By Thalif Deen * UNITED NATIONS, Apr 6 2021 (IPS) – The 15,900-strong World Bank, which has funded over 12,000 development projects worldwide since 1947, is an international institution with a superlative reputation for its sustained efforts to end poverty… Continue Reading
By Tom O’Connor* – Newsweek The United States’ reliance on economic sanctions to coerce other countries is gradually losing its effectiveness and slowly degrading one of Washington’s most influential tools in international affairs, the power of the U.S. dollar, experts… Continue Reading
By Dirk Siebels* – The Conversation For a week the world was gripped by the extraordinary sight of a massive container ship that had run aground in the Suez Canal in Egypt. The Ever Given is 400m long (1,312ft) and… Continue Reading
By Thomas L. Friedman * – The New York Times We’ve stopped following our formula for success. Sometimes a comedian cuts through foreign policy issues better than any diplomat. Bill Maher did that the other week with an epic rant on U.S.-China… Continue Reading
By David E. Sanger* – The New York Times It may look like the bad old days of the Cold War, but today’s bitter superpower competition is about technology, cyberconflict and influence operations. WASHINGTON — Sixty days into his administration,… Continue Reading
By Sonali Kolhatkar* – Independent Media Institute More for Her Climate Warrior Politics Than Her Identity Indigenous Congresswoman Deb Haaland’s confirmation should not be reduced to symbolism. In her farewell address to the House of Representatives, New Mexico Congresswoman Deb Haaland said… Continue Reading
By Yanis Varoufakis* For Draghi bring McKinsey in as advisers makes clear whose interests will be served, and it’s not those of ordinary Italians. Last week, upon hearing that Mario Draghi, as Italy’s new PM, employed McKinsey to advise the… Continue Reading
By Vijay Prashad* – Globetrotter, Independent Media Institute On March 12, the heads of government of four countries, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, and the United States President Joe Biden, met for… Continue Reading
By George Friedman* – Geopolitical Futures One of the hardest problems of foreign policy is developing an accurate evaluation of a potential adversary’s intentions and capabilities, which are frequently separate realities. I discussed this recently in a piece that pointed out the… Continue Reading
By staff writers Nikkei Asia, Japan Martial law expanded to wider region of Yangon BANGKOK — Myanmar’s military has extended martial law to broader sections of Yangon after the deaths of dozens of protesters in the city’s garment production hub,… Continue Reading
By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram (*) SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Mar 9 2021 (IPS) – Developing country governments are being wrongly advised to use their modest fiscal resources to pay down accumulated debt instead of strengthening pandemic relief… Continue Reading
By Sonali Kolhatkar* – Independent Media Institute While a public desperate for protection against COVID-19 is quick to shame “vaccine hunters,” the real culprits are the companies refusing to share their publicly funded intellectual property and the governments allowing them… Continue Reading
By Boaventura de Sousa Santos* The global rise of the far right has given new relevance to the concept of anti-system in the context of politics. In order to understand what is happening, we need to go back a few decades.… Continue Reading
EDITORIAL How can the west continue to do business with the man who approved Jamal Khashoggi’s murder? As details emerged of the gruesome 2018 murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul of the exiled dissident and journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, most… Continue Reading
By Riccardo Petrella* – Wall Street International Magazine “No one will be left behind” In the name of “national” health security, the dominant groups have taken measures that run counter to the much-vaunted objective of “no one will be left… Continue Reading
By Thalif Deen* UNITED NATIONS, Feb 26 2021 (IPS) – A sign outside a laundry in New York City had a frivolously flippant slogan: “We launder dirty clothes, not dirty money.” And a 2019 movie titled “Laundromat,” based on a… Continue Reading
By Michael von der Schulenburg* – Wall Street International Magazine A letter to Roberto Savio The impeachment process in the US Congress is over, with former President Trump being acquitted. Both sides of America’s political divide now claim victory. Michael… Continue Reading
By Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Amy Kapczynski, David Singh Grewal (*) – Boston Review If we are to emerge from this era of crisis, we need legal thinking that operates on fundamentally different presumptions. We live in an era of intersecting crises—some… Continue Reading
By James K. Galbraith* – New Economic Thinking A Congressional Budget Office Report on the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 underpins a February 11 Washington Post editorial headlined, “Democrats Must Listen to the Data.” The Post laments that a… Continue Reading
By Ellen Brown* – Web of Debt, Blog Wall Street may own the country, as Kansas populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease once declared, but a new generation of “retail” stock market traders is fighting back. A short squeeze frenzy driven… Continue Reading
