Categoria

Economy / Finance

Armed conflicts

The Iraq War Has Cost the US Nearly $2 Trillion

CRAWFORD*  – THE CONVERSATION The figure includes $838 billion in “emergency” and “overseas contingency operation” funding and $59 billion spent by the State Department and USAID on Iraq and Syria Even if the U.S. administration decided to leave —…

Economy / Finance

Financialization Increases Inequality

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Michael Lim Mah Hui (*) KUALA LUMPUR and PENANG, Feb 4 2020 (IPS) – Financialization has worsened inequality through various channels, including macroeconomic policies. For example, quantitative easing and low, if not negative interest rates have…

Economy / Finance

The Davos Set's Most Dangerous Delusion

By Conor Lynch * –  Truthdig Few thinkers are more deserving of criticism than Milton Friedman. Not only was he the late 20th century’s leading proponent of unfettered capitalism, he served as one of the intellectual fathers of the neoliberal ideology that has been so…

Economy / Finance

Failures Of Neoliberalism

Mike Konczal  – Roosevelt Institute  SUMMARY: INTRODUCTION Over the past several decades, an empirical revolution in economics has undermined many of the assumptions of the reigning approach to economic policy, which we refer to here as “neoliberalism.” This issue…

Commerce

Oil-rich Gulf Turns to Renewable Energy

By Kunda Dixit* ABU DHABI, Jan 29 2020 (IPS) – The increased frequency of climate-induced weather extremes and public opinion pressure are forcing even major fossil fuel exporting countries in West Asia to make a big push towards renewable energy. In January alone, the United…

Civil Society

Big Oil has a do-or-die decade ahead because of climate change

The Economist The 2020s are poised to be to energy firms what the 2010s were to utilities—disruptive As revolutionary slogans go, it hardly had the resonance of ¡No pasarán! But when Repsol, a Spanish oil company, said in December it would reduce the net carbon…

Corruption

Isabel dos Santos: Africa's richest woman 'ripped off Angola'

By BBC Panorama Team Leaked documents reveal how Africa’s richest woman made her fortune through exploiting her own country, and corruption. Isabel dos Santos got access to lucrative deals involving land, oil, diamonds and telecoms when her father was president of Angola, a…

Commerce

The Guardian view on Davos: capitalists know they must do better

Editorial The climate crisis and social unrest could finally force corporate leaders to think beyond the profit motive When Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in an Alpine ski resort in 1971, he wasn’t to know that the 30-year postwar boom was on its last legs. The…