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Casino Capitalism and the Derivatives Market: Time for Another “Lehman Moment”?
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 December 24, 2023, Catherine […]
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Farmers Struggle Far from over
Bayer, which profits from various environmentally harmful and disease-causing chemicals like glyphosate, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) “to develop resource-efficient, climate-resilient solutions for crops, varieties, crop protection, weed and mechanization”. The ICAR, an apex public sector institution, is responsible for co-ordinating agricultural education and research […]
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“The Great Taking”: How They Can Own It All
“’You’ll own nothing and be happy’? David Webb has gone through the 50-year history of all the legal constructs that have been put in place to technically enable that to happen.” [Oct 2 interview titled “The Great Taking: Who Really Owns Your Assets?”] The derivatives bubble has been estimated to exceed one quadrillion dollars (a […]
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Policing and Policy
To start with an anecdote of my personal intellectual history, I have to recall reading The Gulag Archipelago as a youth. There were two things that impressed me about this work although I later came to view much of the author’s assertions to be questionable and distorted. However, if one reads the entirety of Solzhenitsyn as […]
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Negotiating Faith and Capitalism: An Exploration of Contemporary Spirituality
Born into a Muslim family, I regularly encounter people who come to my house to invite me to religious gatherings. In these times of neoliberal fascism, it is interesting to note the ideological experience that piety seeks to provide. The most recent person whom I interacted with attempted to root the everyday relevance of religion […]
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War By Other Means: Short Selling JPMorgan
When the FDIC put Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank into receivership in March, a study reported on the Social Science Research Network found that nearly 200 mid-sized U.S. banks were similarly vulnerable to bank runs. First Republic Bank went into receivership in May, but the feared contagion of runs did not otherwise occur. […]
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Let Them Eat Bugs: Challenging the WEF’s Corporate-Driven Food Reset
The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels commodity monocropping and food insecurity as well as soil and environmental degradation. It is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, […]
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The Taylor Swift Exploitation Machine
She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t care for you, and she doesn’t know you. But does her team pretend to, confecting an image of faux empathy and interest, sorting out the wheat from the chaff. The predatory, fan sucking phenomenon of the Taylor Swift marketing machine is something to behold. Leaving aside the sort of […]
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Another Look at the Financial Transactions Tax
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash A small financial transactions tax could correct a number of maladies in our economic system, from the federal debt crisis to the widening wealth divide to the rampant financialization of the economy, while eliminating taxes on income and sales. The debt ceiling crisis has again brought into focus the […]
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