Portside

The AI boom wasn’t built for the polycrisis.

Burdened by decades of neocolonialism and corruption, Senegal faces an all-too-familiar dilemma faced by countries across the Global South: how to pursue sovereign development under the weight of debt.

America’s current credit rating masks a fatal contradiction, and a downgrade is the only honest assessment of an empire in decline. The expanding war in Iran and the subsequent crisis in the Strait of Hormuz have fractured global energy supply chain

Former TitleMax store managers told ProPublica and The Current about how they were trained to keep customers unaware of the true costs of their title pawns. When they were more transparent, they faced repercussions.

For many low-income and minority Americans, automobiles have been turbo-boosted engines of inequality, immobilizing their owners with debt, increasing their exposure to hostile law enforcement, and in general accelerating the forces that drive apart haves and have-nots.

While industrial capitalism got rid of the landlord class, capitalism still had economic rent, but instead of being paid to the landlord class, it is now paid to the banks in the form of interest.

Queen Elizabeth is celebrating her Platinum Jubilee of 70 years on the throne. Even before cost of living crisis, the poor owed the government – or, the Crown – £16bn. Why not just write it off?

The peace movement challenged as never before

There are a lot of root causes to Puerto Rico’s debt. But one overarching part of this narrative is the fact that Puerto Rico has been a colony of the United States since 1898.