President Donald J. Trump Speaks at the 2019 National Association of Realtors Legislative Meetings on Friday, May 17, 2019 at the Marriott Wardman Park. Photo by Brian Copeland (Flickr). The following is an excerpt from Jack Rasmus’s new book, The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump,
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Canadian Dimension: We’re still waiting for a trade deal that benefits working people
Then-Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and then-Mexican Minister of Economy Ildefonso Guajardo during NAFTA talks in 2017. Photo by the U.S. Department of State. United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) officers released the following statement on the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on December
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: How privatization became the economic dogma of our time
“Public Transit Privatization”, an illustration by Aaron Millard used during a public protest of a Metrolinx Board meeting in Toronto. The following is an excerpt from Linda McQuaig’s new book, The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich Are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth, released this year by Dundurn Press.
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Anti-Globalization and its Discontents
Hundreds of feet in the air, four climbers from the Rainforest Action Network and the Ruckus Society hang a giant banner off of a construction crane on the eve of the mass street protests against the WTO, Seattle, 1999. Photo by Dang Ngo/Rainforest Action Network. This article originally appeared in
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: From anti to alter-globalization
Participants at an exhibition of antiglobalization protest artwork and films curated by Vienna-based artist Oliver Ressler called A World Where Many Worlds Fit, 2008. Photo by Petra Gerschner. By the end of the 1980s, various cracks began to appear in the global neoliberal edifice. Partially, they were triggered by early
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The IMF Is Utterly Indifferent to the Pain It’s Causing
Robert B. Zoellick, World Bank President (L) and Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director. Photo by Simone D. McCourtie/World Bank. Each year, the board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gathers at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. This year, the IMF will meet under the leadership of a new chief, Kristalina
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Trudeau’s proposed speculation tax
I’ve written a blog post about the Trudeau Liberals’ recently-proposed speculation tax on residential real estate owned by non-resident, non-Canadians. The full blog post can be accessed here.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Larry Elliott writes that a corporate-centred model of globalization is unlikely to survive the Trump regime. And Jeff Spross proposes an alternative which allows for people to be free and capital to be controlled, rather than the other way around. – But
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Non-Aligned Movement gathers in Venezuela to resist dictatorship of dollar
Late in the evening on July 19, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif stepped out of a plane and met his Venezuelan counterpart, Jorge Arreaza, on the tarmac outside Caracas with an enthusiastic embrace. Zarif was in town to participate in the ministerial conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). “Today in
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The Global Currency War Has Begun
Over this weekend, China’s Yuan currency broke out of its band and devalued to more than 7 to $1. At the same time China announced it would not purchase more US agricultural goods. The Trump-US Neocon trade strategy has just imploded. As this writer has been predicting, the threshold has
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: NAFTA renewed. Now what?
Photo by The White House When Donald Trump declared NAFTA to be “the worst deal” in American history (and the worst deal ever signed “by any country”), those who had long opposed NAFTA found themselves in a bind. They could hardly side with Trump and be identified with the imperial
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Thoughts from the road: General Motors, China and Alberta, a new landscape emerges from Monday’s dust
OTTAWA Now that the dust is settling from Monday’s announcement General Motors Corp.’s last auto assembly plant in Oshawa, Ont., will soon be closed, the emerging landscape is not promising for Alberta. Leastways, it’s not hopeful from the perspective of an Alberta that has no plan to transition from a
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
Book Review Adam Tooze. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. Viking. New York. 2018 The global economic crisis is now more than a decade old, and is far from definitively behind us. Indeed, many fear, with good reason, that the recent, uneven and lethargic global recovery
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Review of the Renegotiated NAFTA: Benefits and Drawbacks to Canada
Trudeau and Freeland praise USMCA trade deal There is something strange about this. Other than Maude Barlow and of Sujata Dey of the Council of Canadians, it appears that no other journalists or columnists from the mainstream media have mentioned two significant features in NAFTA 2.0 that are of considerable
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on NAFTA 2.0
Photo from Public Domain At midnight last night, Canada and the U.S. agreed on a new deal on NAFTA, one which would now be called the USMCA, the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, as if that was easier to pronounce. Use May Ca? Here is the good, the bad, and the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Lucas Chancel points out the myths underlying any claim that corporate globalization does anything but voluntarily exacerbate inequality: It is often said that rising inequality is inevitable — that it is a natural consequence of trade openness and digitalization that governments are powerless
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Impact of growing opioid crisis on life expectancy in the United States is more evidence that neoliberal austerity kills
PHOTOS: This scene is in Paris. It could be anywhere in our “globalized,” that is, neoliberalized world. (Photo: Eric Poulhier, Wikimedia Commons.) Below: Rundown but dignified Havana, high-profile U.S. economist Paul Krugman (Photo: Flickr, Commonwealth Club) and political economist Alan Nasser (Photo: Evergreen State College). Will Mexico eventually decide it
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Smooth Sailing Ahead For the Global and Canadian Economy?
The consensus forecast of just about everybody – the IMF, the OECD, the Bank of Canada, the Canadian banks – is that Canada will share in a global recovery from the stagnation which followed the financial crisis of a decade ago. All of the major economies – the US, the
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Airbnb: short-term rentals, short-term thinking
Photo by Open Grid Scheduler The idea of home sharing is a great one. Cities thrive on density, on different people doing different things but in close proximity to each other. If one family leaves town for a week, there would be nothing better from the city’s perspective than to
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Radical Municipalism: The Only Solution to Amazon’s Extortion of Cities
Photo by Mike Seyfang Last week saw a flurry of humiliating pitches by North American cities for Amazon to pick them as the location of the corporation’s second headquarters. New Jersey committed a phenomenal $7 billion in tax breaks if picked. Stonecrest, Georgia, pledged to annex 345 acres to create
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