Subjects Archives: Financialization

COVID-19 has exposed the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all, the fiction that unpaid care work isn’t work, the delusion that we live in a post-racist world. We are all floating on the same sea, but some are in super-yachts and others clinging to drifting debris.

The rogue deployment of secret federal police forces in Portland, Oregon, has added a new complication to negotiations over reauthorizing the Trump administration’s vast surveillance powers and appropriating new money for the Department of Homeland Security.

The existing alphabet soup of possible recoveries—V, U, W, and so on (which I discussed back in April)—is clearly inadequate to describe what has been taking place in the United States in recent months.

The excessive use of force and killings of unarmed Black Americans by police has fueled a popular movement for slashing police budgets, reimagining policing, and directing freed funds to community-based programs that provide medical and mental health care, housing, and employment support to those in need. This is a long overdue development.

Millions of U.S. households are already facing desperate crises.

The most important economic problem the United States is facing is the failure to contain Coronavirus and the unethical decisions politicians have been making to reopen without the administrative capacity to limit the virus’s spread.

Cutting police budgets without establishing public control over their behavior doesn’t solve the problem, and invites politicians to shuffle budget numbers around like a three-card monte swindle.

Yesterday morning, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.4 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation.

A British high court ruled on July 2 that because the UK recognizes opposition leader Juan Guaidó as president, it does not have to give the government of Nicolás Maduro access to the reserves.

Cities across the world are facing a double-barreled existential problem: how to adapt to climate change and how to pay for it.

One of the graver risks for big-time criminals is that investigators will be able to identify them and their deeds by ‘following the money’. The criminals have to hide the proceeds of their crimes. This is done by depositing their monies into legitimate finance houses and businesses.

Altogether, as philosopher Cornel West put it, the U.S. is showing every sign of being a “failed social experiment”. And yet there is a veritable boom in the U.S. stock market. The stock market index Nasdaq has increased by more than 40 per cent since March 23 and is now “within striking distance of all time highs” as one commentator put it.

Companies that say they stand with protesters have been funding police foundations for years.

The U.N.’s Human Rights Chief Michelle Bachelet urged countries to confront legacy of slavery and colonialism.

In 1974, the United Nations General Assembly passed a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which was driven by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

The U.S. military’s budget, like so many police department budgets, is bloated, and diverts our tax dollars into forces of domination and violence. Now is the time to question our spending priorities at the local and federal level.

Richard Heinberg is a very important scholar and an apparently lovely human being. His books are always penetrating, and both his contribution to and his review of Michael Moore’s corporate-green-censored movie, Planet of the Humans, demonstrate his continuing efforts to speak crucially unheard truths.

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has slammed into the global system with almost the same impact we might expect from an asteroid strike. All aspects of economic, cultural and political activity on the planet have been devastated and disrupted in ways that seemed unimaginable just a few months ago.

Will colleges and universities reopen in the fall? That’s the question on the minds of many these day—administrators, faculty, staff, students, and their families, not to mention the communities in which they live.

Industries prepare for decoupling as worst scenario, accelerating homegrown technologies as Washington hawks destroy global supply chain.