Leftnews.org | News and Views from the Left

by Editors — last modified 2018-05-01T13:01:25-04:00
Contributors: Faiz Ahmed, JBB, Graham H. Cox, R. Dubois, JA Cox
The best of the political left-wing from around the web.

Canada Pension Plan invests millions in private prison corporations

— by JBB — last modified Oct 15, 2018 01:16 PM
Brent Patterson | The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board holds $5.9 million of stock in two U.S.-based private prison corporations, Geo Group (formerly associated with Wackenhut Corrections Corporation) and CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America). The Crown corporation, which millions of Canadians outside of Quebec pay into for their retirement income, holds about $1.7 million in shares in Tennessee-based CoreCivic and about $4.2 million in shares in Florida-based Geo Group.
Read More…

We Need More Than $15

— by JBB — last modified Oct 15, 2018 01:06 PM
Jonathan Rosenblum | Jacobin | Jeff Bezos doesn’t deserve any praise for the recent raise at Amazon — not least because $15 isn’t anywhere near enough.
Read More…

Brazil’s Bolsonaro-Led Far Right Wins a Victory Far More Sweeping and Dangerous Than Anyone Predicted. Its Lessons Are Global. | Intercept

— by Graham H. Cox — last modified Oct 13, 2018 10:05 AM
"For the past thirty years, Congressman Jair Bolsonaro was a fringe extremist in Brazilian politics, known mostly for outlandish, deliberately inflammatory quotes in which he paid homage to the most notorious torturers of the 1964-1985 military regime, constantly heralded the 1964 coup as a “defense of democracy,” told a female socialist colleague in Congress that she was too ugly to “deserve” his rape, announced that he’d rather learn that his son died in a car accident than was gay, and said he conceived a daughter after having four sons only due to a “moment of weakness.” (Last September, he used Google to translate a Brazilian epithet for LGBTs to, in essence, call me a faggot on Twitter)."-- Glenn Greenwald
Read More…

Puerto Ricans want a clean and just energy future | Equal Times

— by Graham H. Cox — last modified Oct 10, 2018 08:20 AM
"“It is possible to create a new energy model in Puerto Rico where the utilities remain a public good and public investments are made to repair and update old failing infrastructure, while new infrastructure is built for a renewable energy future, all of which can be done and maintained by public sector workers,” says Irene Shen of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED), a global, multi-sector initiative to advance the democratic direction and control of energy."
Read More…

Climate change and growth – Nordhaus and Romer | Michael Roberts

— by Graham H. Cox — last modified Oct 09, 2018 03:07 PM
"These discount rates are central to any discussion. Most current models of climate-change impacts make two flawed assumptions: that people will be much wealthier in the future and that lives in the future are less important than lives now. The former assumption ignores the great risks of severe damage and disruption to livelihoods from climate change. The latter assumption is ‘discrimination by date of birth’. It is a value judgement that is rarely scrutinized, difficult to defend and in conflict with most moral codes."
Read More…

Understanding the Global Rise of the Extreme Right

— by JBB — last modified Oct 09, 2018 08:41 AM
by Walden Bello | CounterPunch | Just a few years ago, the idea that the extreme right would come to power in what were regarded as stable liberal democracies would have been dismissed not only by liberals but by more left-wing progressives. Yet, in just eight years, 2010-2018, the world has seen the extreme right move from being outside the corridors of power to the center of power itself.
Read More…
Document Actions