Social

Faced with the mounting economic crisis, European leaders have promised aid to the hardest-hit member states. But there’s always strings attached. For France Insoumise MEP Manuel Bompard, the proposals for loans and grants ignore the real scale of the crisis — because they all put debt repayment above the needs of average Europeans.

[Not only are existing pensions too few, too poor, and/or facing increased downward pressure with repeated stock market crashes, but some of our pension funds actually invest in high objectionable businesses. Another needed element of a "green recovery"....Gene McGuckin]

May 21, 2020

May 20, 2020

This crisis has reinforced what we already know — our current economic system is leading us down a path of destruction

Economists are cautioning that the Canadian economy has entered one of the deepest recessions in our history. Our country is not alone in this. The impact of COVID-19 has put the global economy on track for a “new Great Depression.”

 April 12, 2020

May 17, 2020

One might have hoped that the very severity of the threat posed by the pandemic would compel the elites who manage capitalist societies to behave more responsibly and decently. The return of the pre-neoliberal “nanny state” (however inadequate it was) seemed to some a real possibility. But while the capitalist state may be concerned with maintaining social equilibrium, preserving a basic level of public health and upholding its own legitimacy, it remains utterly devoted to ensuring the conditions in which businesses can function and profits can continue to flow.

May14, 2020

May 14,2020 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Socialist Project — The transport sector represents one of the most serious challenges when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, which are increasing faster than from any other sector in society – and at an ever-increasing pace (over 120 per cent globally over the last 30 years – and still increasing in all parts of the world).

APRIL 3 2020

The novelist on how coronavirus threatens India — and what the country, and the world, should do next 

Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?