Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label investment

UK: Something Monstrous

“[T]he vilification of migrants and Muslims forms part of a primitive persecutory phantasy, shaped by the UK’s colonial history and by its entrenched material disparities.” “[I]t would be more accurate to view contemporary British bordering as a continuation of colonial violence: an attempt to police the nation’s last frontier, so that the wealth and status gained from imperial conquest is preserved, materially and symbolically – and withheld from former colonial subjects.” This goes with the rhetoric of politicians who stress that UK needs migrants, but they have to be skilled ones and the country ‘legally’. They did not mind before – in fact encouraged – the hundreds of thousands of Polish and others, many of whom were unskilled, when British capital needed cheap labour. During the ‘great boom’ of capitalism in the 1959s and 1960s liberal democracy could thrive at home without the need to scapegoat the Other. On the contrary, many workers from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean were e...

Global Carbon Inequality 1990-2019

“ In my benchmark estimates, I find that the bottom 50% of the world population emitted 12% of global emissions in 2019, whereas the top 10% emitted 48% of the total. Since 1990, the bottom 50% of the world population has been responsible for only 16% of all emissions, whereas the top 1% has been responsible for 23% of the total. While per-capita emissions of the global top 1% increased since 1990, emissions from low- and middle-income groups within rich countries declined. Contrary to the situation in 1990, 63% of the global inequality in individual emissions is now due to a gap between low and high emitters within countries rather than between countries. Finally, the bulk of total emissions from the global top 1% of the world population comes from their investments rather than from their consumption.” Source: Lucas Chancel on nature.com

Has ‘Globalisation’ Ended?

The claim was  global expansion and harmonious development of the productive forces and resources of the world .  The 2008-09 crisis, the Arab uprisings and social movements in the West itself, wars and civil wars, migration, fall in living standards for many people, environmental degradation, rise of neofascism and more racism, increase in inequality and corruption, the handling of the pandemic and vaccine apartheid … has exposed what ‘globalisation’ has really meant.

‘Bidenomics’: Its Origins and Its Limitations

Is this shift sufficient to tackle the century’s social and ecological crises? Not nearly. Does it alter essential class relations? On the contrary: it strives to re-legitimize the social order. Is it unambiguous? No: while private finance has been kept out of new domestic infrastructure projects, the US is still driving privatization and deregulation in the global south and intensifying its new Cold War on China. Will it propel a new phase of economic expansion? I doubt it, due to the sheer scale of global overaccumulation and the fade-out of the industrialization bonanza. 1979 in Reverse

UK

  Michael Roberts , 25 December 2020: