INDIA
Jayati Ghosh writes: Fascism in the 21st century does have some new features, which are also common to at least some of the countries that are currently experiencing it. They are largely related to the possibilities generated by new technologies, especially communication and surveillance technologies, which are increasingly being used by governments with fascist inclinations….
Read More about Techno-fascism in the 21st century
Bookshelf
The climate crisis is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, which threatens not only global civilization, but the very survival of our species and many others. This book gives a lucid explanation of the science of climate change and illuminates the role of capitalism in creating and perpetuating the climate crisis and related dangers….
Read More about Bookshelf: Capitalism and Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming
CLIMATE CRISIS
Much of the mainstream media, corporate lobbyists and politicians would like the public to think of climate change as something akin to a natural phenomenon. In this second part of our series on Capitalism and Climate Change, we present a selection of articles that examine the deep-seated connections between climate change and a rapacious global economic order….
Read More about Digest: Climate crisis and the myth of ‘green’ capitalism
ALTERNATIVES
Richard Norgaard writes: Two centuries of explosive economic growth have radically altered our world. With human activity now the major driver of geological change, the industrial era has come to be called the Anthropocene. In this essay, I instead adopt the term Econocene, thereby underscoring its ideological foundation: economism, the reduction of all social relations to market logic….
Read More about The Church of Economism and its discontents
Corporate Watch
CLIMATE CRISIS
Climate change is real, and it’s going to get worse. This video looks at how obstacles to solving the problem are intrinsic to our capitalist system. The growing strength of the climate movement around the world gives us great hope, but it’s going to take a revolution to make the world inhabitable for future generations….
Read More about Series: Capitalism and Climate Change
Famouseconomists.net
Bookshelf
Author Mark Weisbrot says: “Behind almost every prolonged economic malfeasance there is some combination of outworn bad ideas, incompetence and the malign influence of powerful special interests”. Unfortunately, such nightmares are repeated in other places because even if the lessons are learned, they are not taken to heart, by “the people who call the shots”….
Read More about Bookshelf: Failed – What the “experts” got wrong about the global economy
25 March 2015. Farmer Nityagopal Barman (43) committed suicide, after being unable to repay his loans
AFP
Development/Growth
As output is rising at a slower rate since 1990, profitability of farmers is getting adversely affected: for they are not being able to produce at as fast a rate as they had been doing before. Note, decline in public investment is a conscious government decision. There are also other policy changes which aggravated this….
Read More about Farmer suicides: What do we know? What does it mean?
Development/Growth
Over the past three decades, average income of the farmer has increased by only 19%, while that of the government employee has by 370% and that of the corporate sector by more than a thousand per cent… Hidden in the rhetoric of being “pro-farmer and pro-poor” are the continued logic of being “pro-investor and pro-business”….
Read More about A.R. Vasavi: The bitter reality behind the ‘pro-farmer’ budget
Development/Growth
Devinder Sharma writes: Jaitley wants the farmers to wait five years for their income to rise to 3,332 rupees a month. I can imagine the Economic Survey presented in 2022 proudly stating the success. But the reality is, by 2022, adjusting for inflation, the doubled income would be equivalent to what a farmer makes now….
Read More about Budget Analysis: Don’t believe the hype, farmers have been short-changed again
“The mindset of the Indian elite is: the poor are different from me and I don’t want them around”
R. V. Moorthy
Bookshelf
“India’s economic policies are determined by the World Bank. They are therefore pro-capital, and anti-labour. Today the World Bank’s at the end of its tether. Its formula of formal capital in the informal economy failed because the poor don’t own capital. Having run out of ideas, they’ve now started blaming the poor for being poor.”…
Read More about Jan Breman: “76 per cent of the Indian population is living in poverty”Development/Growth
Jahnavi Sen reports: According to a new research paper by Radicka Anand, capital intensity of production has been increasing across industries in the last decade. This is true not only in capital intensive industries (or those industries whose capital intensity is higher than the median of the manufacturing sector), but also for labour intensive industries….
Read More about As automation increases in India, so does inequalityConflict/Dispossession
Colin Todhunter writes: There is a notion that we can just continue as we are, with an endless supply of oil, endless supplies of meat and endless assault on soil, human and environmental well-being that intensive petrochemical agriculture entails. Given the statistics, this is unsustainable, unrealistic and a recipe for continued resource-driven conflicts and devastation….
Read More about Arms, Agribusiness, Finance and Fossil Fuels: The Four Horsemen of the Neoliberal Apocalypse
Pradeep Gaur/Mint
Consumerism/Lifestyle
Sudipto Mundle writes: India’s current high growth is organically linked to food price inflation, and the rising margin between the wholesale and retail price of food. Should we continue to celebrate India’s status as the world’s fastest growing economy, while leaving it to consumers to cope with rising food prices as best as they can?…
Read More about India’s high growth rate and the price of food
Protesters block Silicon Valley shuttles, smash Google bus window
TheVerge.com
Bookshelf
Douglas Rushkoff writes: We’ve to stop looking at our economy as a broken system, but one that’s working absolutely true to its original design. We are not witnessing capitalism gone wrong — an egalitarian currency system corrupted by greedy bankers — but, rather, capitalism doing exactly what it was programmed to do from the beginning….
Read More about New Book: Throwing Rocks at the Google BusEconomy
This short animated video on inequality from Krishi TV shows what it really means when the top 1% of India owns half of the country’s wealth. The benefits of India’s economic growth of the past years have been largely appropriated by this small group, at the expense of the welfare of the majority of Indians….
Read More about Video: What it really means when the top 1% own half of India’s wealth
Cagle.com
Economy
Satyajit Das writes in The Times of India: Policy makers have sold the future for a precarious, short-lived stability. There is a striking similarity between the problems of the financial system, irreversible climate change and shortages of vital resources like oil, food and water… The world is remarkably unprepared for the crisis that is unfolding….
Read More about Hopium economics and the madness of infinite growth on a finite planetCLIMATE CRISIS
In this essay, leading Australian public intellectual Robert Manne writes: Our conscious destruction of a planet friendly to humans and other species is the most significant development in history. No less important than the impact of climate change is the question of why human beings have so far failed so comprehensively to rise to its challenge….
Read More about Why have we failed to address climate change?
Conflict/Dispossession
Rohini Mohan reports: In under a year, the Modi government has begun to undo policies of fair land acquisition, undermine environmental protection and reverse the fight for tribal rights. The finance, environment and rural-development ministers, and Modi himself, have called these safeguards to protect people’s property, the environment and tribal rights “roadblocks” to economic growth….
Read More about Narendra Modi’s war on the environmentGREEN POLITICS
Introducing a new digital pamphlet designed to connect the dots on advanced-stage, 21st Century neoliberalism /The Rules We now all live on a One Party Planet. This is a provocative claim, pregnant with meaning and implication. If it’s true in the way we believe it to be, it means there is an identifiable form of totalitarianism…
Read More about Digital Pamphlet: Do We Live on a One Party Planet?
Conflict/Dispossession
Basudev Mahapatra writes: Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, has “delinked forest clearance from clearance by the National Wild Life Board and halved NBWL clearance requirements from 10km to 5km around forest reserves, besides emasculating the Board by replacing eminent experts and concerned NGOs with rubber stamps. He has also relaxed procedures of the Forest Conservation Act….
Read More about Rohini Mohan: The Modi Government’s war on environment
