Capitalism

Global 1% Own 43% Of Financial Assets

January 18, 2024 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. Resistance Report Capitalism, Elon Musk, Inequality, Jeff Bezos, Neoliberalism, Oxfam, Warren Buffett

The world’s richest 1% own 43% of global financial assets, and the wealth of the top five billionaires has doubled since 2020, while 60% of humanity – nearly 5 billion people – collectively got poorer, according to a report by Oxfam, a leading international humanitarian organization. Oxfam published the study, “Inequality Inc.”, to coincide with the World Economic Forum meeting of corporate oligarchs and Western government officials in Davos, Switzerland this January. The five richest people on Earth in 2023 were Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Warren Buffett. Their combined wealth skyrocketed from $340 billion in 2020 to $869 billion just three years later.

Casino Capitalism And Derivatives Market: Time For A ‘Lehman Moment’?

January 16, 2024 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Educate! Capitalism, Derivatives, Finance and the Economy, Financial Crisis

Reading the tea leaves for the 2024 economy is challenging. On January 5th, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said we have achieved a “soft landing,” with wages rising faster than prices in 2023. But critics are questioning the official figures, and prices are still high. Surveys show that consumers remain apprehensive. There are other concerns. On Dec. 24, 2023, Catherine Herridge, a senior investigative correspondent for CBS News covering national security and intelligence, said on “Face the Nation,” “I just feel a lot of concern that 2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that’s very hard to predict.”

Commons And Commoning: A Progressive Vision Of A Good Society

January 14, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Capitalism, Constructive Program, The Commons, Transformation

Established systems don't welcome fundamentally new ideas – even when they desperately need them, even if people are clamoring for them. Entrenched systems see new ideas and logics as disruptive. They see them as threatening and even incomprehensible. And yet, as Albert Einstein famously said, "Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them." We're at an impasse today because contemporary institutions keep bringing the same mindset to solving problems that need some fresh and strikingly different approaches. The many problems afflicting agriculture and the food system today are fundamentally similar to those afflicting the rest of society. They are just another theater for rentier capitalism, which relies on market/state collusion, extractivism of nature, and systemic precarity for many ordinary people.

Community Economies: Reframing Wealth Building

January 11, 2024 Thomas Klaffke, Resilience. Create! Capitalism, Community Control, Local Economy, Wealth

Our current wealth-building system is based on individualism and therefore elitism. We’re totally focused on this idea of competition, on “beating” the opponents and gaining leverage against others to “win”. Those who outrun their competitors “lead” the race and therefore become the “leaders”. Society envies those who “made it”, who, through gaining competitive advantage, made a fortune and can now enjoy status, power, and independence points that seem almost unreachable for the ordinary person who feels stuck in the daily rat race. “The dominant narrative around leadership in many areas of the world centers individualism over solidarity.

An Environmental Activist’s Guide To The Great Barrington Declaration

January 4, 2024 Phil Wilson, Resilience. Strategize! Capitalism, COVID-19, Libertarian, Pandemic, Public Health

The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) is standard issue libertarian free market ideology sanded down to fit the confines of public health – this document (coauthored by three highly credentialed academics: Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford) recommended that governments do nothing to combat a once in a century pandemic destined globally to obliterate as many as 27 million lives. The fever dream enshrined in every libertarian narrative holds that “self regulating forces” exhibit a mystical benevolence only realized when governments retreat, and defer to the “natural order.”

Opening A New Path On Climate And The Future

December 30, 2023 Gus Speth, Resilience. Strategize! Adaptation, Capitalism, climate crisis, Transformation

Of the many climate struggles going on today, the great one, played out in hundreds of arenas around the world, is the struggle to rein in and then halt the buildup of greenhouse gases. Gaining ever-more attention is the struggle to adapt to the climate impacts already upon us. But there is a new struggle that needs to be joined now: the struggle to learn from our mistakes — the Big Mistake of climate catastrophe. What is it about our society, our economy, our politics, and our culture that has let this giant failing happen? What is it that has led us to this tragedy? There are a set of readily available answers to this question, the conventional wisdom of the matter.

How Oil Money Turned Louisiana Into The Prison Capital Of The World

December 28, 2023 Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Truthout. Educate! Big Oil, Capitalism, Criminal Justice and Prisons, History, Louisiana

On October 14, 2023, Louisiana elected far right candidate Jeff Landry to the governor’s mansion. As the state’s current attorney general, Landry (a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy) has made headlines for his creation of an anti-crime policing task force for New Orleans, suing the state to block clemency appeals by those on death row, and advocating to make public the criminal records of juveniles in predominately Black areas of the state. Landry’s dedication to “law and order” has been matched by his commitment to extractive industries. As a climate change denier, he has pushed for more aggressive off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and sued the Environmental Protection Agency for overreach.

Contrasting Strategies Of The United States And China

December 26, 2023 Roger D, Harris, Popular Resistance. Educate! Capitalism, China, Foreign Policy, Socialism, United States, Wars and Militarism

In the latest salvo preparing the US for confrontation with China, Nicholas Burns flat out said, “I don’t feel optimistic about the future of US-China relations.” Burns should know. He is Washington’s ambassador to Beijing. The US stance on bilateral relations with China, according to Burns, is one of “strategic competition in the coming decades… vying for global power as well as regional power.” Indeed, the US is preparing for war with China. High-ranking US Airforce General Mike Minihan foresees war as early as 2025. This contrasts with the Chinese approach of cooperation for mutual benefit to solve the most pressing global problems.

Transnational Corporations Provoke A Single Scream Of Horror

December 22, 2023 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Capitalism, Class Struggle, OECD, taxation, United Nations, Wars and Militarism

Within the United Nations, there is a little-known debate about the status of global tax regulation. In August 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a draft document called ‘Promotion of Inclusive and Effective International Tax Cooperation at the United Nations’. This document comes out of a long debate led by the Global South about the unregulated behaviour of transnational corporations (especially the ways in which they avoid taxation) and about the fact that discussions regarding regulations have been dominated by Global North countries (notably those in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, an intergovernmental platform largely made up of the richest countries in the world).

International Migrants Day: How To Change The System?

December 21, 2023 Neal Resnikoff, Orinoco Tribune. Create! Capitalism, Chicago, Latin America, Migrants, migration crisis

The UN General Assembly proclaimed December 18 International Migrants Day in 2000. It took into account the large and increasing number of migrants in the world. It aimed to further the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. The Convention recognizes the human rights of migrant workers and promotes their access to justice as well as to humane and lawful working and living conditions. It provides guidance on the elaboration of national migration policies and for international cooperation based on respect for human rights and the rule of law.

The Process Of Consumption And The Means Of Achieving Well Being

December 19, 2023 Luis Razeto Migliaro and Matt Noyes, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Strategize! Capitalism, Consumers, Economics, Workers

In the previous sections we examined the processes of production and circulation, laying out the foundations of their respective general theories. We now turn to the central questions of a general theory of economic consumption. In Economics, the theme has scarcely been considered from a theoretical standpoint. Consumption is taken into account as a relevant economic variable, but in a very restricted sense – as “consumer spending” – as opposed to savings and accumulation. At the micro-economic level, the focus has been on consumer behavior in an effort to understand consumers’ disposition to spend, in relation to their drive to accumulate revenue and wealth, as well as the way variations in price affect spending.

Scientists Say COP28 Is A Blank Cheque For More Deadly Delay

December 18, 2023 The Canary. Educate! Capitalism, climate crisis, COP28, Extinction Rebellion, greenwashing, Scientist Activism

The UN climate summit, hijacked by the fossil fuel cartel, has gifted a blank cheque to rich countries and Big Oil to kill one billion people and force billions more to flee their homes by 2100. The so-called ‘historic’ outcome of COP28 fails to deliver the most basic and necessary measures which would have prevented societal and earth systems collapse, as outlined by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and halt all new gas and oil projects. Instead, the new resolution includes numerous loopholes which will allow polluters to greenwash emissions through fictional carbon capture, meaningless carbon credits, and the re-classification of methane (“natural gas”) as a transition fuel.

International Solidarity At The First ‘World Congress For Climate Justice’

December 7, 2023 John Malamatinas, Unicorn Riot. Organize! Capitalism, Climate Justice, Italy, Solidarity

Milan, Italy — For many years, transnational movements like “Fridays for Future” or “Extinction Rebellion” have tried to push governments to comply with the 1.5 C climate threshold set in 2015 by the Paris Agreement, yet activists believe not enough has changed. The struggles against mega-projects — be it coal mines, pipelines, motorways, train lines, construction for Olympic games, or water privatization — are still happening in every continent, and many are crying out for an immediate reaction to a dystopian future. One such reaction happened in October in Milan, Italy: The World Congress for Climate Justice (WCCJ).

Is American Banking Safe? You Might Not Like The Answer

December 6, 2023 Lynn Parramore, Scheer Post. Educate! Banking, Capitalism, Federal Reserve, Finance and the Economy, History, Regulation

As anybody who lived through the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 knows, banking can be hazardous. Failures can hit millions hard, wiping out life savings, tossing the economy into chaos, and messing with investments, spending, and overall growth. Capital requirements are supposed to be crucial buffers shielding banks from catastrophes, rooted in centuries of financial evolution from Alexander Hamilton up through the New Deal regulatory regime and modern international agreements like the Basel Accords. But current regulators’ efforts to raise the capital ratios of big banks to safe levels are strongly opposed by most financiers, sparking debates on finding a balance between stability and financial risk, all amid intense political pressures.

COP28 – We Need To Challenge The Power Of Fossil Fuel Capitalism

December 5, 2023 Global Ecosocialist Network. Strategize! Capitalism, climate crisis, COP28, Ecosocialism

Despite the fact that we are teetering on the edge of the climate cliff, capitalist governments are far from the drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and carbon drawdown necessary to prevent this “temporary” temperature rise from becoming the norm, setting us well on the path to an unlivable planet for the majority of the world’s human and non-human population. On the contrary, emissions have steadily increased during the past few years. The environmental destruction caused by wars, occupations and the military-industrial complex are compounding the crisis. The shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy has suffered a setback because of this and the threat of a nuclear conflict is again hanging over us.

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