Subjects Archives: Political Economy

One accusation still seems to lack an adequate response: Is the U.S. working class inherently anti-degrowth because it would mean a massive loss of jobs?

Economist Michael Hudson details how BRICS could create a mutual settlement currency for payment imbalances among central banks and build an alternative to the financialized neoliberal model of the dollar/NATO bloc.

An estimated 12 million metric tons of plastic currently enters the ocean each year.

The surprising history of cars in the U.S. offers hope for a shift toward more climate-friendly transportation options.

Ajay Banga was anointed World Bank president for promoting financial inclusion. Thanks to its success and interest rate hikes, more poor people are drowning in debt as consumer prices rise.

In his 1963 book, ‘Africa Must Unite’, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, wrote, ‘We have here, in Africa, everything necessary to become a powerful, modern, industrialised continent.

We’re joined this month by William A.( “Sandy”) Darity to discuss reparations for Black Americans. A founding theorist of stratification economics and foremost scholar of the racial wealth gap in the United Stats, Darity is perhaps best known for his committed public advocacy for acknowledging, redressing, and resolving histories of racist violence against enslaved black people and their descendents through a federal program of reparations for black Americans.

Orinoco Tribune interviewed U.S. academic Steve Ellner on different issues, ranging from Venezuelan domestic issues to global matters.

THE Modi government, ever solicitous of corporate interests, has launched a plan whereby real estate developers and other corporates will be allowed to destroy large swathes of India’s forest cover for starting projects that rake in profits. It is amending the Forest Conservation Act to remove those forest patches that are not deemed as such by the government from protection under the Act.

At its fifteenth summit in August 2023, the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) group adopted the Johannesburg II Declaration, which, amongst other issues, raised the question of reforming the United Nations, particularly its security council. To make the UN Security Council (UNSC) ‘more democratic, representative, effective, and efficient, and to increase the representation of developing countries’, BRICS urged the expansion of the council’s membership to include countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

“Welfare for Markets” exposes the neoliberal links of basic income, and helps to explain why it is not a useful demand for the left, argues Dominic Alexander

One of the major problems faced by Global South countries is that they are saddled with immense debts in dollars, and Western corporations claim ownership over their resources.

Poverty is rising in one of the world’s oldest colonies: In Puerto Rico, 41.7% of people, including 57.6% of children, live in poverty. This is nearly four times the U.S. rate. And Puerto Rican workers are getting poorer even while unemployment falls.

Foster explains Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism and how the concept of “metabolic rift” highlights the alienation between humans and nature caused by capitalism’s focus on profit over sustainability.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek last week welcomed a UNESCO World Heritage Committee decision not to list the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger”. But what is “great news” to Plibersek is not great news for the reef. 

Ah, money, the driving force behind life in the modern world.

The India-Middle East-Europe transportation corridor may be the talk of the town, but it will likely go the way of the last three Asia-to-Europe connectivity projects touted by the west-to the dustbin. Here’s why.

The Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion in British Columbia is running into another round of problems and generating even more opposition. ‘The controversial government-owned fossil fuel company is seeking regulatory approval to change its pipeline construction methods and route, after running into problems drilling a tunnel.’

The great cultural theorist Stuart Hall called Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth “the bible of decolonisation” as it encapsulated the urge for freedom across the colonial world. Fanon illuminates how racism represented an organising principle for capitalist classes by systematically devaluing the lives of the majority of the world’s population.

Éric Toussaint’s history of the World Bank shows powerfully how it and other international institutions have enforced imperialist exploitation, finds John Clarke