Subjects Archives: Political Economy

Back in June, Neil Irwin wrote that he couldn’t find enough synonyms for “good”  to adequately describe the jobs numbers.

In most states in the United States, the rich have enjoyed ever lower rates of taxation while working people have suffered from inadequately funded public services.

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.

The rise of extreme right wing politics is a response by sections of the ruling classes internationally to the economic stagnation.

Germany’s politicians played the chicken game last week, testing which party, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union or its Bavarian “sister party”, Horst Seehofer’s Christian Social Union, would be the first to swerve.

How can we understand the way that capitalism comes to be gendered and racialised?

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.

Nuclear power is enormously expensive and yet successive U.S. governments, including that of President Donald Trump, have supported the industry in many ways. The net result is that various costs are passed on to society at large, while the profits accruing from this pursuit are privatized.

The United States’ National Endowment for Democracy distributed some 4.2 million dollars in Nicaragua, between 2014 and 2017, to train “new leaders” to overthrow the Sandinista government | Francisco Arias Fernández*

Why are thousands of Central Americans fleeing violence and economic devastation and flocking to the United States? Because of the American dream? Because the streets are paved in gold?

MPN spoke to Yasha Levine, the author of “Surveillance Valley,” and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster about the rise of the Amazon.com empire and the merger of Big Data, finance capitalism, and the U.S. state apparatus.

A recent article published in the American Economic Review, “Global Inequality Dynamics: New Findings from WID.world,” draws upon the World Wealth and Income Database to examine trends in global inequality.

Trump is threatening to dismantle the current world trading system, but in his first year US trading patterns show strong continuity with the previous administration.

Letting the law of capitalist value govern society makes building socialism almost impossible because, even if the general guidelines of capitalist value seem to be acceptable, all it takes is for the market to plunge for you to lose your bearings entirely.

Capitalism as a system functions irrationally because social and ecological concerns cannot be taken into account when making business decisions. Profits before all else.

Only days after passing a tax on Amazon and big business in Seattle, the corporate politicians in Seattle repeal the ordinance.

Karl Polanyi’s reciprocal, redistributive substantive-socialism; ‘Corbynomics’ as fair and caring socialism.

In this episode, Money on the Left cohost Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo) expands upon the argument made in his video essay, “Inglorious Basterds: Nazi Desire Fully Employed,” which takes a neochartalist lens to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2008).

There was a day when the world realised they’d had enough of America. It wasn’t when America turned it back on the Herculean effort to sign the world up to the Paris Climate Agreement or TTIP or America’s continuous support for Israel’s murderous actions in Gaza or various other deals that took years to iron out and negotiate that have since been trashed. It was a moment we knew was going to happen but least expected to prove so important.

Many here say that South Africa’s constitution has never been an impediment to land redistribution; the problem was always the political will of the ANC, which abandoned Marxist ideology for a neoliberal approach.