Subjects Archives: Financialization

For those on the Left, finance seems like a bourgeois pastime. Many of us outright despise the stuff. While the petit bourgeoisie drool over dividends and diversification, we prefer to focus on crisis and class.

A literalist, out-of-context reading of Marx can get one into trouble, or at the very least, leave you hopelessly confused. For help, I look to David Harvey. Perhaps the preeminent expert on Marx’s Capital in the English-speaking world, Harvey meticulously reconstructed Marx’s approach to money in his major treatise, Limits to Capital (1982).

Warren Buffett is one of the wealthiest people in the world. He is also Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Hathaway, a huge U.S. investment conglomerate. Looking at Berkshire’s investment policy reveals some important features of the economics of imperialism today and the role of money capitalists.

Thousands of people will gather next week in Davos. Their combined wealth will reach several hundred billion dollars, perhaps even close to a trillion. Never in world history will be the amount of wealth per square foot so high. And this year, for the sixth or seventh consecutive time, what would be one of the principal topics addressed by these captains of industry, billionaires, employers of thousands of people across the four corners of the globe: inequality…

Forida is a 22-year-old sewing machine operator in a clothing factory in Dahka, Bangladesh. She often works 12-hour days producing clothes for brands such as H&M and Target. Sometimes, during busy production cycles, the hours are even longer.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will stop research on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and is expected to lay-off 300 research and development staff in Massachusetts and Connecticut, in a move that could severely hamper progress towards effective treatments for these illnesses – proving that critical medical research cannot be left in the hands of capitalist profiteers.

We’ve made it through 2017. The first-season installment of presidential Tweetville is ending where it began, on the Palm Beach, Fla., golf course of Mar-a-Lago. Though we are no longer privy to all the footage behind the big white truck, we do know that, given the doubling of its membership fees, others on the course will have higher stakes in the 2018 influence game.

After the Global Financial Crisis, Steve Keen achieved worldwide acclaim with his book Debunking Economics (2011). It attacked the core tenets of neoclassical economics and some of its heterodox rivals. It also revealed Hyman Minsky’s post-Keynesianism as the most promising route to a scientific revolution in economics.

Bitcoin has left the world of finance gasping. Although the total market value of all that cryptocurrency in circulation is only a fraction of the value of the world’s financial assets, the rapid rise in the value of the currency has made it the most wanted of those assets. On January 1, 2017, the currency was trading between $972 and $990 a unit. By December 7, it was trading between $14,063 and $17,363.

The last four decades have been marked by rising wage inequality, with the vast majority of American workers experiencing wage stagnation while those at the top rung of the economic ladder reap the benefits of growth in productivity. These dynamics mean that many workers struggle to make ends meet; in 2016 one in five families in which at least one person worked were living below 200 percent of the federal poverty line (U.S. Census Bureau 2017).

“DON’T LET YOUR CHILDREN GO INTO CRIPPLING DEBT LIKE I HAVE!” I shout, as I and a group of students with SENS-UAW make our way to a major intersection just off Union Square. We wave signs, hoist our banner and merge into the crowd. We are protesting the new GOP tax bill, which will affect the lives of current, previous, and prospective students in critical and long-lasting ways.

On December 5, the Trump administration took its first major step toward allowing employers to legally pocket the tips earned by the workers they employ. The Department of Labor (DOL) released a proposed rule that would allow restaurants to take the tips that servers earn and share them with untipped employees such as cooks and dishwashers.

Murders of trade unionists and social leaders, paramilitary activity, coca production… If we only paid attention to the mainstream media we would not get the idea that these problems are actually growing in Colombia, one year after the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC came into place. To get a better picture and understand how all these elements connect to US policy and corporate interests, we interviewed Daniel Kovalik, a lawyer and human rights activist who has long been involved in the struggle for peace and justice in Colombia.

Powerful corporations and the rich in the United States continue their winning ways. By narrow margins, both the House of Representatives and Senate have agreed on a budget proposal that calls for an increase in the federal deficit of $1.5 trillion dollars in order to fund a major reform of the U.S. tax system that will make the rich and powerful even more so.

Last week saw a flurry of humiliating pitches by North American cities for Amazon to pick them as the location of the corporation’s second headquarters.

The division of the world is not only by classes, but by North and South as well. And unfortunately the British left does not realise that, and the framing of being anti-neoliberal, in contrast to anti-imperialist, denies this differentiated reality.

Both Democrats and Republicans have used social security funds to hide government debt—i.e., to trick the public. This was made possible by a huge surplus engineered by fund actuaries to account for baby boomers. In the next few years the fund will need to cash in on its bonds and this will cause the federal debt to balloon.

The fundamental changes I would advocate are those that would: dramatically boost worker power; secure a progressive and growing funding base for a needed expansion of public housing and infrastructure and public spending on health care, education, and transportation; and end the production and use of fossil fuels and significantly reduce greenhouse emissions.

“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life.” With this sober stroke of his insurgent pen, the 93-year-old scholar joined the Communist Party.

If you reject from the outset the idea of uniting a majority based on shared economic interests, then pretty much all you’ve got left is the “thoughtful and humane co-optation” of racism and xenophobia.