Subjects Archives: Financialization

On Monday, President Joe Biden unveiled his 2023 budget, calling for dramatically increased funding for war and the police while allocating all-too-little funding for social services. Out of the total $1.58 trillion of spending outlined in the budget, $813 billion is allocated to the military while $769 billion is allocated for non-military spending. This is a $31 billion increase in funding for the war machine.

The juggling which U.S. imperialism has to do to maintain its hegemony becomes more bizarre by the day. First, it kept needling Russia (“provoking the bear”) “on behalf of the western alliance” by expanding NATO to its very borders, knowing full well that Ukraine’s joining NATO would be totally unacceptable to Russia.

Zelensky justified the ban on mostly left and anti-NATO parties in the country by claiming that they had alleged links with Russia, despite the fact that most of these parties have publicly opposed Russian intervention.

The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela maintained its willingness to resume its oil trade with countries such as the United States, and even those that belong to the European Union, but it has clearly outlined the diplomatic and political conditions necessary for any exchange to take place.

CounterSpin interview with Braxton Brewington on student loan debt.

Deletion needed to preserve big lie of an unprovoked Russian invasion

Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian market.

Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx has a section on the “Fetishism of Commodities”.

On Feb. 24, the day when Russia launched the military operation, U.S. wheat and corn futures rose by their daily trading limits while soybeans rose to the highest since 2012.

Marx’s first sentence in Capital Volume One is: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an “immense accumulation of commodities”, its unit being a single commodity.” (Moore and Aveling translation).

According to defenders of the status quo, the best response to our most serious problems is to let markets work their magic; government regulation of private business activity only makes things worse.

COVID-19 has exposed major long-term economic vulnerabilities. This malaise–including declining productivity growth–can be traced to the greater influence of finance in the real economy.

CounterSpin interview with Rakeen Mabud on supply chain breakdown.

“This really isn’t a conversation about providing relief to a small, niche group of people,” said the congresswoman. “It’s very much a keystone action politically.” –AOC

The United States has elected to lock itself in a zero-sum conflict with China, attempting to stop China’s inevitable rise as the world’s largest, most powerful economy and thus nation.

There’s millions of dollars sloshing around Massachusetts Parents United and National Parents Union these days. Some of it is from Charles Koch.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has expressed dissatisfaction over the role played by Nepal Rastra Bank to ensure stability of Nepal’s banking sector.

KUALA LUMPUR: Many factors frustrate the international cooperation needed to address the looming global warming catastrophe. As most rich nations have largely abdicated responsibility, developing countries need to think and act innovatively and cooperatively to better advance the South.

Columbia’s student workers delivered an invaluable lesson—one day longer, one day stronger—that you don’t have to have to go to graduate school to understand.

The Canadian Zionist Cultural Association (CZCA) was caught supporting a foreign military in violation of charity law. But it’s unclear if the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) will apply its rules to the Israel focused registered charity.