Capitalism
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Inflation and financial risk
Is inflation coming back in the major capitalist economies? As the US economy (in particular) and other major economies begin to rebound from the COVID slump of 2020, the talk among mainstream economists is whether inflation in the prices for goods and services in those economies is going to accelerate to the point where central… Continue reading
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UK Crony Capitalism: Misleading Parliament
On 22 February, in the aftermath of the High Court finding that Matt Hancock had broken the law by failing to publish PPE contracts, Boris Johnson told Parliament this: “the contracts are there on the record for everybody to see” and “all the details are on the record” But what he told Parliament was just not true. A large… Continue reading
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Space Colonization Is A Capitalist Perception Management Op
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in a dispute with NASA over whose private space exploration corporation will get the $2.9 billion US government contract to return to the moon. I gleaned this annoying piece of information by way of an obnoxiously sycophantic Atlantic puff piece titled “Elon Musk Is Maybe, Actually, Strangely, Going to Do This Mars Thing”, subtitled… Continue reading
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Biden uses first major address to lay out his program for the working class
In his first speech to a joint session of Congress on April 28, Joe Biden made the calculation that he needed to directly address the needs of the working class. “20 million Americans lost their jobs in the pandemic – working- and middle-class Americans. At the same time, the roughly 650 billionaires in America saw… Continue reading
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60-70% of world’s attention focused on just 10 online domains, according to latest research
Alarming new research into the online economy has found that just 10 domains command the majority of the world’s attention and are on course to grab even more in the coming years. Continue reading
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“Digital” workers don’t delete Marx on May Day
“Digital” economy and work, like the imagined and claimed “4th industrial revolution”, are mesmerizing many scholars that lead them to chorus: “Blue-collars are gone, gone are smoke spewing chimneys, so is Marx”. But, do facts support those scholars’ choir “Cancel Marx” even if data related to blue-collar employees are ignored? Continue reading
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Learning from the mistakes of the USSR
Capitalism is the first, but not the last industrial society in history. This remarkable but cruel mode of production has its feet in the era of the horse drawn carriage and its head in satellites orbiting planets and even exiting our solar system. What took months now takes hours, what took the efforts of thousands… Continue reading
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UK Crony Capitalism: The Judgment is in
Good Law Project is today able to reveal the names of four more companies awarded contracts through the VIP lane: Clandeboye Agencies, P14 Medical, Luxe Lifestyle and Meller Designs. Continue reading
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Not so much oven-ready as ready made curtains for Mr. Johnson
Something interesting is happening in capitalist governance. The capitalist class is closing ranks, regularising and professionalising its rule by squeezing out the populist fools. Instinctively they recognise the class battles which lie ahead and they can no longer tolerate those who flippantly raise the aspirations of the masses and then misgovern. Continue reading
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Politics in Britain is entering a new phase
The successful vaccine roll out by the NHS and Starmer’s right wing gallop has given Johnson a shot in the arm. Polls put the Tories 7% ahead of Labour, and on the 6 March at 13% ahead. But the Brexit fall-out, the Covid “social murder”, the dis-United Kingdom, and the economic crisis all point towards… Continue reading
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21 April 2021: Vaccine capitalism and more
Vaccine capitalism – Penally military refugee camp closes – profiles of Deliveroo and deportation profiteer Evelop/Barceló Group Continue reading
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How Climate Collapse Will Overwhelm The U.S. Military & Jeopardize The State’s Existence
The story of the climate’s deterioration is intertwined with the story of class conflict, with the battle between the revolutionaries and the counterrevolutionaries. Much to the chagrin of U.S. national security technocrats, factors show that the instability and destruction from the climate collapse is most likely going to harm the strategic interests of the counterrevolutionaries… Continue reading
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The Best Intentions of Sir Ronald Cohen: Building the Crypto-Corrals of Social Investment
It’s a tangled web but the bottom line is that social-impact investing, given a big boost by the pandemic and the “Great Reset” planned in its wake, can be made to sound so good that it’s hard to conceive what a dangerous threat it poses: it only “works” by herding and caging. Continue reading
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Trial lawyers accuse Monsanto, Bayer of “pay-to-appeal scheme”
26 April2021 — US Right to Know The lawyers who led the nationwide U.S. Roundup litigation through three trial victories and forced Monsanto owner Bayer AG into an $11 billion settlement have notified a federal court that they have uncovered evidence of fraud in a secret deal between Monsanto and a lone plaintiff’s lawyer who… Continue reading
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US: Economies bent out of shape
Here is a vivid picture of the US economy. It is a body obese with fictitious capital, whose arteries are clogged by debt, limbs that are ulcerated by deindustrialisation, outsize fists from arms spending but with a still functioning brain. This article looks specifically at how the growth of fictitious capital has bent the US… Continue reading
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Football: a people’s sport?
The collapse of the attempt to form a ‘super league’ of top European soccer teams by the billionaire owners of the big clubs is only an interrupted chapter in the story of the commodification of sport into profitable capitalist enterprises, owned and controlled by capital. It is no accident that JP Morgan was the fund manager for… Continue reading
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Gates Unhinged: Dystopian Vision for the Future of Food
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world. Continue reading
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UK Crony Capitalism: David Cameron
The Greensill scandal has once again exposed cronyism right at the heart of Government. The more we learn, the more shocking the revelations become. Continue reading
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IMF and debt: a new consensus?
There is much talk among ‘progressive’ economists that the IMF and the World Bank have turned over a new leaf. Gone are the days of supporting fiscal austerity, demanding that national governments get public debt levels down and insisting on conditions for countries borrowing IMF-WB funds that their governments privatise their state assets, deregulate markets… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 