Subjects Archives: Political Economy

The most important economic problem the United States is facing is the failure to contain Coronavirus and the unethical decisions politicians have been making to reopen without the administrative capacity to limit the virus’s spread.

I want to start by acknowledging the significance of what has happened in the last ten days. We’re now in the midst of what we can definitively say is the biggest wave of mass protests in the United States since the 1960’s

Today’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows two months in a row of payroll employment gains, an increase in jobs of 4.8 million in June on top of 2.7 million in May. But, because so many jobs were lost in March and April, we are still 14.7 million jobs below where we were in February, before the pandemic spread.

Cutting police budgets without establishing public control over their behavior doesn’t solve the problem, and invites politicians to shuffle budget numbers around like a three-card monte swindle.

CoronaShock is a term that refers to how a virus struck the world with such gripping force; it refers to how the social order in the bourgeois state crumbled, while the social order in the socialist parts of the world appeared more resilient.

It is time Canadians debate whether they want to be part of an intelligence group driving hostile relations with China.

Yesterday morning, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.4 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation.

This essay connects police brutality to the brutality of capitalism. Capitalism has long promised a better life for people, a promise that was begrudgingly accepted by elites in the post-WWII age.

The U.S. has bought up almost all of the stock of remdesivir from Gilead, making it nearly impossible for this COVID-19 drug to be available anywhere else in the world.

If the people of Kosovo can hold the CIA-backed gangsters who murdered their people, sold their body parts and hijacked their country accountable for their crimes, is it too much to hope that Americans can do the same and hold our leaders accountable for their far more widespread and systematic war crimes?

Matt Taibbi concluded that the 2008 Wall Street bailout had “built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors.”

A British high court ruled on July 2 that because the UK recognizes opposition leader Juan Guaidó as president, it does not have to give the government of Nicolás Maduro access to the reserves.

It’s an empty phrase used by people who wish to bypass the necessity of struggle, says the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY.

Cities across the world are facing a double-barreled existential problem: how to adapt to climate change and how to pay for it.

At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics a young man born on the day of Hiroshima nuclear bombing was selected to be the last torch bearer on the relay, to signify that Japan had stood up from nuclear ruin. In an attempt to replicate the 1964 Olympic theme, the Abe government has constructed the idea of a Fukushima “revival,” a returned to normal. Exposing this illusion is an important cultural war.

We know how the first paragraph begins. We’ve read about the changing climate for over twenty years, infrequently at first and then daily until we couldn’t deny it any longer. The world is burning.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unravelled the close structural links between the climate crisis and the global capitalist mode of production.

Radical Reviewer and Tristan from Step Back History review The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

One of the graver risks for big-time criminals is that investigators will be able to identify them and their deeds by ‘following the money’. The criminals have to hide the proceeds of their crimes. This is done by depositing their monies into legitimate finance houses and businesses.

Altogether, as philosopher Cornel West put it, the U.S. is showing every sign of being a “failed social experiment”. And yet there is a veritable boom in the U.S. stock market. The stock market index Nasdaq has increased by more than 40 per cent since March 23 and is now “within striking distance of all time highs” as one commentator put it.