Subjects Archives: Political Economy

The U.S. sees the emergence of China and other Asian countries as a ‘fierce competition’. For the Global South, however, these developments bring new opportunities to pursue sovereign development.

In this republished essay from 2017, John Bellamy Foster discusses how U.S. neofascism in certain ways resembles the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with historically distinct features specific to the political economy and culture of the United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century.

A popular coal-miner’s riddle from the 1930s summarizes one of capitalism’s most visible and absurd contradictions. After a daughter asks her father why their home is so cold, he tells her they don’t have any money to purchase coal.

Alternative Title: “For Beginners and the Forgetful: Capitalism, Imperialism, and Their Historical Cycles, and the Inevitability of a Global Redistribution War Led by the U.S.”

In January 2024, the World Economic Forum predicted that by 2050 climate change will cause 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in damage.

Their message is clear: When Trump takes the presidential oath of office on Jan. 20, his job is to work for them.

U.S. imperialism in short believes that it can do whatever it likes, that it is a law unto itself.

Universities in the UK are in crisis. Job cuts in the sector are reaching ‘cataclysmic’ levels, with an estimated 10,000 already lost and many more at risk. This manufactured crisis, however, is far from inevitable. The time has come to revitalise higher education funding in the UK by extending what Cornell legal scholars Robert Hockett and Saule Omarova call ‘the finance franchise’ to universities.

As progressive governments take office in the Global South, now more than ever there is a burning need for a new development theory that can fulfill the Promethean aspirations of the darker nations.

Game-changing fires destroyed Paradise, California, in 2023, and Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2024—clear warnings, if any were still needed, that the climate catastrophe had arrived.

Trump has promoted a number of plans to make America strong—at other countries’ expense.

Meet the Lone Star megadonors, think tankers, and politicians poised to play big roles in Trump’s comeback tour.

Since 2022, the largest bird flu outbreak in history has raged across the United States.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen a buzz in the corporate media about President-elect Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric on annexation.

Chris Bambery looks at the reasons for the new president’s threat to buy Greenland and finds there is military logic in the madness, and behind it the growing rivalry with China.

World’s wealthiest 1% have already burned through their share of the entire annual carbon limit, Oxfam warns.

Beverly Hills billionaires, fires, climate change, and the ecocidal terraforming system that underpins the California way of life.

BRICS keeps expanding. As a new full member, it added Indonesia, the 4th most populous country with the 7th largest economy on Earth. BRICS now has 10 members and 8 partners. They make up 41.4% of global GDP (PPP) and half the world population.

There are at least three basic differences between European nationalism as it developed in the seventeenth century and the anti-colonial third world nationalism of the twentieth century.

Firefighters are being flown in from neighboring states like Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, as local resources have been depleted. This shortage can be directly attributed to recent budget cuts signed by Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, with the Los Angeles Fire Department seeing a $17.6 million reduction, while the police department received a $126 million increase.