Subjects Archives: Political Economy

It is almost unanimous, then. Most Western media have given us the lowdown.

Neo-fascist rulers like Javier Milei propose to control inflation not by curbing capital flight, but by launching a massive attack on the working class.

“Almost nobody says we should have the richest pay the least. And yet when we look around the country, the vast majority of states have tax systems that do just that.”

In memory of Paul Burkett, Marxist scholar and jazz musician, 1956-2024.

Matt Seybold joins Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson to discuss the political economy of literary criticism from past to present, amateur to professional. Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature at Elmira College and Resident Scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. In addition to writing and teaching in the field of literature & economics, Seybold produces and hosts The American Vandal podcast, an ever-growing collection of conversations and presentations about literature, humor, and history in America that is inspired by Mark Twain’s life and legacy. 

A bright star in the firmament of justice has gone out. One of the greatest journalists of our era has passed away.

In a single move, Yemen’s Ansarallah has checkmated the west and its rules-based order.

In October 2023, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published its annual Trade and Development Report. Nothing in the report came as a major surprise. The growth of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to decline with no sign of a rebound.

Pavlina Tcherneva, a Professor of Economics at Bard College and a Research Scholar at the Levy Institute, has written a concisely, argued case for a federal job guarantee within the context of a Green New Deal.

The World Bank insists private finance is needed for economic recovery and the Sustainable Development Goals but does little to ensure profit-hungry commercial finance serves the public interest.

Western currencies have almost been completely phased out in Russia-China trade, as nearly all payments between the countries are now carried out in rubles and yuan, according to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

Hearing or reading about the “contradictions of capitalism” in an article or at a rally might be intimidating, like a foreign language or a term only a certain group can understand.

Within the United Nations, there is a little-known debate about the status of global tax regulation.

Control of Mediterranean gas fields is not the reason for the current attack on Gaza, but the theft of Palestine’s natural resources has long been a goal of the Zionist settler-colonial project and its Western sponsors.

Russia is negotiating with the Houthis of Yemen to protect Russian oil cargoes moving through the Red Sea for delivery to India and China, the principal destinations of Russian oil currently traversing the waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and the Gulf of Aden.

The fact that unrestricted trade creates domestic unemployment is quite obvious, and should be especially obvious to third world people who have had the historical experience of deindustrialisation during colonial rule.

On Friday, December 15th, “a “merry band of miscreants” entered a Whole Foods in NYC, lifted a bunch of groceries, and walked out in Jeff Bezos masks,” reported independent journalist Talia Jane on Twitter/X.

Access to water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. The World Bank, Nairobi Water Company, and development economists exploited this unjust context to treat poor Kenyans like guinea pigs.

The basic theme is to suggest that under neo-liberalism there has been such an acceleration of the growth rate of Gross Domestic Product that the people as a whole have become much better off, and vast masses of them have been lifted out of poverty (one particular enthusiast has even claimed that poverty now afflicts only 2 per cent of the population).

WHEN an economy shrinks, as did the British economy last month, it triggers an alarm bell to all those who live not by their labour but by ours.