Capitalism
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Breaking the glass screen – framing monopoly capitalism in global commodity chains
The term global commodity chain referred to the material and logistical aspects of organizing production involving numerous components brought together over spatially dispersed global production platforms and or assembly sites. Continue reading
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Bill Gates and Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill
The global lockdowns that Bill Gates helped orchestrate and cheerlead have bankrupted more than 100,000 businesses in the U.S. alone and plunged a billion people into poverty and deadly food insecurity that, among other devastating harms, kill 10,000 African children monthly — while increasing Gates’ wealth by $20 billion. His $133 billion fortune makes him… Continue reading
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Sharma: success for the farmers’ movement in India would send a global signal
If the Indian farmers succeed in making Minimum Support Price (MSP) a legal right, it would cause major disruptions to international trade. Continue reading
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Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years Ago, in Washington D.C.
The kisan agitation at the gates of Fortress Delhi has forced even the corporate media to take note of the corporate drive to capture control of the remaining non-corporate sectors of the country’s economy, including its agriculture; the phrase “Ambani-Adani” is now a popular term for this process. Continue reading
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Viral Inequality: From Jeff Bezos to the struggle of Indian Farmers
The world’s 10 richest billionaires have collectively seen their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID. Continue reading
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The mainstream: meeting the historic challenges?
Recently, newly confirmed US Treasury secretary and former Fed chief, Janet Yellen, spelt out the challenges facing US capitalism in a letter to her new staff. She said: “the current crisis is very different from 2008. But the scale is as big, if not bigger. The pandemic has wrought wholesale devastation on the economy. Entire… Continue reading
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Stop the game – I want to get off!
‘Hedging’ used to be a way of reducing the risk of selling or buying. Farmers waiting for their harvest to come in are uncertain about what price per bushel they will get at the market: will they get a price that makes them a profit and a living for next year or will they be… Continue reading
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Indian Farmers on the Frontline Against Global Capitalism
In a short video on the empirediaries.com YouTube channel, a protesting farmer camped near Delhi says that during lockdown and times of crisis farmers are treated like “gods”, but when they ask for their rights, they are smeared and labelled as “terrorists”. Continue reading
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Is This Revolution Truly Rinky-Dink?
During the late 60s, when the US war on Viet Nam was going strong and people were questioning capitalism, I drove from Eugene to Berkeley where my sister was living. I ran into folks who invited me to a discussion about starting a commune. There, everyone talked about dropping out of consumer society and buying land to get away… Continue reading
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Mega-rich recoup COVID-19 losses in 9 months but for everyone else…
The 1,000 richest people on the planet recouped their COVID-19 losses within just nine months, but it could take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic, reveals a new Oxfam report today. ‘The Inequality Virus’ is being published on the opening day of the World… Continue reading
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REVEALED: Public money is funding private healthcare
The UK government has used half a billion pounds of aid money to fund unaffordable private healthcare services in the global south. We need to take a stand and demand that public money is used to support universal public healthcare instead. Continue reading
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Three tragedies born in the womb of neo-liberalism
At first sight, the Pandemic, Grenfell and Brexit, don’t seem to be connected, but they are. They represent the uncivilised outcomes of an unrestrained capitalism obsessed by cutting costs, the state and regulations. The result is that the short-term enrichment of the tiny minority are now being swamped by the longer-term losses that the rest… Continue reading
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Covid and fictitious capital
During the year of the COVID, output, investment and employment in nearly all the economies of the world plummeted, as lockdowns, social isolation and collapsing international trade contracted output and spending. And yet the opposite was the case for the stock and bond markets of the major economies. The US stock market indexes (along with… Continue reading
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Zoom Privilege: COVID-19 restrictions are making the rich richer & everyone else poorer
Wall Street, Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley are swimming in cash and prosperity. 2020 could not have gone better for the country’s elites. The vast majority of Americans, on the other hand, have been forced into financial, physical, and emotional ruin. 2020 served as the year that government dictates — purposed with fighting a disease… Continue reading
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The UK’s Singapore-on-Thames Delusion
I will not spend much time on this topic because it is so ridiculous. But the notion that the UK can become a ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ seems to underlie some Brexit fantasies. Do these have any foundation? Continue reading
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A race to the bottom’? Post-Brexit deregulation of workers’ rights – 1
The FT editorial board reports on the package of deregulatory measures being prepared by the UK’s business department with the approval of Downing Street. It has not yet been agreed by ministers — or put to the cabinet — but select business leaders have been sounded out on the plan, ‘according to people familiar with the… Continue reading
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Brexit trade agenda threatens disastrous deregulation
The director of Global Justice Now, Nick Dearden makes an appeal to the public to support their work of restraining this government and its toxic policies centred around the recently negotiated Brexit deal. Continue reading
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Don’t worry, the sadism is good for you…
Ever since at least the Iraq War of 2003, the fundamental alternatives facing North American and European elites have been constant. One alternative might have been to accept a certain loss of global power so as to share global influence peacefully in a multi-polar world with China, Russia and other regional powers. Instead, the Western… Continue reading
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How Much Did “The Culture of Narcissism” Get Right?
Forty years ago, Christopher Lasch described a soulless society headed toward a “war of all against all.” Are we there? A look back at the book TK readers chose for review Continue reading
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Agroecology and Post-COVID Plunder
Contingent on World Bank aid to be given to poorer countries in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns, agrifood conglomerates will aim to further expand their influence. These firms have been integral to the consolidation of a global food regime that has emerged in recent decades based on chemical- and proprietary-input-dependent agriculture which incurs massive externalised… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 