This unequal exchange leads to truly massive net transfers from South to North. In the final year of data, we see the following:

A net South-North flow of 12 billion tons of embodied materials, and 21 Exajoules of embodied energy. According to recent research, this quantity of materials and energy would be enough to provide infrastructure and supplies to provision decent living standards – universal healthcare, education, modern housing, sanitation, electricity, heating/cooling, induction stoves, refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, public transit, computers, and mobile phones – for the entire population of the global South, but instead it is siphoned away for consumption and accumulation in the core.

A net flow of 820 million hectares of embodied land. This is twice the size of India. This land could be used to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, but instead it is used to produce things like sugar for Coca-Cola and beef for McDonald's, consumed in the North.

A net flow of 826 billion hours of embodied labour. That’s more than the total annual labour rendered by the entire workforce of the US and European Union combined. That labour could be used to staff hospitals and schools in the global South, and produce food and goods for local needs, but instead it is used to churn out tech gadgets and fast fashion for Northern corporations.

These results reveal that the high levels of consumption and growth in the core rely heavily on net appropriation from the South, today just as much as during the colonial era. In the case of materials and labour, around half of the total consumption in the core is net-appropriated from the South.

https://progressive.international/wire/2025-04-18-china-unequal-exchange-and-the-present-world-historic-juncture/en

And yet, Israel has bombed not only hospitals, but also water towers, bakeries, schools, and cemeteries. The World Health Organization confirms that 95 percent of pregnant and nursing women in Gaza face starvation. Starvation became a weapon of war. Since the start of Ramadan in March, all aid convoys have been denied.

Over 80 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure lies in ruins. Thirty-seven million tons of debris have replaced what were once homes, clinics, classrooms, and kitchens. Entire neighborhoods destroyed.

Hind Rajab was 6 years old. Her family’s car was hit in Gaza City. She was the only one who survived. For hours, she hid among the corpses: “They are all dead around me,” she said. “I’m so scared.” The ambulance sent to save her was shelled. Her body was found days later, charred and lifeless.

In the West Bank, the machinery of elimination moves in different forms. Children are executed at checkpoints. Israel remains the only country in the world that systematically detains and tries minors in military courts. Human Rights Watch has documented the torture of children in Israeli prisons. In 2023 alone, Israeli forces killed at least 111 Palestinian children in the West Bank.

https://theintercept.com/2025/05/15/israel-palestine-gaza-women-children-genocide-nakba/

In 2021, Bukele upended El Salvador’s judicial system by replacing top Supreme Court judges and hundreds of lower court judges with loyalists and ousted the country’s attorney general who had opposed his policies. To the public, Bukele framed the moves as anti-corruption measures, referring to the governmental system as “Los mismos de siempre,” or, “The same as always,” reminiscent of Trump’s “Drain the swamp” slogan of his first term.

No longer with judicial constraints, Bukele responded by shepherding a new law through the country’s legislature that declared a state of emergency. The law, known as the State of Exception, suspended many civil rights, including due process, legal representation, and freedom of assembly. He then mobilized police and military into largely low-income neighborhoods controlled by gangs.

https://theintercept.com/2025/05/09/trump-bukele-kilmar-abrego-garcia-el-salvador-cecot-prison/

Employee-owned firms exist in Canada, although there are a relatively small number of them. Friesens, which operates in Manitoba, is one of Canada’s leading book printers. They are employee-owned and democratic. Shift Delivery is a worker cooperative and bike-powered delivery firm serving Vancouver. PCL Construction and Chandos Construction are 100 percent employee-owned.

And democratic employee ownership is popular across the political spectrum. A recent US survey found that a majority of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents support the concept of employee ownership and would prefer working for a firm owned by employees.

Democratic employee-owned firms are more grounded in their communities. Employee-owners who have homes, families, and friends to consider are unlikely to vote to move their businesses out of their communities in response to tariffs or other economic shocks. Nor are they going to run around the globe looking for the cheapest labor force. Democratic employee-owned firms also have a track record of weathering economic adversity and facing it with creativity. They are less likely to fail during a recession and more likely to maintain employment and wages for their workers, which also means they can help maintain macroeconomic stability for the wider economy. Research shows that democratic employee-owned firms can be just as or more competitive and profitable than conventional businesses. And they are more likely to distribute wealth more equitably, reducing inequality both within firms and across society. Wealth, of course, makes it easier for people to weather economic adversity.

Additionally, when adopting labor-saving AI technologies — another potential threat to Canada’s workers — employee-owners are positioned to share in the firm’s profits and benefit from efficiencies. When jobs and incomes are protected through employee ownership, AI systems have the potential to make work safer, easier, and more productive. When workers are not in the driver’s seat, however, there’s more danger that AI systems could put people out of jobs and deepen economic inequality.

The Canadian government should act quickly to support and incubate democratic employee-owned firms. There are many actionable policies available that have been tried and tested around the world.

In 2024, Canada’s federal government passed legislation to support EOTs. EOTs hold the shares of a firm in trust for the benefit of the firm’s employees. EOTs make it easier for business owners to sell their firms to their employees, with the purchase price paid out of the firm’s profits over several years, meaning there is no out-of-pocket cost to employees. Grantbook, a company that advises philanthropic foundations, became the first Canadian company to convert to an EOT in January 2025.

The federal government has instituted a partial tax exemption on capital gains realized through the sales of conventional firms to EOTs. This policy creates an incentive for business owners to pursue this option when planning their succession. As a next step, this exemption should be made permanent and extended to worker cooperatives. These tax breaks may be justified by the larger social and economic benefits associated with employee-ownership.

Canada could create a public investment bank with a mandate to cultivate democratic employee-owned firms and provide incentives for conventional banks to lend to these firms. Governments should also ensure that democratic employee-owned firms are eligible for — and prioritized in — existing public investment funds and business support programs. When businesses are being sold or shuttered, workers could be afforded a right of first refusal to purchase them.

Additional tax incentives for democratic employee ownership are also worth considering, e,g, setting lower corporate income tax rates for these firms and providing personal income tax deductions for workers who put their savings toward creating new worker cooperatives.

jacobin.com/2025/05/democratic-workplaces-ownership-control-stability/

For example, an analysis of voting preferences recently presented by two Polish sociologists from Warsaw’s SWPS, Mikołaj Cześnik and Oliwia Szczupska, shows that social class significantly influences the differential support for Tusk’s broad-tent Civic Coalition (KO) and the Left, as compared to right-populist PiS. Belonging to the middle or upper class increases the likelihood of supporting KO and the Left, with the upper class showing a particularly strong preference for KO, even considering control variables. Both the middle and upper classes consistently express stable support for left-wing forces. This leads to a paradox, already described in previous research, that the lower classes around Central and Eastern Europe tend to vote for the far right, despising leftist proposals.

Polish politics, then, is not driven by class positions but by the performance of representation. Even in the heyday of Solidarność or during the transition period, the Left was given voice not by workers but by intellectuals and urban professionals speaking in their name. This has not changed. Left-wing forces today — both Biejat’s and Zandberg’s — are still coalitions of the educated, the managerial, and the downwardly mobile middle class.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/poland-elections-class-rezem-lewica/

Over the last eight years of Trump mania, news coverage has become increasingly sensationalist and facile, focusing less on stories that affect ordinary Americans and lively, high-quality debate about pressing issues than on the next outrageous installment in the Trump saga. Even stations that are critical of Trump allow his bombastic provocations to set the parameters of their coverage. American political media is increasingly difficult to distinguish from a Trump reality show — and functionally close to useless for educating citizens, exposing them to thoughtful articulations of new perspectives, and equipping them to participate in democracy.

Robert McChesney mapped out clear plans for news and info systems that work for all with a system called he called “democratic media,” with outlets funded by the public but free from both market greed and state meddling.

McChesney’s most fully realized proposal, created with John Nichols, is the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI):
- it'd distribute federal funding for journalism democratically at the county level, by allocating about 0.15 percent of GDP annually (roughly $34 billion) to this project, amounting to $100 per person in each county
- This approach draws inspiration from an American tradition: in the 19th century, postal subsidies for newspaper delivery effectively represented 0.21 percent of GDP. We understood then that delivering reliable and accurate information to American citizens was a fundamental component of a functioning democracy and worth pooling our resources to pay for.
- The key innovation is that citizens themselves would determine how funds are distributed. Every three years, adults would receive three votes to allocate among qualified nonprofit news organizations in their county. This multivote system would deliberately encourage media diversity, as no single outlet could receive more than 25 percent of a county’s funding. To qualify, organizations must be locally based nonprofits, operating for at least six months, producing original content regularly, and maintaining independence from larger entities.
- Administered by the US Postal Service, the LJI would establish no government editorial oversight — the only controls would be basic qualification requirements and citizen voting. All content produced using these funds would be freely available online. The system would revive competition in local journalism, replacing the “one newspaper town” model that dominated the late twentieth century with multiple independent voices in each community.
- Pickard offers complementary proposals that address media reform at a more structural level. He envisions a “public option” for journalism. At the funding layer, he proposes a national trust fund of approximately $30 billion annually, supported through multiple revenue streams including taxes on communication oligopolies, proceeds from spectrum sales, and levies on platform monopolies like Facebook and Google
- Particularly relevant to the current debate over NPR and PBS is Pickard’s idea that a public media system would allow journalists to “practice the craft that led them to the profession in the first place.” He calls for worker-run cooperatives and collective ownership models, strengthened by robust unions that democratize newsrooms from within.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/public-media-journalism-npr-pbs/

These challenges must be the focus of the labor left’s energies in the months and years to come. It goes without saying that workplace organizing remains a key task. But something fundamental must also change in the labor left’s electoral orientation. At the very least, a much more confrontational approach toward a party that has actively encouraged class dealignment is needed.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/dealignment-democrats-clinton-obama-trump/