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Capitalism

Debtor Organizing Can Transform Our Individual Financial Struggles

September 17, 2024 J. Patrick Patterson, In These Times. , , ,
Although debtors’ unions are a new, emerging front in the fight against racial capitalism, their potential holds across many types of debt. The millions of people being crushed by medical debt could organize locally to demand hospitals cancel their bills. Or they could start a national medical debt strike to advance the cause of universal healthcare. Credit card debtors could rally against usurious lending practices and advocate for a socially productive — as opposed to predatory — system of credit and debt. Student debtors could transform not only the predatory lending that has become synonymous with higher education, but also the landscape of who has access to that higher education in the first place.

Venezuela In The Crosshairs Of Technological Imperialism

September 5, 2024 Misión Verdad Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , , , , , ,
In August, Venezuela’s re-elected president, Nicolás Maduro, signed a decree blocking access to social media platform X, formerly Twitter, for 10 days. President Maduro said of its owner, tycoon Elon Musk, “He has violated the rules by inciting hatred, fascism, civil war, death, confrontation among Venezuelans, and has violated all Venezuelan laws.” Musk, who also owns the Starlink satellite broadband network, expressed his support for the far-right Venezuelan opposition and insulted the president, which is a sign of the determination of the new global elites to carry out regime change in Venezuela. This action was accompanied by other attempts implemented through various technological platforms such as Apple, Google, and Meta.

What Will It Take To Make Black Lives Matter?

September 3, 2024 Detroit Will Breathe, Left Voice. , , , , ,
This summer, the American Midwest has been the epicenter of several notable police murders of Black people including John Zook, Jr. of Wayne, Mich., Sonya Massey of Springfield, Ill., Sherman Butler of Detroit, and Samuel Sharpe of Milwaukee. While most of these tragedies occurred many miles from one another, they all share common threads in that the victims were poor, Black, and suffering from some version of a mental health crisis at the time of their deaths. Samuel Sharpe, a veteran and well-known resident of an unhoused community in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Milwaukee, was gunned down without hesitation, just blocks from the Republican National Convention (RNC), as he turned to run away from police after being approached by officers in the midst of an argument with a neighbor.

Capitalism Facilitates Firestorms, Floods And Tornadoes

August 24, 2024 Zoe Johnson, Workers' World. , , , ,
Summer 2024 has been host to severe and persistent wildfires and tornadoes throughout the United States. Long before the summer, just from January through March alone, more than 2,669 square miles were charred in the United States. That’s larger than the area of Delaware and was already half of the total area impacted in 2023. Moreover, the National Weather Service confirmed 180 tornadoes in July, the most the country has had since 1997, when there were 190. Most of these tornadoes resulted from two storm systems: Hurricane Beryl and the July 15 Derecho — a very long-lived and damaging thunderstorm that can itself be as damaging as a tornado — that impacted Chicago.

How US Big Tech Monopolies Colonized The World: Welcome To Neo-Feudalism

August 19, 2024 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
US Big Tech corporations have essentially colonized the world. In almost every country on Earth, the digital infrastructure upon which the modern economy was built is owned and controlled by a small handful of monopolies, based largely in Silicon Valley. This system is looking more and more like neo-feudalism. Just as the feudal lords of medieval Europe owned all of the land and turned almost everyone else into serfs, who broke their backs producing food for their masters, the US Big Tech monopolies of the 21st century act as corporate feudal lords, controlling all of the digital land upon which the digital economy is based.

US Or China, Which Is Truly Democratic?

August 17, 2024 Simon Turner, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , ,
Who do we want to lead? With genocide ongoing, regional wars brewing, and climate change records breaking, who is a safe pair of hands? Today a choice exists; an alternative to the US-led international order is being built, with China at its center. A Western survey, the Edelman Trust Barometer, found China to be the country rated highest globally in terms of people’s trust in their government. China has held the top spot every year but one since 2018, with a comprehensive trust index of 79 in 2024. The US is down at a mere 46.

Google Profits Extraordinarily Off Of Not Having Competition

August 14, 2024 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. , , ,
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” So ruled district court Judge Amit Mehta in United States v. Google, being called a “landmark” antitrust case that will affect not just Google, but potentially all tech giants in the current landscape. The point was, Google pays billions every year to companies like Apple and Samsung that distribute search engines, to ensure that it’s the only search engine anyone would see, by making sure it’s the preset default on devices. If your supermarket only had one brand of milk on the shelf, even if it had some others in the back, you would recognize that as unfair. But for many of us, the internet is still a mystery miracle, and we’re not used to bringing the same sorts of questions to bear.

Capitalism’s Unequal Distribution Deprives You Of True Freedom

August 9, 2024 Richard D. Wolff, Counter Punch. , , , ,
As the French economist Thomas Piketty most recently exposed, capitalism, across time and space, has always tended to produce ever-greater economic inequality. Oxfam, a global charity, reported that 2022’s 10 richest men together had six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people on earth. The lack of democracy inside workplaces or enterprises is both a cause and an effect of capitalism’s unequal distribution of income and wealth. Of course, inequality predates capitalism. Powerful feudal lords across Europe had blended autocracy with unequal distributions of wealth on their manorial estates.

Investigation Exposes How Etsy Profits From Israeli Apartheid

August 8, 2024 Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams. , , , ,
Etsy, the popular U.S.-based e-commerce website, is profiting from goods made and sold in Israel's illegal settler colonies in the occupied West Bank, a report published Wednesday revealed. "Under the radar, Etsy—the popular online platform for selling and buying artisanal and vintage items, with a mission to 'keep commerce human'—has been profiting from businesses with shops in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT)," states the briefing, which was published by the Institute for Journalism and Social Change (IJSC), Global Justice Now, and War on Want. "It's time to bring an end to this shameless corporate profiteering."

As Stock Market Crashes, Is US Facing New Financial Crisis?

August 8, 2024 Michael Hudson, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Is the United States on the verge of a potential new financial crisis? This is a question that financial analysts are asking after there was a market crash on August 5. It is being compared to the famous “Black Monday” crash in the stock market in 1987. They also both happened on a Monday. So is this another Black Monday? This was the biggest market plunge since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, when many investors were selling off their holdings, fearing that there was going to be a big recession. In fact, as of the August 5th crisis, the volatility index, the VIX, which is a measurement of how rapidly stock prices move in the S&P 500 – which is the stock market index of the 500 biggest companies on U.S. stock exchanges – the volatility index is at the highest level since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Debt Is Political: Why Wealth Flows From Poor To Rich

August 5, 2024 Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson, Geopolitical Economy. , , ,
You may think that today, given the events of recent weeks, we might be talking about the wars that seem set to spiral out of control, particularly with Israel appearing so determined to escalate its hostilities with Hezbollah that it is willing to make accusations on entirely and visibly flimsy grounds. You might think that we will talk about how it’s not at all clear who’s in control, particularly in that country that so often fancies itself as the world’s policeman or woman, as the case may be. And indeed, we certainly intend to cover these topics in the future. However, today we will focus on a very closely related topic, and that is debt.

Capitalism And Democracy Are Opposites

August 4, 2024 Richard Wolff, LA Progressive. , , ,
Fans of capitalism like to say it is democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and never was. Indeed, it is much more accurate to say that capitalism and democracy are opposites. To see why, you have only to look at capitalism as a production system where employees enter into a relationship with employers, where a few people are the boss, and most people simply work doing what they are told to do. That relationship is not democratic; it is autocratic.

Bridging The Human / Nature Divide Through Convivial Conservation

August 1, 2024 David Bollier. , , ,
The conservation movement has always lived within the contractions of the capitalist political economy. Much of it celebrates the global system of market growth, private property, and profit-making while trying, in irregular, PR-driven ways, to compensate for the appalling ecological destruction of this system by creating nature preserves. More recently, the conservation establishment has explicitly come to embrace market-based forms of conservation, such as eco-tourism, hunting, and the patenting of exotic plant genes. Land is recast as "natural capital" and made to pay tribute to markets to assure its own protection. The problem with both of these approaches to conservation is that they regard humans as entirely separate from nature, a premise that is biologically absurd.

‘You Are Not A Loan!’ Introducing The Nation’s First Debtors’ Union

July 23, 2024 Hannah Appel and Astra Taylor, In These Times. , , , ,
A dozen members of Debt Collective were arrested at a Capitol Hill protest in May demanding that President Joe Biden ​“fund education, not genocide.” Before they were taken away by police, the protesters unfurled banners reading ​“You Are Not A Loan” and “$1,700,000,000,000” (the current amount of outstanding student debt). The connection was clear: Biden can and must use his executive powers to cancel all student debt and fund education, not to authorize and fund Israel’s destruction of Palestine. Organizers and activists came from all over the country to Washington, D.C., to tell him so. The ​“Fund Education, Not Genocide” action in May was just a sliver of what we’re about — and what we’re capable of.

Capital Has No Borders; Why Should We?

July 21, 2024 Maurizio Guerrero, In These Times. , , , ,
Elia Velásquez fled the violence and poverty that plagued her native El Salvador in the 1990s. “I saw how my family was suffering, so I said to myself, ​‘If I leave, I can work and help them,’ ” the 55-year-old hotel worker in Washington, D.C, tells In These Times during a phone interview in Spanish. ​“That would be better for them.” El Salvador was deep into a fratricidal civil war, partially instigated and funded by the United States, that left the country in shambles when it ended in 1992. Velásquez came to the United States and initially worked in a packaging facility in the Washington, D.C., area. There, workers did not even get ​“a glass of water” from the managers, she says.
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