IN THE wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, capitalism regrouped as states pumped enormous amounts of money into the system to stabilize it. The result has been a relatively weak recovery—one that has failed to clear away the problems that had produced the crisis in the first place. As a (...)
APEC IS TWO WORLDS APART
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is merely an economic forum yet it operates as a powerful mechanism for accelerating regional economic integration. Established in 1989, APEC serves as a venue for its 21 member economies to leverage their interdependence. (...)
JAISAL NOOR, PRODUCER, TRNN: The long-awaited text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, has finally been released to the public. The controversial and until now highly secretive trade pact would reduce trade barriers and transform how business is done for the twelve Pacific Rim countries (...)
The TPP’s language is complex, but its result would be simple: more corporate power, and less democratic control.
Critical public debate on President Obama’s coveted Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) had been undergoing an important shift in the buildup to his failure yesterday to secure “fast (...)
While the Finance Ministers of several oil guzzling countries like India and China are smiling, people are not. Global oil prices have fallen about 40% since June when the price of a barrel of oil was US$ 115/- to $70/- a barrel currently. This decrease has benefitted governments, but the (...)
In its most recent world public opinion survey, the Pew Research Centre found that ‘international financial instability’ is considered a major threat by 52 percent of those polled was a close second, after climate change at 54 percent).
Here in South Africa, after the lifting of local exchange (...)
Despite much optimism, there are clear indications that BRICS lacks the capacity to function as a powerful and innovative new force in the realm of global politics and governance.
Can BRICS emerge as a collective that will reject the current neoliberal order and seek to promote a much more (...)
“As the Economist put it at year-end 2006, ‘having grown at an annual rate of 3.2% per head since 2000, the world economy is over halfway towards notching up its best decade ever. If it keeps going at this clip, it will beat both the supposedly idyllic 1950s and the 1960s. Market capitalism, the (...)
While the Occupy movement has forced a public discussion of extreme corporate influence on every aspect of our lives, behind closed doors corporate America is implementing a stealth strategy to formalize its rule in a truly horrifying manner. The mechanism is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (...)
There is growing momentum in the United States and Europe for increasing taxation on the financial industry. On April 13, the Congressional Progressive Caucus put out a People’s Budget that explicitly called for taxing trades of derivatives and foreign exchange transactions. In March the (...)
INSTEAD OF CALLING the recent G-20’s brutal austerity declaration (issued at the conclusion of its annual summit in Toronto) an orchestrated declaration of class war on the people, many progressive/Keynesian economists and other liberal commentators simply call it “bad policy.” While it is true (...)
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 19, 2010 (IPS) - They left behind months or years of slaving away — in some cases, literally — in garment sweatshops, working long hours for little to no pay. But breaking free from modern-day slavery or forced labour wasn’t enough for a group of textile workers from Argentina (...)
Hosting the G20 in Toronto was the first of a series of political gambles by the Conservative Canadian government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. At a time when U.S. President Barack Obama, leader of the world’s greatest debtor nation, was seeking additional stimulus money and therefore (...)
The Punjab government subsidized scheme of 10 Rupees a kilo for wheat flour (Atta) has made Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister, very “popular” in Punjab and Pakistan. The Muslim League Nawaz (PMLN) is banking on this and other popular schemes introduced by their government in Punjab as the main (...)
Across the globe, as mining and oil firms race for dwindling resources, indigenous peoples are battling to defend their lands – often paying the ultimate price.
It has been called the world’s second “oil war”, but the only similarity between Iraq and events in the jungles of northern Peru over the (...)
When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a sharp increase of over 60 per cent in the price of tortilla, the flat unleavened bread that is Mexico’s staple, many analysts pointed to biofuels as the culprit. Owing to US government subsidies, turning (...)
In a press conference in Timor Leste’s capital city Dili on May 14, top UN officials declared that the country is not at a risk of starvation from the global food crisis. According to the World Food Programme (WFP) Country Director Joan Fleuren in Timor Leste, “The Government is working hard to (...)
The global food market fosters both scarcity and overconsumption, while imperilling the planet’s ability to produce food in the future.
In his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” of 1798, the English parson Thomas Malthus insisted that human populations would always be “checked” (a polite word (...)
May 7, 2008 — Karl Marx, born on 5 May, 1818, nearly two centuries ago, had in 1867 laid bare the ``intimate connection between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist (...)
When “peak oil” theory was first widely publicized in such path breaking books as Kenneth Deffeyes’ Hubbert’s Peak (2001), Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over (2002), David Goodstein’s Out of Gas (2004), and Paul Robert’s The End of Oil (2004), energy industry officials and their government associates (...)
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