Subjects Archives: Political Economy

Hakan Ozoglu. Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries.   Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.  xv + 186 pp.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7914-5993-5. Identifying Kurdish nationalism as “one of the most explosive and critical predicaments in the Middle East,” the author notes that “the subject regrettably […]

I did not want to talk a lot, but he obliged me to expand on things; I asked some questions and, basically, listened to him. His words recounted the feats of the Chinese people in the last 10 months.  Heavy and unseasonal snowfall, an earthquake that devastated surface areas equivalent to three times the size […]

The overall consumer price index fell by 1.0 percent in October, driven by an 8.6 percent drop in energy prices.  The core CPI also fell in October, declining 0.1 percent primarily as a result of a 1.0 percent drop in apparel prices.  Over the last quarter, the CPI has fallen at a 4.4 percent annual […]

Can South America escape the wrath of the economic and financial storms that have their epicenter in the United States?  Since the financial meltdown began in mid-September, the bond markets of most of the region (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela) have been hit, as well as most of their stock markets and a number of currencies.  […]

Over the 1980s and 1990s we witnessed the simultaneous rise of two reactionary political projects, Hindutva and neoliberalism, to a position of dominance in India.  Such a combination is not unusual, in that neoliberalism is usually allied with and promoted by socially reactionary forces (such as the hyper-nationalism of the “bureaucratic-authoritarian” dictatorships in Latin America, […]

One of Barack Obama’s leading advisors has done more damage to Africa, its economies and its people than anyone I can think of in world history, including even Cecil John Rhodes.  That charge may surprise readers, but hear me out. His name is Paul Volcker, and although he is relatively unknown around the world, the […]

  As I write this, the most serious economic crisis in 80 years is rolling across the planet.  Only time will tell if we are now going into one of history’s U-turns or if it’s all just part of the normal boom-and-bust business cycle.  And no one yet knows how badly humanity and the ecosphere […]

Since the second half of the 1990s, the internal public debt of the world’s developing countries has increased significantly.  This increase is now reaching alarming proportions in a number of middle-income countries.  While some very poor countries have not yet been affected, the historical trend indicates a continuing rise in the debt level for developing […]

Recently, economist Joseph Stiglitz called the current crisis “avoidable.”   He blamed it on “ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, and sheer incompetence.”  In tune with the norms of his profession, he proposed “policies” to fix the problem.  Debates over the worsening economic crisis increasingly turn on which “policies” to use to stop, reverse and “avoid” […]

Some of you may have been present at our meeting in this building in May this year, when I recalled what I had said to Lucien Goldman in Paris a few months before the historic French May 1968.  In contrast to the then prevailing perspective of “organized capitalism,” which was supposed to have successfully left […]

The libertarian moment in U.S. bourgeois politics is quickly passing today.  It was burning bright in the spring, when Ron Paul banners were hung from every overpass.  Soon his books will be remaindered.  Libertarians have nothing to say that will get a hearing in a period of crisis.  Libertarianism can rationalize the economic success or […]

Today, I read that the US Federal Reserve had opened a new line of credit for the Central Banks of Mexico, Brazil, South Korea and Singapore.

John Bellamy Foster: We need to go down to 350 parts per million [the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere], which means very big social transformations on a scale that would be considered revolutionary by anybody in society today — transformation of our whole society quite fundamentally.  We have to aim at […]

Here is Capital, Volume One, pictured as a word cloud identifying 125 words that most frequently appear in the volume and representing the size of each word in proportion to its frequency (the more frequently a word is used in the volume, the larger it is in the picture). Click here to download the word […]

  金融危機是全球化資本主義的罩門？ 知名經濟學者阿敏專訪 Samir Amin: “It’ a monster, yes, it’s a monster, but it’s a monster which can be defeated also.  This pattern of globalization, this pattern of the exclusive rule of dominant capital, that is, of oligopolies, is not acceptable and is not accepted.  The breakdown is starting by the financial crisis, because financial […]

Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab.  On the one hand, “food insecure” governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production.  On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits […]

The boardrooms and finance ministries of Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur are today filled with a fair degree of schadenfreude at America’s troubles.  Schadenfreude is not a very nice emotion; Theodor Adorno once defined it as “unanticipated delight in the sufferings of another.”  But asking Asia’s business and governing elites to repress shivers of […]

In Zulia, Chavez made reference to “comrade Sarkozy,” and did so with a certain irony but he meant no offense. On the contrary, he was rather recognizing the sincerity of the president when he spoke in Beijing in his capacity as chairman of the European Community.

Bail Out Homeowners, Create Trust, and Unfreeze Credit Markets The bailout scheme imposed by the United States government misrepresents the ongoing credit crunch as a problem of illiquidity, i.e. lack of cash.  In reality, the problem is a lack of trust due to widespread insolvency in the financial market.  In such an environment of widespread […]

This widening and deepening economic crisis is transforming US politics.  New possibilities are emerging for activists and potential activists if they can see and respond creatively to them. One possibility follows from rethinking the Obama candidacy in the light of recent German politics.  Obama has already garnered an historically disproportionate share of the campaign contributions […]