Subjects Archives: Political Economy

Big oil and gas company Chevron is deeply entwined with the Israeli state.

The French economist J B Say had believed that there could never be a problem of aggregate demand in any economy, that whatever was produced was ipso facto demanded.

Gus Speth – “My family and I spent 25 years in Washington DC. They were good years, and every morning I began with coffee and The Washington Post. The newspaper was a wonderful companion—and reliably progressive. But there is something going on there now on the editorial board that I find, well, weird.”

Global capital through the international finance system has obtained near hegemony and capitalism is projected as the best and most superior system in history.

We speak with Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, about his forthcoming book, Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Democracy in Power is a highly detailed work of political and institutional history that recounts the struggle over electric power generation in the United States.

The stock market crashed on August 5, in a new “Black Monday”. What caused it? Is the USA on the verge of a new financial crisis? Ben Norton is joined by economist Michael Hudson to discuss the extreme volatility.

Workers in the Global South—from farm workers to scientists—power the world economy but face a yawning wage gap.

CounterSpin interview with Keith McHenry on criminalizing homelessness.

By sanctioning so many countries so readily, the Empire has in effect sanctioned itself–and convinced an ever-increasing number of states to seek alternative economic and financial structures.

Vladimir Lenin made many valuable contributions to Marxist political economy.

Bourgeois economists, ever ready to proclaim the impending demise of the socialist economic model in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), find every opportunity to throw shade on China’s economic system.

The early twentieth century saw a wave of anti-colonial struggles that took the form of the labour strike.

An extraordinary chart from ‘The Pioneer’ below compares nations whose largest trading partner was either the USA or China in the year 2000 and the year 2020. Over one short decade, it is a powerful visualization of how the world’s economic centre shifted.

There is an expectation that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would prioritise a historic turnaround in India’s relations with China as a legacy of his 15 years in power. Things are indeed moving in such a direction. 

The Third Plenum is a meeting of China’s Communist Party Central Committee composed of 364 members which discusses China’s economic policy for the next several years.

‘Climate change has already caused mass death on a pandemic-like scale’

In 1998, the head toxicologist at 3M estimated that a safe level of PFAS in human blood is about one part per billion. The average American’s blood has not double, not triple, but 30 times that amount.

Many low-income countries (LICs) continue to slip further behind the rest of the world. Meanwhile, people in extreme poverty have been increasing again after decades of decline.

Global carbon dioxide emissions (the main cause of global warming) continue to rise, hitting a new high in 2023.

Multimillionaires around the world have benefited from the inflation year 2023, while the German super-rich alone increased their wealth by 10 percent to more than €2.1 trillion.