June 1982. A powerful Italian banker tied to the Vatican is discovered hanging beneath London’s Blackfriars Bridge—pockets weighted with bricks, cash on him, and a passport under an alias. Was it suicide or an execution tied to one of Europe’s wildest finance scandals?
This video breaks down the fall of Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican Bank’s entanglement, the secret P2 lodge, mafia allegations, and how multiple inquests shifted the “suicide” narrative toward murder—yet no one was ever convicted
In a 2015 interview with Yahoo News, Carpenter said that They Live is “a documentary. It’s not science-fiction.” Conceived during Reaganomics, the story examines a society obsessed with consumerism and greed. The villains are aliens from another planet and represented the Reagan Republican government and greedy bankers of the 80s.
According to Carpenter, it has only gotten worse. “It’s morphed into something really bizarre. The same problem – unrestrained capitalism – still exists. Everything is built to make a profit.”
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When Nada puts on the special sunglasses, he is bombarded with subliminal messages hidden within the pages of magazines, on billboards, and in other forms of advertisement. Nothing is left to the imagination when humans are subliminally told to Consume, Obey, Buy, Conform, Stay Asleep, Do Not Question Authority, No Independent Thought, and Money is Your God!
Carpenter created They Live as a warning against greed and propaganda. While filming, Carpenter was surprised by people not noticing or paying attention to the props with subliminal messages. As if it was normal.
Privatisation in Nigeria’s utilities has been a cautionary tale. Since the 2013 electricity sector reforms, tariffs have skyrocketed, blackouts persist, and jobs have dwindled – leaving millions without affordable access. Similar patterns in water and waste sectors exacerbate inequality, particularly for low-income and rural communities. The summit’s discussions revealed how these policies, often backed by global lenders, undermine worker rights and public accountability.
The United Nations has warned that Gaza faces a “human-made abyss” and that rebuilding the territory could cost more than $70 billion over several decades, The Guardian reported. A report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) highlighted that Israel’s military operations have “significantly undermined every pillar of survival” for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, leaving the population in “extreme, multidimensional impoverishment.”
UNCTAD noted that Gaza’s economy contracted by 87% between 2023 and 2024, reducing GDP per capita to just $161, among the lowest in the world. The West Bank has also suffered from economic decline, attributed to violence, settlement expansion, and restrictions on worker mobility. The report added that withholding of fiscal transfers by Israel has limited the Palestinian Authority’s ability to provide essential services or invest in recovery, at a time when urgent rebuilding and crisis response are needed.
The effort appears mostly driven by national security concerns, particularly a desire for the government to prop up strategic industries and lessen America’s reliance on foreign countries like China for key resources. Some officials are hopeful the equity stakes will generate a windfall for taxpayers, but the likelihood of that is unclear. Many of the companies are facing financial headwinds, and some could take years to become profitable.
The unusual government intervention into the private market is fueling some concerns, including the opacity of the process, the potential for favoritism, corruption and market distortions, along with the possible loss of taxpayer funds should the investments fail.
Aaron Bartnick, a fellow at Columbia University and a former Biden White House official, said there were serious questions about whether the government role in private industry would address national security vulnerabilities and deliver a return on taxpayer dollars.
“In the absence of a clearly articulated strategy,” he said, the concern was that “this could just devolve to arbitrary deals that favor friends or disfavor foes.”
In a report ahead of the G20 meetings in Johannesburg, hosted by the South African government later this month, the expert panel said the gap in global wealth between rich and poor will widen over the next decade without a permanent monitoring group such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the report, commissioned by the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, found inequality growing in more than eight in 10 of the world’s countries.
The report said 83% of all countries, accounting for 90% of the world’s population, met the World Bank’s definition of high inequality. It added that countries with high inequality were seven times more likely to experience democratic decline than more equal countries.
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The report said new analysis showed that between 2000 and 2024, the world’s top 1% captured 41% of all new wealth, while only 1% went to the bottom 50%.
The committee said a groundbreaking study by the Italian economist Salvatore Morelli showed as much as $70tn of wealth would be passed to the next generations by 2035.
“Wealth inequalities have a forward momentum, as compound interest increases fortunes and, in the absence of effective inheritance taxes, wealth is handed down from one generation to another, undermining social mobility and economic efficiency,” it said.
The Whitlam government’s removal took place amid immense worldwide political instability that triggered ruling class fears of social revolution, including in Australia.
The period from 1968 to 1975 was marked by the most convulsive uprisings of the international working class since the aftermath of World War II. Not only was US imperialism facing opposition at home and internationally to its barbaric neo-colonial war in Vietnam. Workers internationally were on the offensive, demanding higher wages and better conditions.
In May-June 1968, France was convulsed by an indefinite general strike that brought the government of President Charles De Gaulle’s regime to its knees and it only survived with the assistance of the Stalinist Communist Party. In Italy, a wave of strikes erupted in what became known as the “Hot Autumn” of 1969. In 1970, the social democratic-Stalinist “Popular Unity” coalition Allende government was elected in Chile on the basis of a raft of populist promises to ameliorate social conditions.
In 1974, workers’ struggles erupted in Britain, culminating in the bringing down of the Heath Conservative government. In the same year, President Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 as US imperialism and its puppet government plunged toward final defeat in Vietnam in April 1975. In Europe, military and fascist dictatorships fell one after another in Portugal, Greece and Spain from 1974 to 1976, amid mass popular opposition.
These political upheavals were fuelled by a deep crisis of the profit system internationally, as the post-World War II boom was coming to an end. The ability of US imperialism to stabilise global capitalism based on its own overwhelming economic domination and the betrayals by Stalinism of the post-war, working-class upsurge was ending. International trade and financial arrangements had been underpinned by the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which made the US dollar a world currency convertible to gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce.
In August 1971, facing inflation at home and a looming international run on gold, Nixon ended the gold backing for the US dollar, destabilising the global monetary system. That gave rise to stagflation—soaring inflation and unemployment—intensified by the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973–74 and the worst worldwide recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The great English historian, Christopher Hill, writing on the causes of the English revolution pointed out that despite the bravery of the revolutionists they were unable to overcome the monarchy’s blocking of reforms because they had a “stop in the mind” they believed in the dominant ideology of the time that the King was King by “divine right” he was God’s representative on earth. It’s hard to challenge that. But that ideology was shattered when along came Cromwell who suggested they cut off the King’s head and see what happens. The ideology was a sham and a new day was born.
At the heart of the IMF’s findings is the concept of “state capture”, where, according to the fund, corruption becomes the norm and, in fact, the primary means of governance. The report argues that the Pakistani state apparatus is frequently used to enrich specific groups at the expense of the broader public.
The report estimates that “elite privilege” – defined as access to subsidies, tax relief and lucrative state contracts for a select few – drains billions of dollars from the economy annually, while tax evasion and regulatory capture crowd out genuine private sector investment.
These findings echo a 2021 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, which said economic privileges granted to Pakistan’s elite groups, including politicians and the powerful military, amount to roughly 6 percent of the country’s economy.
Ali Hasanain, an associate professor of economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, said the IMF’s description of elite capture is accurate but added that it was “hardly a revelation”.
He pointed to the 2021 UNDP report and other domestic studies that describe how Pakistan’s economic system has long served politically connected actors who secure “preferential access to land, credit, tariffs and regulatory exemptions.”
“The IMF diagnostic repeats what many domestic studies, including those by the World Bank and Pakistan’s own institutions, have already emphasised: Powerful interests shape rules to maintain their advantage,” he told Al Jazeera.
For a long time, we were warned that a cost of living crisis would be coming.
That is happening now.
For a long time, we were warned that delinquency rates would rise because consumers were piling up too much debt.
That is happening now.
For a long time, we were warned that foreclosure filings would surge when the current housing bubble started to burst.
That is happening now.
For a long time, we were warned that cryptocurrency prices would plummet.
Now more than a trillion dollars in cryptocurrency wealth has been wiped out.
Another thing that we have been relentlessly warned about is the weakness of the labor market.
Today, we learned that “the pace of layoffs has picked up over the past four weeks”…