Tag Archives: capitalism

Because "shareholder value." [Nirmal Mulye, chief executive of Nostrum Laboratories,] told FT he agreed with Martin "Pharma Bro" Shkreli raising the price of AIDS and cancer drug Daraprim in 2015 from $13.50 to $750 per tablet, saying he was "within his rights because he had to reward his shareholders." We live in a "capitalist economy and if you can't make money you can't stay in business," Mulye said. "We have to make money when we can. Appropriately, nirman means "no mind."The Week...

Weekend thinking.Thoughts On EconomicsA Semi-Idyllic Golden AgeRobert Vienneau

The takeaway: The appropriate modes of economic organization vary from country to country. In saying this, I’m following Edmund Burke, who wrote: Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. The answer might lie in a distinction made by Burke as described (pdf) by Jesse [Norman]....

MR Online Imperialism in the 21st Century — Global Value Chains and International Labour Arbitrage Dev Nathan Originally published: Economic & Political Weekly (Vol. 53, Issue No. 32, August 11, 2018)

But here’s a simple fact which ought to illustrate, in a sense, the question you’ve asked: This is an extremely undemocratic arrangement. What do I mean? Well, the number of people that make all the key decisions in American corporations, and by that I mean deciding what to produce, deciding how, deciding what technology to use, deciding the physical geographic location—will it be produced in Cincinnati or in Shanghai, etc.—and finally, what to do with the profits that the labor of all the...

There are so many people out there who genuinely believe that financial plutocrats like Soros are communists, and that Wall Street-sponsored Hillary Clinton is a socialist. Many American self-proclaimed right-wingers seriously assert that the German Nazis were all socialists, simply because “Nazi” is short for ”Nationalsozialismus”, which translates as “National Socialism”. Therefore, they make a conclusion that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were ideologically the same. Sadly, this is...

Good read. Relatively short and on point.RedFlagSocialism is back, with good reason Daniel Taylor  

...there is, if you like, a third way between utopian communism on the one hand and technocratic tweaks on the other. It begins from the idea that ten years of stagnant productivity might mean we are now at the phase of capitalism that Marx foresaw: At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the...

Must-read. Michael Hudson gives the background on Argentina's fall in terms of neoliberal capitalism. Michael Hudson: What really is at issue is whether all debts should be paid, or not? I think that there should be an international rule that no country should be obliged to pay its debts to the wealthy One Percent, especially to a creditor class that prefers to hold its domestic wealth offshore in foreign currencies. No country should be obliged to pay its bondholders if the price of...

In examining the implications for an exit from a currency union, one of the issues that arises is the proportion of public debt that is issued under foreign law. This is a separate issue to the implications of foreign-currency denominated debt. Both issues are problematic and compromise a government’s capacity to remain solvent. I covered the former issue to some extent in my 2015 book – Eurozone Dystopia: Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale – when I was considering different strategies...