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The Profiteering Motive
Times of crisis can be glorious for some. The Great Depression bred its share of wealthy profiteers. The First and Second World Wars fostered many a multimillionaire. Over the bodies of millions, the returns for armaments companies were unparalleled. And during the current “cost of living crisis,” as it is so often dubbed, there are […]
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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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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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For Argentina’s Small Farmers, the Land Is Predictable but the Markets Are Not
Thirty years ago, in my economics textbook in India, the section on international trade referred to Argentina. It would be better, according to the textbook, for Argentina to concentrate on the production and export of beef, while Germany should direct its resources towards the production of electronics. This example was used to illustrate Adam Smith’s […]
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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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Peace Dollars: Putting Our Economic House In Order
The total federal deficit at $31+ trillion? Maybe it’s time for some creative thinking — a totally unique strategy that benefits all Americans, not just capitalist predators. Special use currency is not unprecedented. Abraham Lincoln used “greenbacks” — the paper currency shown above, backed by nothing more than confidence in the government — to finance the Civil War. He […]
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The True Meaning of Debt
In debating the validity of raising the debt limit, the United States Congress has not carefully analyzed the reasons for government debt and the meaning of all debt. The true meaning of debt has the modern capitalist system as a debt-driven system. All new money supply is debt and the money supply is the energy […]
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Steering the Titanic into the Iceberg
Patty Chayefsky’s film Network, an acid-laced spoof of capitalist media, reaches its climax when Chairman Arthur Jensen, leader of the fictional mega-corporation CAA, thunders his disapproval to the crazed but wildly popular anchorman, Howard Beale. Encouraging his viewers to protest CAA’s unpatriotic merger deal with Saudi Arabian capitalists, Jensen accuses Beal of having “meddled with […]
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Squeezed by the Shorts: Time to Ban Short Selling?
Short sellers have made a killing in the recent banking crisis, scalping $14.3 billion from bank stock owners just in March of this year. Short sellers “borrow” stock they don’t own and immediately sell it, driving the price down. Then they buy it back at the lower price, return the stock, and pocket the difference. […]
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Toxic Contagion: Funds, Food and Pharma
In 2014, the organisation GRAIN revealed that small farms produce most of the world’s food in its report “Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland.” The report “Small-scale Farmers and Peasants Still Feed the World” (ETC Group, 2022) confirmed this. Small farmers produce up to 80% […]
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