufficiencies still plague our everyday lives. One example is that humanity is currently wasting around 40% of the food it produces , while hundreds of millions around the world continue to suffer from hunger and malnutrition.

US President-elect Donald Trump, faced with the threat of “the end of the dictatorship of the dollar,” announced the imposition of tariffs on the countries belonging to the Brics. Threat as a policy has been imposed in the governmental lineage of the presidents of the United States when they wage wars or sanction whoever is convenient for them.

Today marks one year since the inauguration of President Javier Milei, of the ultra-right alliance La Libertad Avanza (LLA). The situation is worsening and the permanent lying and falsification of data and figures are denounced every day by the alternative press, because the ruler, who considers himself as a “mole infiltrated to destroy the national State from within”, has under his control most of the local mass media. “Almost 60 percent, that is well over half of the population that did not vote for him.” There are four million new poor people and two million 500 thousand indigent people in the country. Poverty among children under 18 years of age amounts to 65.5 percent.

In the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, the word ‘corruption’ increasingly began to appear in the reports of multilateral agencies and non-governmental organisations. These reports argued that corruption is rooted in the regulatory function of states, which control large-scale development projects and whose officials oversee the delivery of licences and permits; if the regulatory function of states could be minimised, many of these reports argued, corruption would be less pervasive. This kind of anti-corruption discourse fit neatly within the neoliberal drive to shrink states’ regulatory apparatuses, deregulate and privatise economic activity, and promote the idea that the freedom of the market’s invisible hand would create a moral foundation for society. The epicentre of this argument has been the African continent, where the idea of ‘corruption’ – meaning corruption of the state – has effectively been used to diminish the state’s regulatory functions and reduce the number of state employees. In neoliberal literature, corruption omits concepts such as transfer mispricing, trade mis-invoicing, accounting irregularities, financial mismanagement, and tax avoidance – all of which are essential elements of multinational corporations’ accounting practices – all of which are essential elements of multinational corporations’ accounting practices.

Michael Moore condemns the US health care system.

It will not be enough to take the means of production, as they have been developed by capital, into social or public ownership. We must aim to change what those means of production produce, and the way they produce it. What does this mean, politically, here and now?