Subjects Archives: Political Economy

In the age of COVID-19, poor and working-class people are susceptible not just to illness, but also to discrimination and disdain.

‘Another, probably more severe pandemic has been predicted. Scientists know how to prepare, but someone must act. If we choose not to learn the lessons that are right before our eyes, the consequences will be dire.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ eagerly awaited Friday morning Official Unemployment Rate report for April—what editors generally call the BLS’s “headline” rate of unemployment—was definitely headline-worthy.

Universities can immediately bypass feckless state & federal legislatures & finance themselves directly with “Unis” supported by the Federal Reserve For a growing majority of outspoken administrators and faculty, the economic fallout associated with the Covid-19 crisis threatens to catapult U. S. higher education into a draconian age of austerity, layoffs, and closures. The question, […]

On 21 April, the head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) David Beasley said that the world was experiencing a ‘hunger pandemic’. That day, the Global Network Against Food Crises and the Food Security Information Network released the 2020 Global Report on Food Crises.

Early evidence on the intensity and drivers of the COVID-induced crisis in the U.S. and Europe suggests that the official response may lengthen the recession and delay recovery

Death cult capitalism–now the dominant variety–accepts some losses among the royal caste as an acceptable trade-off for creating a world in which millions of lives are extinguished to lube the system and keep the good stuff rolling in, feeding the insatiable parasites at the top whose lust for short term profits has no end.

While there are great differences between the crises and political movements and possibilities of the 1930s and now, there are also important lessons that can be learned from the efforts of activists to build mass movements for social transformation during the Great Depression. My aim in this paper is to illuminate the challenges faced and choices made by these activists and draw out some of the relevant lessons for contemporary activists seeking to advance a Green New Deal.

In particular, the existence of a reserve army serves to discipline labor, keeping its wage demands in check, since employed workers are forced to compete with unemployed and underemployed workers for the available jobs.

Like nursing homes, the U.S. meatpacking industry has become one of the hotspots of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

In all, Sanyal’s work is engaging, remarkable in its cross-disciplinarity, and fresh. Though its influence has been concentrated in Indian academia, I urge my colleagues elsewhere to give it a read. It will definitely make you think.

For capital, profits come from disease, not peoples’ health. COVID-19 shows the consequence of disease capitalism in a globalized world, the rich—countries or individuals—will not be spared either.

Based on important new figures from the Maddison Project Database, it refutes the claim that the countries of Eastern Europe were economic failures when they were still ruled by (ostensibly) communist regimes.

The Mexican-American War began with a dispute over the U.S. government’s 1845 annexation of Texas. In January 1846, President James K. Polk, a strong advocate of westward expansion, ordered General Zachary Taylor to occupy disputed territory between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers. Mexican troops attacked Taylor’s forces, and on May 13, 1846, Congress approved a declaration of war against Mexico.

Given the dramatic rise in unemployment, cuts in hours, and sharp decline in gig economy work, it isn’t surprising that hunger is becoming more common, particularly among families with children. Nearly half the U.S. couldn’t withstand a $400 emergency, and most households that have taken hits are seeing bigger income losses than that.

The film makes numerous good points, but fails as a whole because it spreads corrosive disinformation and mistruths about wind and solar. It also utterly fails to articulate a vision of what the alternative environment movement it claims to be a clarion call for would actually look like.

The current globalization was always legitimized by the argument that capital today, unlike in colonial times, had become blind to racial and other such distinctions across countries in deciding upon its location; it would now flow wherever opportunities for profitable investment existed.

I admit upfront that this is a hard newsletter to read. It is about debt. There is a bloodless quality to the way that we talk about the debt of the poorer nations. There is nothing poetic here. The numbers are alienating, their outcome shocking.

The balance of nature is not the same today as in Pleistocene times, but it is still there: a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot safely be ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity by a [person] perched on the edge of a cliff. The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. [Humans], too, [are] part of this balance.

The virus risks plunging Bangladesh into social, economic, and political turmoil—not to mention the public health crisis.