Capitalism
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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
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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
The New Dark Age 