Subjects Archives: Political Economy

ON October 2, 2020, even before any vaccines against COVID-19 had been approved, India and South Africa had proposed to the WTO that a temporary patent waiver should be granted on all such innovations.

A group of anti-war veterans said President Joe Biden’s spending priorities indicate that he thinks “preserving apartheid is more important than fighting climate change.”

Despite the quickening decline of the “West,” the U.S. and its junior partners in imperialism are determined to hold humanity hostage to terminal capitalist greed and violence.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, where health spending and human development levels are in a dramatic state, there is a stronger case than ever for unilateral suspensions of debt payments based on arguments recognized in international law; such as state of necessity and fundamental change of circumstances.

The promise of digital transformation is anchored in a discourse that the tech sector invented along with venture capital (VC) when they came together to lobby for reducing capital gains taxes in the late 1970s.

The U.S. has sanctions against over 30 countries, close to one-third of the world’s population. When the pandemic startedin early 2020, our Government tried to prevent Iran from buying respirator masks from overseas, and also thermal imaging equipment that could detect the virus in the lungs.

State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell explained—in a now removed article in Dagens Industri, a Stockholm-based financial newspaper—that the country’s strategy to contain the virus would not “compromise our social functioning in a way that is more detrimental to any profits”.

The U.S. is launching a New Cold War against Russia and China in an attempt to deflect our attention from the escalating crisis of global capitalism.

The television series Star Trek has appeared in several iterations with a few handfuls of movies thrown in that have fired the imaginations of viewers of all ages for nigh 55 years.

As the global challenge of climate change mounts and the coronavirus pandemic magnifies economic inequalities, Karl Marx, who pointed to the contradictions and limitations of capitalism, is gaining new admirers in Japan, particularly among the young.

The series continues with analyses of how indebtedness developed in other regions of the Global South.

What is new with contemporary (global) leading corporations? If gigantic monopolies are a repeated phenomenon in capitalism’s history, why all the fuss we see every day regarding high concentration?

The coronavirus pandemic and other aspects of the multidimensional crisis of global capitalism are enough to fully justify suspending debt repayment. Indeed priority must be given to protecting people against ecological, economic and public health disasters.

Documentary filmmaker Maren Poitras joins the podcast to discuss and share a teaser from Finding the Money, the first feature-length documentary on the past, present, and future of Modern Monetary Theory. The film is currently under consideration for audience and jury awards in the DocLands film festival.

Money on the Left is joined by Emily K. Hobson and Dan Berger, coeditors and curators of the recently published collection Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001.

In 2020, nations were struggling to support their economies through the times of hardships and lockdowns caused by the pandemic. Those efforts apparently did not prevent governments from spending more money on their militaries than ever before in more than three decades, the report said.

The information war now conducted by the U.S. against China centers on Xinjiang. Once again, the U.S. uses longstanding problems—such as the rise of extremism in Central Asia (fueled to some extent by the U.S. since the 1980s)—to create problems for its adversaries.

In France’s former African colonies, imperialist monetary policies from Paris continue to cripple domestic economies and undermine democracy. Colonialism in Africa won’t have meaningfully come to an end until true economic sovereignty is allowed to flourish.

So maybe not just one year of the pandemic.

The recent period of globalisation–following the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the integration of China into the world economy–is in essence the period of global value chains (GVCs).