Capitalism
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Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism, Part 2
8 March 2021 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism Plundering a New Found Land While treasure fleets carried silver to Spain, far more ships were carrying men, fish and whale oil across the North Atlantic. Part One discussed the development of fish as a mass food commodity, and the Dutch use of factory ships in the… Continue reading
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Finally, Whose Land Is It?
It is not that the earth is ours and that it belongs to us. It is that we all belong to the earth. From it we live, with its fruits we feed ourselves, from its lakes and rivers comes the water we need, with its wood and stones we build our houses, even the most… Continue reading
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We’ve got some good news. The US has kicked the US-UK trade deal into the long grass
5 March 2021 — Global Justice Now Throughout last year Donald Trump and Boris Johnson wanted to do this high risk deal in a hurry, but public pressure from activists like you stopped them from being able to hustle it through before the US election. Since then we’ve been waiting to hear if the Biden… Continue reading
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Recent Amazon Revelations: What do they tell us about the ongoing farm protests?
Amid the continuing farm protests, with the farmers completing almost three months camping at the borders of Delhi, the international news agency Reuters published a report based on multiple internal documents of Amazon regarding its India operations over the last few years.[2] Amazon is a global e-commerce giant, and it has already achieved close to… Continue reading
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The Bits and Bytes of The Great Reset: COVID-19 and the Scaling Up of Data-Capitalism
The so-called Great Reset amounts to little more than a campaign to turn humanity into datasets, which the world’s most powerful hedge funds and transnational corporations can use to create more profits for themselves and their clients. Continue reading
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UK budget: coming out of COVID
The UK economy was the hardest hit of the top G7 economies in the year of the COVID. Real GDP fell 9.9%, which the multi-millionaire and richest man in the British parliament, Conservative Chancellor, Rishi Sunak admitted was the worst contraction in national income in 300 years! Continue reading
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A People’s History of Struggle: Liberty or Lockdown
What began in March 2020 as a three-week lockdown to ‘save the NHS’ has turned into a year-long clampdown on fundamental liberties with the spectre of freedom through vaccination (‘COVID status certificates’) and the eventual rollout of all-encompassing digital IDs on the horizon. Continue reading
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Bill Gates’ plans for our food systems will hurt Africa
Food movements across Africa and hundreds of groups around the world are protesting Gates Foundation’s plans to transform African food systems. They say Gates’ efforts to push chemical-intensive industrial agriculture in Africa are harming, not helping, small farmers, communities and the climate. Continue reading
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The Pine-eyed Boy Escapes from the Belly of the Dark Night in the Fish’s Tale
It’s hard to say where things begin, but they do, as do we, and we are somehow in them and they in us, and a story begins. Then the story gets silently disclosed as we live it, even though most of us don’t tell it until later, if we can find our tongues. But when… Continue reading
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COVID 19: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Profitable)
24 February 2021 — theplanningmotivedotcom We have passed through the epicentre of the pandemic and the trailing winds are subsiding. Time to take stock. This article compares the contrasting impact of the pandemic in the USA to India. It is the follow up to an article first presented in May last year titled “Reversing the… Continue reading
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Bill Gates, Climate Warrior – and Super Emitter
Bill Gates has a new book out: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. But some people are less than amused at having to take lessons on the climate crisis from a billionaire who, in the words of the ETC Group, “made a fortune skirting government regulations with monopolistic practices, and holds a significant financial stake… Continue reading
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Fight Like Malcolm X!
Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on Feb. 21, 1965, through a plot by the FBI and New York Police Department. Today, we remember Malcolm as a militant community organizer, revolutionary internationalist, and fighter for Black liberation by any means necessary: Continue reading
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Bitcoin hits $50,000, the 10-year yield hits 1.3%
17 February 2021 — theplanningmotivedotcom It is not commonplace for the bourgeois or financial media to provide an insightful article into the workings of the capitalist economy. The modern version of the invisible hand would be the self-driving economy, and we know that such an economy is a car crash waiting to happen. The value… Continue reading
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EU/Germany parting of the ways?
From its inception the European Union was an ambitious strategy to build an economic bloc which would serve as a counter-weight to the US’s global economic dominance. (1) One of the primary conditions of this overall construction involved the creation of a single strong currency, the euro, that could become the rival to the US$.… Continue reading
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Deflation, inflation or stagflation?
During the year of the COVID, global consumer and producer prices dropped fell. In some manufacturing-based economies, there was even a fall in price levels (deflation) eg the Euro area, Japan and China). Continue reading
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Lithium, Batteries and Climate Change
I have spent the last year working on a book called Fight the Fire: Green New Deals and Global Climate Jobs. Most of it is about both the politics and the engineering of any possible transition that can avert catastrophic climate breakdown. One thing I had to think about long and hard was lithium and… Continue reading
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The Invincible Green Stick of Happiness
6 February 2021 — Edward Curtin Tolstoy’s grave on the edge of the ravine at his estate Yasnaya Polyana “Ясная поляна, могила Л.Н. Толстого 2” by Alexxx1979 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 After a night of haunting dreams that flowed as if they were written like running water, written on air, as the Roman… Continue reading
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OPINION: Don’t Stop at Big Tech—We Need to Bust Big Agriculture, Too
A wave of consolidation has given a few large companies control of proprietary, multi-level systems of traits, seeds, agrochemicals and digital technology. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 