“We said that this gathering [the summit] should be seen as a threat to global humanity. It’s quite clear from its history - that is NATO’s history - that it is a structure that is used to maintain and advance Western global capitalist interest, and for that it should be seen as a threat. Most of the interventions by NATO have been beyond the pale of legality,” [Ajamu] Baraka, [national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace,] told hosts Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon. “The very fact...
Read More »Global Giants: American Empire and Transnational Capital — Maximilian C. Forte
Review of Giants: The Global Power Elite by Peter Phillips (Introduction by William I. Robinson). New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018. LCCN 2018017493; ISBN 9781609808716 (pbk.); ISBN 9781609808723 (ebook); 353 pps. Giants: The Global Power Elite, by Peter M. Phillips, Professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University, opens with a stated intention of following in the tradition C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite. This book is clearly meant to be a contemporary update and expansion...
Read More »Trump’s Trade Threats are really Cold War 2.0 Michael Hudson
At stake is whether China will agree to do what Russia did in the 1990s: put a Yeltsin-like puppet of neoliberal planners in place to shift control of its economy from its government to the U.S. financial sector and its planners. So the fight really is over what kind of planning China and the rest of the world should have: by governments to raise prosperity, or by the financial sector to extract revenue and impose austerity. U.S. diplomacy aims to make other countries dependent on its...
Read More »Zero Hedge — Trump Declares Trade War On India, Imposes New Tariffs
No surprise, actually. Same policy as toward China requiring "reform" allowing the US to compete equally in their domestic markets. India and China have no intention of allowing foreign entities control the commanding heights of their economies through "investment." It's a national security issue, just as the US approaches this domestically itself. This is basic to neoliberal globalization that effectively colonized the rest of the world. Nothing new here, either. It is typical of empires....
Read More »Jason Hickel — How Britain stole $45 trillion from India: And lied about it.
Colonialism and "the white man's burden." The story of the East India Company and how transnational corporate totalitarianism began. The rest is history that is still unfolding in accordance with this paradigm that has been adapted to neoliberal globalization and how capitalism is uplifting the masses, in particular those who are not of European descent. There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India - as horrible as it may have been - was not of any...
Read More »Reuters — Trump is shaping new ‘liberal’ order to block Russia, China, Iran, says Pompeo
"Neoliberal order." There, fixed it for you. In a twist on Trump’s “America First” policy, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Trump was not abandoning its global leadership but instead reshaping the post-World War Two system on the basis of sovereign states, not multilateral institutions. “In the finest traditions of our great democracy, we are rallying the noble nations to build a new liberal order that prevents war and achieves greater prosperity,” Pompeo told diplomats and...
Read More »James Pethokoukis — Republicans have a big new economic idea. It’s terrible.
James Pethokoukis is has a master's degree in journalism and no credentials in economics. Perhaps this explains at least part of his failure to understand that globalization under neoliberal doctrine — "free markets, free trade, and free capital flows" results in the great leveling as capital flows where resources, including labor, as least expensive in order to be be competitive. This implies that wages and capital investment in developed countries, where resources are most costly, will...
Read More »Ramanan — Thomas Palley – Re-theorizing The Welfare State And The Political Economy Of Neoliberalism’s War Against It
Thomas Palley has a new paper: The Case for Concerted Action Thomas Palley – Re-theorizing The Welfare State And The Political Economy Of Neoliberalism’s War Against It V. Ramanan
Read More »Reuters — Top US Treasury official slams China’s ‘non-market behavior’
The U.S. Treasury's top diplomat accused Beijing of "patently non-market behavior" and said that the United States needed stronger responses to counter it. David Malpass, Treasury's undersecretary for international affairs, said that market-oriented, democratic governments were awakening to the challenges posed by China's economic system, including from its state-owned banks and export credit agencies. He reiterated his view that China had stopped liberalizing its economy and was actually...
Read More »Paul Grenier — Russia, America, and the Courage to Converse
Despite its claims to “open-ness,” liberalism in its late modern Western form becomes self-contained to the point of closure. Allied with such power constructs as the “liberal world order,” globalization (a word that came into common usage only after the fall of the Soviet Union) tends towards the homogenization of political space and the radical constriction of pluralism. Notice a trend toward closure? It's affected conventional economics in addition to politics. Plurism, the hallmark of...
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