The super-rich increased their combined fortunes by 27.5% during the worst of the market turmoil from April through July.
Subjects Archives: Monopoly
Sinophobia Inc: Understanding the anti-China Industrial complex
Take a deep dive into the inner workings of Sinophobia Inc. to learn how to see through the media machine.
The world can show how Pharma monopolies aren’t the only way to fight COVID-19
The U.S. has bought up almost all of the stock of remdesivir from Gilead, making it nearly impossible for this COVID-19 drug to be available anywhere else in the world.
BlackRock’s rise shows the dark direction of monopoly capitalism
Matt Taibbi concluded that the 2008 Wall Street bailout had “built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for […]
Venezuela denounces ‘absurd decision’ of UK to retain its gold reserves
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.
Elon Musk is acting like a neo-Conquistador for South America’s lithium
Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, wants to build an electric car factory in Brazil. He was supposed to meet Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, in Miami in early March, but he was too busy; instead, Musk will go to Brazil sometime this year.
WhatsApp and fake news, or how to kill democracy
Fears and anxieties are used to create and diffuse fake news and manipulate the electorate. This is what happened at the last Brazilian election. A group of researchers studied the case in order to develop a method to deal with fake news.
An alternative to liberal globalization
In the Bandung Conference of 1955, the governments and peoples of Asia and Africa expressed their ambitions to reconstruct a global system based on the recognition of the rights of countries that had previously been under the yoke of colonialism. In that period, “the rights to development,” as applied to the frameworks for negotiating multipolarity […]
Notebook #2: The Rate of Exploitation
The rate of exploitation in the production of Apple’s iPhone X, which stands at 2458%, is 25 times the rate of exploitation that is gleaned from Marx’s examples in Capital, published in 1867.
Education Dept says Middle East Studies program has to advance the security interests of the United States in order to receive further funding
The U.S. Department of Education has determined the Duke-University of North Carolina Consortium for Middle East Studies misused Title VI funds and they’re requiring the program to provide a revised list of activities that will use these funds over the coming year.
Top 1% up $21 Trillion. Bottom 50% down $900 Billion.
The insights of this new data series are many, but for this post here I want to highlight a single eye-popping statistic. Between 1989 and 2018, the top 1 percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion. The bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period.
There must be bones under the paved street
On 6 August 1945, the United States military dropped a bomb that contained 64kg of uranium-235 over the city of Hiroshima (Japan). The bomb took just over 44 seconds to fall from 9,400 metres and detonated 580 metres above the Shima Surgical Clinic. Over 80,000 people died instantly. This was the first use of the […]
Inflation & the Politics of Pricing with Nathan Tankus
In this episode, we talk with Nathan Tankus, Research Director of the Modern Money Network, and Research Fellow at the Clarke Business Law Institute at Cornell Law School. We ask Nathan to expand upon and deepen his engagement with the inflation question in all its historical, political, and rhetorical complexity.
98.3 percent of Ghana’s gold remains in the hands of multinational corporations
Disproportionate focus on corruption of national leaders distracts from the systemic theft of Ghana’s wealth.
Lots of noise from Trump but nothing changed for U.S. multinational corporations
Bank of France: “Six small jurisdictions (Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Singapore and Switzerland), which count for less than 1 percent of the world’s population, hold 63 percent of the overall profits earned abroad by U.S. multinationals.”
International Institutional Monopoly Capitalism and Its Manifestations
Monopoly capitalism emerged from “laissez-faire” capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, allowing giant corporations to dominate the accumulation process.
U.S. public school teachers: declining pay, growing militancy
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 […]
Russiagate is a ruling class diversion
So this is what we can look forward to in the long twilight of a shrinking U.S. empire: the shrieks of a delirious ruling class, concocting endless diversions from the central reality of late-stage capitalism’s inability to offer the people anything but widening wars and deepening austerity.
June 2018: reflections on 1988 three decades later
Capitalism as a system functions irrationally because social and ecological concerns cannot be taken into account when making business decisions. Profits before all else.
University strikes: where do we go from here?
On February 22nd the University and College Union (UCU) called for the beginning of a nation wide strike in response to Universities UK’s (UUK) attempt to shift of the Universities Superannuation Scheme from a defined benefit pension to a defined contribution pension.
