Oligarchs and financial interests are expanding control over Ukraine’s agricultural land with help and financing from Western financial institutions. High economic stress and war will lead to more land consolidation by large agribusinesses. Continue reading A Journal of the Plague Year 2023: Grand theft Ukraine: sowing seeds of plunder
by Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre What can quantitative linguistic analysis tell us about the operations and outlook of the international financial institutions? At first glance, the words most frequently used in the World Bank’s Annual Reports give an impression … Continue reading Bankspeak: the language of World Bank reports
by Henry A. Giroux As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor while expanding the ranks of their managerial class. Modeled after a savage neoliberal value system in which wealth and power are redistributed upward, a market-oriented class of managers largely has taken over the governing structures of most institutions of higher education in the United States. As Debra Leigh Scott points out, “administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country.”[1] There is more at stake here than metrics. Benjamin Ginsberg views this shift in governance as the rise of what he … Continue reading Taking notes 32: Beyond neoliberal miseducation
by Steve Fraser “All that is solid melts into air” is even truer about the hyper-flux of everyday life today than it was when those words first appeared in the Communist Manifesto more than a century and half ago. Truer, that is, with one major exception. In our political life we are fixated on the past, forever looking backward. Arguably, national politics over the last half century has polarized between efforts to defend and restore the New Deal Order and relentless attempts to repeal it and replace it with something even older. The liberal left has fought to extend or … Continue reading To go beyond the capitalist state
by Henry A. Giroux In the aftermath of the reign of Nazi terror in the 1940s, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote: National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.[1] Adorno’s words are as relevant today as they were when he first wrote them. The threat of authoritarianism to citizen-based … Continue reading The ghost of Authoritarianism in the Age of the Shutdown
Are we destined for history, for philosophy, for the world, have we been sent, probably from further afield than from our individuality, to wage a war in their name? — Anti-Badiou, Laruelle With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own. — John F. Kennedy The US of A is on the brink again. It is on the verge of running out of cash … Continue reading Taking notes 26: Revolution-in-waiting
by Sandy Brian Hager (forthcoming) In the wake of the current crisis there has been an explosive rise in the level of the US public debt. These massive levels of public indebtedness are expected to keep growing unless there are drastic changes to existing budgetary policies. This apparent dilemma has sparked a debate over which groups should bear the burden of debt repayment and fiscal adjustment. However, one crucial question remains unasked: whose powerful interests are served by the public debt? America’s real ‘debt dilemma’ Every man and woman who owned a Government Bond, we believed, would serve as a … Continue reading America’s real ‘debt dilemma’
by Sanjay Perera
We return to the idea of general equilibrium and the transcendent nature of it espoused by economists and the problems ensuing from this. Another normative aspect to this for economists, in terms of what good a state of equilibrium can produce is highlighted by the so-called Pareto criterion. Continue reading A critique of Capital (3): Toward a moral economy
by Danny Weil Get ready students: your college student loans are due to double on July 2013! The cost of higher education is spiraling and with it the cost of student loans, one of the biggest Wall Street rackets currently in existence. Both the Obama administration and the Republicans are seeking “market solutions” they say will staunch the bleeding [1]. Do not be fooled: it is ‘market solutions’ that caused the crisis and with the financialization of education, students are seen as little more than commodities to be bought, sold and monetized for profit. Education is now nothing more than a pernicious, … Continue reading Student loans: The financialized economy of indentured servitude
by Sanjay Perera
From the perspective of the Kantian critique the problem with the synthetic idea of general equilibrium is that it fast becomes a transcendent one. Continue reading A critique of Capital (2): The metaphysics of economics
Philosophers for Change 