SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
April, 03 2009, 12:30pm EDT
Friday April, 03 2009, 12:30pm EDT
Contact:
Taruna Godric
416-916-5202 ext 432
smcommunications@
Can G20 Avert the Crisis?
Leo Panitch: G20 trying to patch up the 'old world order'
WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON - Following
the G20 summit yesterday, British Prime Minister Brown made the announcement
that a "new world order is emerging" that will allow the global society
to be more open, fair and sustainable.
However, it sounds more like a plan to try to keep the same
world order that was around in the 80s and 90s according to Leo
Panitch, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York University and the author of American Empire and the Political Economy of International Finance.
"It's impressive that the 19 leading
world states...and the European Union have not fallen apart during this
tremendous crisis and they've come together with an agreement around a
bunch of rhetoric, but also around some measures," said Panitch.
The rhetoric is that the countries
are in this together, which is significant considering that in the
economic struggle of the 30s the capitalist governments all turned on
each other. Since then the same class and state structures exist.
The measures being taken is a provision of $500-billion to
the International Monetary Fund since exorbitant interest rates have
stalled international trade.
"This is not
the kind of thing that's going to get us out of this problem," Panitch
said. "The central problem is that banks aren't lending. And all of the
brew ha ha in the run up to this meeting about whether there was going
to be more regulation for when the banks start lending again, 'cause
right now it's doesn't matter. It's not like they're engaged in
speculation. They aren't speculating. They aren't lending at any level
of risk. And the fiscal stimulus doesn't address that either.The
trouble with the fiscal stimulus is that unless the banks are lending
then the multiplier effect of that fiscal stimulus doesn't kick in.
There's nothing that the G20 is doing that is really addressing that
except ensuring that the bankers don't get more frightened."
Watch the full story on our website:
The Real News Network is a television news and documentary network focused on providing independent and uncompromising journalism. Our staff, in collaboration with courageous journalists around the globe, will investigate, report and debate stories on the critical issues of our times. We are viewer supported and do not accept advertising, government or corporate funding.
LATEST NEWS
To Counter Trump, Coalition Launches People's AI Action Plan
"The White House AI Action Plan is written by Big Tech interests invested in advancing AI that's used on us, not by us. Today, we are reclaiming agency over the trajectory AI will take."
Jul 22, 2025
In anticipation of U.S. President Donald Trump's Artificial Intelligence Action Plan, over 90 groups focused on consumer protection, economic and environmental justice, labor, and more came together Tuesday to call for an AI blueprint that "delivers on public well-being, shared prosperity, a sustainable future, and security for all."
"We can't let Big Tech and Big Oil lobbyists write the rules for AI and our economy at the expense of our freedom and equality, workers and families' well-being, even the air we breathe and the water we drink—all of which are affected by the unrestrained and unaccountable rollout of AI," says the coalition's website for the new People's AI Action Plan.
"The American people need good, stable jobs, functioning public institutions, safe online spaces for children, and clean, affordable, safe, and reliable energy," the site says. "The American economy needs robust innovation, a level playing field for all, and relief from the tech monopolies who repeatedly sacrifice the interests of everyday people for their own profits."
The site features "actionable ideas for an AI agenda that meets the needs of everyday people," highlighting campaigns and reports from coalition members, including Accountable Tech, AI Now Institute, Color of Change, Demand Progress Education Fund, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Friends of the Earth, MediaJustice, National Nurses United, New Disabled South, Open Markets Institute, and Public Citizen.
The 90+ organizations supporting a People's AI Action Plan all have concrete, actionable ideas for an AI agenda that furthers the interests of everyday people and challenges the tech billionaire agenda we’ll see from the White House. Learn more about them: peoplesaiaction.com
[image or embed]
— EPIC (@epic.org) July 22, 2025 at 11:46 AM
"The White House AI Action Plan is written by Big Tech interests invested in advancing AI that's used on us, not by us," said AI Now Institute co-executive directors Sarah Myers West and Amba Kak in a statement. "Today, we are reclaiming agency over the trajectory AI will take: It's time for a People's Action Plan for AI that puts the needs of everyday Americans over corporate profits."
Trump started the process for his AI Action Plan with a January executive order. It is expected to be released on Wednesday.
Citing unnamed sources, Axios reported last week that "the plan largely lays out the Trump administration's aspirations for AI, some of which officials have already stated, including: promoting innovation, reducing regulatory burdens, and overhauling permitting."
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy spokesperson Victoria LaCivita said in an email to Axios that it "will deliver a strong, specific, and actionable federal policy roadmap that goes beyond the details reported here and we look forward to releasing it soon."
According to Monday reporting from Politico, "The AI Action Plan will include cutting back environmental requirements and streamlining permitting policies to make it easier to build data centers and power infrastructure."
Also on Monday, Nextgov/FCW—which obtained documents and spoke with unnamed sources—reported that "Trump plans to sign three AI-focused executive orders in the runup to the release of the administration's sweeping AI Action Plan."
"Each order focuses on one of three aspects of artificial intelligence regulation and policy that the administration has prioritized: spearheading AI-ready infrastructure; establishing and promoting a U.S. technology export regime; and ensuring large language models are not generating 'woke' or otherwise biased information," according to Nextgov/FCW.
Experts will tell you: The growth of AI doesn't have to mean Big Tech + Big Oil write the rules as they have for this White House. It does not have to mean less freedom + equality. Or more pollution + scarcity. Join us in putting people first in AI: peoplesaiaction.com
[image or embed]
— Open Markets Institute (@openmarkets.bsky.social) July 22, 2025 at 11:06 AM
J.B. Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, stressed on Tuesday that "AI is already harming workers, consumers, and communities—and instead of enforcing guardrails, this administration is gutting oversight."
Branch pointed to a recent vote in the U.S. Senate to remove a controversial provision that would have prevented state-level regulation of AI for a decade from Republicans' budget reconciliation package, which Trump signed on July 4.
"After the AI moratorium was defeated 99-1 under massive public pressure, the message from the public was clear: No more handouts for Trump's tech bro buddies," Branch said. "We need rules and accountability—not a Silicon Valley free-for-all."
'Deep Hole of Their Own Creation': Trump Social Security Administration Cuts Come Back to Bite
"It really is a manufactured crisis as a result of past changes that just continue to just make everything worse, sadly," said Jessica LaPointe, who works at a Social Security field office in Madison, Wisconsin.
Jul 22, 2025
The staffing cuts made by the Trump administration at the Social Security Administration are reportedly coming back to bite them as the agency continues to struggle with serving beneficiaries in a timely manner.
A new report from NPR finds that the administration has been shifting more SSA workers to man the agency's national 800 phone number after staffing reductions from earlier this year led to significantly increased wait times for callers. In all, the agency estimates that 4% of frontline SSA workers have been at least temporarily moved to help handle 800 number calls.
While the SSA claims that this has reduced wait times for callers, experts and current SSA employees who spoke with NPR warned that they will only create problems in other areas over the long haul.
"They are in a deep hole of their own creation on staffing and so you just don't have enough people to go around to serve the public," Kathleen Romig, a former SSA official and current director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told NPR. "And so all you can really do at this point is rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic."
Nicole Morio, a field office worker in Staten Island, told NPR that the staff cuts have led to a workforce that is burned out and overwhelmed.
"The stress level is probably at a maximum for everyone," she said. "At one point I think we were doing the work of 1.8 people. Now it seems as though we're doing the work of 10 to 15."
Jessica LaPointe, who works at a Social Security field office in Madison, Wisconsin, expressed a similar sentiment in an interview with NPR.
"If [SSA employees] decided not to take the buyout incentives that were offered in March, then now they're just leaving to save their mental health as their work keeps piling up," said LaPointe, who also serves as president of a local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union that represents 25,000 workers. "It really is a manufactured crisis as a result of past changes that just continue to just make everything worse, sadly."
LaPointe also dismissed the administration's spin on the situation and said "there's no indication that this is getting better," and that "we have an agency not listening to the workers."
Even if the administration's claims about improving call wait times are accurate, critics note that it's become much more difficult to see how such improvements are impacting the rest of the agency given that it recently removed assorted real-time metrics that had once been tracked on its website.
So far, an estimated 4,600 SSA employees have left the agency since March, and the Trump administration has pushed plans to reduce the staff by a total of 7,000 employees all together, which would represent a 12% cut in its workforce since the start of the year.
Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, argued in an op-ed for Common Dreams last week that "total collapse" of the Social Security system is the end-goal of President Donald Trump and his Republican allies.
"Republican politicians hate effective government programs, because they don't make any money for their paymasters on Wall Street," Lawson wrote. "Since Social Security is the most popular and effective government program, they hate it most of all—and are doing everything they can to destroy it."
'Deep Deception': Report Details How Deep-Sea Mining Industry Exploits National Security Fears
"Mining the deep ocean in defiance of international consensus," said one retired defense official, "would erode U.S. credibility, fracture alliances, and set a dangerous precedent for unilateral resource exploitation."
Jul 22, 2025
As officials meet in Jamaica for a summit on the international seabed this week, a new report by the climate action group Greenpeace details how the deep-sea mining industry—failing to make a convincing case that its exploitation of the deep sea is necessary for a green energy transition—is trying a new strategy: lobbying Congress with the intent of classifying mining on the ocean floor as a national security priority.
In the Monday report, titled Deep Deception: How the Deep Sea Mining Industry is Manipulating Geopolitics to Profit from Ocean Destruction, Greenpeace describes how firms like the Metals Company (TMC), a Canada-based mining company, have spent years trying to convince policymakers around the world that mining in the deep ocean for minerals like copper, nickel, manganese, and cobalt is essential to manufacture electric vehicle batteries for a green transition.
But much of the key data underpinning that argument was produced by mining companies themselves or published by academic journals with financial interests in the industry, and support for the sector from electric carmakers has waned in recent years as the industry has failed to prove it can mine the ocean floor "in a way that ensures the effective protection of the marine environment," as one statement calling for a moratorium read.
Confronted with growing opposition to the notion that deep-sea mining—in which companies use equipment to comb the habitat of tens of thousands of species and potentially spread mining waste for miles—can serve as a key climate solution, Greenpeace said, "these fickle deep-sea entrepreneurs are jumping ship."
Now "they are eager to embrace politically opportunistic 'national security' storylines," reads the report.
"For TMC, the green transition was always a false narrative," said Arlo Hemphill, project lead for the Stop Deep-Sea Mining campaign at Greenpeace USA. "The numbers just didn't add up to justify opening the world's last unspoiled wilderness to mass-scale extractive exploitation. Now, the industry is repackaging itself as essential to national security and defense, exploiting real geopolitical tensions for personal profit. It's a dangerous and unnecessary strategy that could destroy the international seabed to enrich a few."
The report was released as the International Seabed Authority (ISA) convened in Kingston, Jamaica for its 30th Assembly, with governments under heavy pressure from the deep-sea mining industry to fast-track a Mining Code under which they could move forward with ramping up operations—even as 37 states and nearly 1,000 international scientists now support a moratorium on deep-sea mining.
As the ISA began its meeting on Monday, Pew Environment explained the risks carried by deep-sea mining—from noise and light pollution to the endangerment of species scientists haven't yet discovered.
"The deep sea is one of Earth's most pristine and fragile ecosystems," said Grace Evans, senior associate of ocean governance at Pew Charitable Trusts. "Once we damage it, we can't go back."
TMC began "targeting defense and industrial policy stakeholders" in 2022 as it was still pushing its green energy transition narrative.
The company spent nearly half a million dollars over two years to hire lobbying firms to influence votes on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in 2023 and 2024—and succeeded in pushing the Department of Defense (DOD) to deliver a report "assessing the processing of seabed resources of polymetallic nodules domestically."
TMC's lobbying push also convinced 31 Republican members of Congress to write to then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in 2023, asking him "to develop a plan to address the national security ramifications of [China's] interest and investment in seabed mining."
In March, TMC announced it would seek permits from the U.S. to mine the international deep sea under American authorization—a move that "brazenly" bypassed international treaties and consensus, said Greenpeace.
Greenpeace's report comes four months after that application and three months after President Donald Trump signed an executive order signaling the government's intent to "rapidly" develop and invest in U.S. capabilities to explore and collect seabed mineral resources through "streamlined permitting," with the White House asserting the U.S. "has a core national security and economic interest in maintaining leadership in deep-sea science and technology and seabed mineral resources."
"We will not stand by while a neocolonial deep-sea land grab takes place that will harm our communities, disrupt our cultural connection to the ocean, and endanger our livelihoods."
Under the order, the Trump administration signaled its "readiness to unilaterally authorize deep sea mining in both U.S. and international waters," reads the Greenpeace report—potentially violating the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the U.S. has not signed.
Days after the order was signed, TMC applied to the U.S. government for deep-sea mining exploration licenses and commercial mining permits. The Greenpeace report details how the Trump administration and companies including TMC are working together to once again promote a false narrative about the necessity of deep-sea mining—one that is actually meant to provide "a lifeline for an industry in crisis."
Global defense industries "likely represent only a tiny fraction of overall global consumption" of the metals found in polymetallic nodules in the deep sea, according to the report—meaning that as with the electric auto industry, the defense sector's true demand for deep-sea mining is much smaller than the industry and the Trump administration would have the public believe.
"The U.S. defense demand stands for a tiny percentage of our domestic consumption of critical metals. And to be honest, U.S. defense is not a big user of anything," Jack Lifton, executive director of the Critical Minerals Institute, told Greenpeace. "Given what the defense industry and the DOD and the different contractors are doing in terms of securing metals from elsewhere, friendshoring, reshoring, recycling, there is no need to mine the seabed for cobalt or nickel or rare earths."
While metals that can be accessed through deep-sea mining do have military uses, "the scale of this military use is relatively modest compared to global civilian demand—dwarfed by the commercial manufacturing sector," reads the report.
For example, the U.S. currently imports manganese ore from Gabon, South Africa, and Mexico, and "a substantial deep sea mining development could nearly double the global supply of manganese in its first year, resulting in an immediate oversupply" and a reduction in the value of the metal and the global mining operation. The U.S. also already has a stockpile of 322,000 tons of manganese in Arizona.
In a foreword to the Greenpeace report, retired U.S. Army Major General Randy Manner wrote that "the bedrock of national security" lies in "global stability, the rule of law, and ecological resilience"—not in accumulating new minerals and weaponry.
"Mining the deep ocean in defiance of international consensus would degrade all three. It would erode U.S. credibility, fracture alliances, and set a dangerous precedent for unilateral resource exploitation," said Manner.
In the Pacific region—where deep-sea mining companies aim to operate—several states and leaders have called for a ban. moratorium, or precautionary pause on the practice, with Pacific Island Heritage Coalition Chair Solomon P. Kaho'ohalahala warning that "the Pacific is not a sacrifice zone."
"We will not stand by while a neocolonial deep-sea land grab takes place that will harm our communities, disrupt our cultural connection to the ocean, and endanger our livelihoods," said Kaho'ohalahala. "This July, ISA member states must make it clear where they stand—for their foundational principles of equity, multilateralism, and environmental protection or unbounded corporate greed."
At the ISA meeting in Kingston, Greenpeace International campaigner Louisa Casson said governments around the world "have sent a clear signal that the deep-sea mining industry will not get international approval any time soon"—even amid industry pressure and the Trump administration's push.
TMC's application to the U.S. "shatters" the firm's credibility "and serves as a stark warning to others considering this reckless path."
"Governments have also reaffirmed that there should be no deep sea mining in the global oceans while major political and scientific questions remain unresolved," said Casson. "Deep sea mining is a dangerous gamble we cannot afford, and the only responsible way forward is a global moratorium."
Most Popular
We cover the issues the corporate media never will.
Please support our journalism.