The Political Economy of Housing

By Flo Schade – Housing commodification and mortgage debt play a huge role in the current political economy. Particularly true in the Canadian context, financialized speculation of housing plays such an outsized role that it results in the contradiction that housing serves a function very different than providing shelter for people.

Let’s start with a broad three-point assessment of bourgeois economics and then specify how that relates to the housing crisis. Economics is a field that operates almost exclusively by using terminology that is designed to be confusing and obscurantist. Bourgeois economic commentary on the housing market is no different; it is propaganda apologizing for the capital class.

Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro Re-elected Despite US-backed Coup Plotters

By Jeff Mackler | Aug 10, 2024

With 80 percent of voting stations counted, the country’s election authority reported that President Maduro had received 51.2 percent of the vote. Edmundo González, the US imperialist-backed and financed “opposition” candidate received 44.2 percent. González had declared in advance of the election, based on spurious polls orchestrated by his right wing supporters, that any result other than his victory would be rejected. The “result” touted by his supporters, according to the July 28 New York Times, “could not be verified” by The Times’ analysts. Strangely, the online version of the same Times article excised this very sentence where The Times called into question the opposition’s claimed victory.

Some 1100 international observers from around the world, including a broad spectrum of the US left and social justice organizations did verify the result. Due to a US-backed cyber attack a final result, now being tabulated by Venezuela’s Supreme Court, is still pending. Venezuelan law mandates that a final result must be certified within 30 days of the election. To date, the opposition has refused to submit its rigged tallies to the Supreme Court, not to mention to any other independent authority.

Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro Re-elected Despite US-backed Coup Plotters

Israelism shows the Beauty of Unanticipated Change

A review by Barry Weisleder

Growing up in the Jewish community in 1960s North Toronto I inhaled the pervasive, smothering influence of Zionism. To question the role of the State of Israel was inconceivable then and there. For example, at late-afternoon Hebrew School classes, which I was obliged to attend to prepare for bar mitzvah, the teacher appealed for contributions to the Keren Kayemet LeIsrael, the Jewish National Fund. He did not mention how our nickels and dimes furthered the Apartheid mission of the JNF.

Israelism, a highly acclaimed, powerful documentary (1 hour, 24 minutes, 2023), depicts the massive shift in opinion that erupted recently amongst North American Jews. The beauty of big change in unlikely places provides a lesson to all who deny its possibility.

The Enshittification of Everything

by Andrew Nikiforuk – 15 Jul 2024 – The Tyee

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” — Antonio Gramsci

Last year the American Dialect Society chose as its word of the year “enshittification.”

Cory Doctorow, a clever fellow and Toronto-born internet dude, invented the term to characterize the declining service and products made by IT monopolies that generate armies of algorithms to bully people like storm troopers.

But I think the descriptor has far broader applications. Everywhere you turn, it seems, civilization is facing a massive and cumulative failure of excessive complexity. Enshittification explains the state of just about everything.

UK Dumps Tories, Elects Blairite Labour

Sep 12, 2024 | by Helen Smith

Many people were shocked when the British Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a snap election for July 4 and quite correctly thought that it indicated that he was leaving the country in a shambles. While Sunak bragged that he had wrestled the inflation rate down to 2 per cent, he left a legacy that had sunk the health care system, social services, and utilities to new lows. It is not surprising then that the new Labour government, like the Tony Blair government of 1997-2007, didn’t offer much in the way of ending austerity in its 2024 platform. Apart from the promise to re-nationalize the railways, there was little commitment to building up the public sector other than through private-public joint ventures which threaten to drain the public purse.

The Junius Pamphlet

by V.I. Lenin

At last there has appeared in Germany, illegally, without any adaptation to the despicable Junker censorship, a Social-Democratic pamphlet dealing with questions of the war! The author, who evidently belongs to the “Left-radical” wing of the Party, signs himself Junius[3] (which in Latin means junior) and gave his pamphlet the title: The Crisis of Social-Democracy. Appended are the “Theses on the Tasks of International Social-Democracy,” which have already been submitted to the Berne I.S.C. (International Socialist Committee) and published in No. 3 of its Bulletin; the theses were drafted by the “International” group, which in the spring of 1915 published one issue of a magazine under that title (with articles by Zetkin, Mehring, R. Luxemburg, Thalheimer, Duncker, Ströbel and others), and which in the winter of 1915-16 convened a conference of Social-Democrats from all parts of Germany[4] at which these theses were adopted.

Jewish National Fund of Canada throws fit after losing charitable status

by Yves Engler – The Jewish National Fund of Canada losing its charitable status is a win for Canadian Palestine advocacy. JNF’s pathetic response to the revocation has also helped shine light on a significant Canadian contribution to Palestinian dispossession.

Last week, JNF Canada published a release saying they were launching legal proceedings against Canada’s revenue minister in a last ditch bid to reverse the revocation of their charitable status, which grants the organization a series of financial benefits including the ability to give donors tax receipts. The JNF hyped their suit through Canada Newswire and a statement on their site in the hope of having the minister intervene (while bemoaning outside pressure as the reason the CRA acted against them).

China’s energy and climate situation

China has just experienced its hottest July and the hottest single month since 1961, while rainfall flooding since April 2024 has devastated areas of the country. The annual, average temperature in 2023 was the highest since records began in 190. The Chinese government and the country’s civil defense networks are trying to mitigate environmental disasters as economic planners seek to meet societal needs and demands. The shocks are reverberating globally.

It was 3.44 am on June 19 and Tang Kaili, a housewares retailer in China’s southern city of Guilin, was sound asleep when a short message from the local government appeared on her phone. It was an official alert that an upstream reservoir would begin releasing floodwater at 5 am. Tang slept through it.