Category: Global Insights
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US Missile Threats, Strategic Partnership With China, Ukraine Conflict (Sergei Lavrov, May 2024)
In a big interview to Sputnik, Russia’s foreign minister discusses several critical topics, including the potential threat posed by US missiles in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, the expansion of military cooperation with China, the special military operation’s progress and Zelensky’s illegitimacy after his term ended. Russian strategic objects, including nuclear ones, may come under…
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How to Avoid Climate Disaster (Bill Gates, 2021)
There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year. Although the figure may go up or down a bit from year to year, it’s generally increasing….
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The Parasite, the Host, and Control of the Economy’s Brain (Michael Hudson, 2015)
Biological usage of the word “parasite” is a metaphor adopted from ancient Greece. Officials in charge of collecting grain for communal festivals were joined in their rounds by their aides. Brought along to the meals by these functionaries at public expense, the aides were known as parasites, a nonpejorative term for “meal companion,” from the…
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Foundation of US Empire: Axes of Evil (James Petras, 2020)
Empires are not easy to sustain given the multiple enemies that they provoke: at the international level (imperial rivals and emerging new powers), at the national level (national resistance movements, unreliable clients and untrustworthy ‘Sepoy’ armies) and at the local level (boycotts, sabotage and strikes). Imperial difficulties are multiplied when an empire is in economic…
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The Modern World-System as a Capitalist World- Economy: Production, Surplus Value, and Polarization (Immanuel Wallerstein, 2004)
The World in which we are now living, the modern world-system, had its origins in the sixteenth century. This world-system was then located in only a part of the globe, primarily in parts of Europe and the Americas. It expanded over time to cover the whole globe. It is and has always been a world-economy….
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The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (Vandana Shiva, 2016)
IN 1970, Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ‘a new world situation with regard to nutrition . . .’. According to the Nobel Prize Committee, ‘the kinds of grain which are the result of Dr Borlaug’s work speed economic growth in general in the developing countries.’1 The ‘miracle seeds’ that Borlaug had…
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Seven Principles for a New Political Economy (Mariana Mazzucato, 2021)
On 16 April 2019 Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist, gave a speech to the European Parliament, calling for ‘cathedral thinking’ to tackle climate change: It is still not too late to act. It will take a far-reaching vision, it will take courage, it will take fierce, fierce determination to act now, to lay…
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What is Biopiracy? (Vandana Shiva, 2001)
Biopiracy refers to the use of intellectual property systems to legitimize the exclusive ownership and control over biological resources and biological products and processes that have been used over centuries in non-industrialized cultures. Patent claims over biodiversity and indigenous knowledge that are based on the innovation, creativity and genius of the people of the Third…