Subjects Archives: Financialization

Those aren’t my words. The quotation that forms the title of this post is from a recent Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis blog post.

Dominant corporations have dramatically increased their market power in the U.S. over the last decades, allowing them to boost their profits and, by extension, political power. And, although rarely acknowledged by the media, this trend owes much to the way public policy has promoted corporate intellectual property rights at the public expense.

If you look at headlines from the last year, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other major fossil fuel companies have seemingly turned a new page on climate change.

Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United States).

The health-care industry overtook the retail sector as the nation’s largest employer in December, giving local economies and their workers a stake in the industry’s growth. Health jobs surpassed manufacturing jobs in 2008.

The Democratic Labor Party, which got 12.5 percent of the vote, confirmed its support for Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad.

GOVERNOR of Puerto Rico Ricardo Rossello has called for the “elimination” of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and announced that a summit of opposition leaders will be held on the occupied U.S. island later this month.

Leon Lederman had to auction his Nobel medal for physics to meet sky-high healthcare costs.

Grace Blakeley dissects the failure of finance capital and calls for radical measures to take it back under democratic control.

The Social Wealth Fund plan is insidious in the sense that it has the capacity to redirect vast amounts of energy and resources toward a goal presented as “socialist” when in reality it is fundamentally incompatible with socialism. We must bring the discussion out into the open to prevent such seductive ideas from compromising the basic vision and integrity of socialism.

Strikes continue to be an effective way for teachers to improve their living and working (and by extension student learning) conditions. And, polls show that a strong majority of parents continue to support them. Popular support for teacher strikes remains strong The education pollster PDK recently asked adults what they thought about teacher salaries and […]

This lack of distinction explains the decline in women’s workforce participation rates. The decline reflects a shift from paid to unpaid work.

The 21st Century has not been a good one for most working people in the United States. In fact, for most of this century, real median household income has been below its starting value in January 2000.

Finding a formula to describe Fidel is no easy task.

In the second installment of our subseries Rebel Women, Madeleine Johansson gives her thoughts on the topic of ongoing debate, sex work, and how we on the left should relate to it.

Republicans and Democrats like to claim that they are on opposite sides of important issues. Of course, depending on which way the wind blows, they sometimes change sides, like over support for free trade and federal deficits. Tragically, however, there is no division when it comes to militarism.

To this day, “NUMSA has not deviated from its perspective of Marxism, Leninism and its goal of building a socialist South Africa,” says Karl Cloete

In international human rights law, a “forced disappearance” occurs when a person is secretly abducted or imprisoned by a state or political organization (or by a third party with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of a state or political organization), followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person’s fate and whereabouts, with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law.

In this episode, we speak with Fadhel Kaboub (@fadhelkaboub), associate professor of economics at Denison University and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. Fadhel outlines a new critical approach to postcolonial political economy, arguing that re-gaining financial sovereignty is a crucial next step for postcolonial nations hoping to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice.

This year alone will bring total spending on the Pentagon and related agencies (like the Department of Energy where work on nuclear warheads takes place) to $716 billion.