Subjects Archives: Political Economy

While a geopolitical tussle between Washington and Beijing over Zambia’s debt default has received significant international attention, Canada’s contribution has been largely ignored.

The 2019 Global Climate Strike—in which more than 6 million people from 150 countries partook—is a misnomer.

Last month, the U.S. National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, outlined the international economic policy of the U.S. administration. This was a pivotal speech, because Sullivan explained what is called the New Washington Consensus on U.S. foreign policy.

The Venezuelan researcher offers her reflections on Chávez’s geopolitics and the reactivation of the Union of South American Nations.

In 2021, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) noted that Argentina remains ‘a major exporter of agricultural products’, which, at that time, accounted for nearly two-thirds of the country’s exports (as of April 2023, agricultural goods accounted for 56.4% of the country’s exports).

The collective push to replace the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency has much to do with Washington’s “weaponization of the dollar through the use of sanctions.”

The BRICS bloc’s New Development Bank, an alternative to the U.S.-dominated World Bank, is de-dollarizing its loans, promoting local currencies, and adding new members: Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe.

‘Experts’ from defense industry funded think tanks are flooding the media, pushing for more arms without disclosing their benefactors.

The deadliest train crash in India in more than a quarter of a century has killed nearly 300 passengers and injured more than 1,000. It is a tragedy that has horrified the world and exposed the criminal neglect of basic infrastructure by the ultra-right regime of Hindu chauvinist Narendra Modi and the capitalist governments that preceded it.

Or is Eternal Energy = Eternal Damnation?

U.S. politicians from both parties agree: the deficit doesn’t matter. In their bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling, Biden and Republicans are boosting military spending to $886 billion while making it harder for poor people to receive food stamps and welfare.

The difficulty the U.S. faces in its current attempts to damage China’s economy was analysed in detail in the article “The U.S. is trying to persuade China to commit suicide”. Reduced to essentials, the U.S. problem is that it possesses no external economic levers powerful enough to derail China’s economy.

In May 1979, the Center for Afro-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles hosted a symposium titled The Political Economy of the Black World. We are publishing, for the first time, Walter Rodney’s thoughtful presentation at this symposium.

Stuart Jordan responds to criticism of his article on ecology and entropy in Solidarity 672

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus had said “You cannot step into the same river twice.”

On December 7, 2022, Southwest Airlines announced that it would reinstate its quarterly dividend payments, which had been legislatively suspended under requirements in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act).

The United States is in the midst of a severe housing crisis that is of its own making. This crisis results from several generations of awful housing policies, some of which date back a half century to the Nixon Administration (1968-1973). 

We’re joined by Jennifer Mittelstadt (@MittelstadtJen), professor of history at Rutgers University, to discuss her involvement with Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education. We speak with Mittelstadt about how Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education is organizing to address the most pressing threats to US public higher education today, as well as about how her own scholarship on publicly-provisioned welfare systems in the United States shapes her political organizing and advocacy.

Most people, including even trained economists, fail to appreciate the fact that an exchange rate depreciation, if it is to work in reducing the trade deficit in a capitalist economy, must necessarily hurt the working class by lowering the real wage rate

All of the social gains made by the working class in the course of more than a century of struggle must be wiped out to pay for the drive by the American ruling class to remove, by force of arms, Russia and China as obstacles to US hegemony, even if it means triggering a nuclear war.