Topic: Labor / Economics
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Cuban Workers Celebrate Salary Rise From New Economic Measures
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‘Today is Cuban workers’ day!’ a Cuban friend told me in late June, beaming at the news that all employees of the island’s ‘budgeted’ state sector would receive significant salary rises, commencing from 1 July 2019. Cuba’s budgeted sector incorporates organisations and entities which operate with a state budget and mostly provide services free to…
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Publicly Owned Utilities Could Help Fight the Climate Crisis
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Earlier this month, Pacific Gas & Electric, the investor-owned utility company that supplies power to much of California, cut off electricity to over 700,000 customers. The company argued that such a drastic measure — the largest planned power outage in the state’s history — was necessary to prevent wildfires. Yet for some activists, this bleakly framed…
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Desperate Central Bankers Grab for More Power
Conceding that their grip on the economy is slipping, central bankers are proposing a radical economic reset that would shift yet more power from government to themselves. Central bankers are acknowledging that they are out of ammunition. Mark Carney, the soon-to-be-retiring head of the Bank of England, said in a speechat the annual…
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A globalized solar-powered future is wholly unrealistic, and our economy is the reason why
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Most scientists, politicians, and business leaders tend to put their hope in technological progress. Regardless of ideology, there is a widespread expectation that new technologies will replace fossil fuels by harnessing renewable energy such as solar and wind. Many also trust that there will be technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and for…
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Neoliberalism Has Met Its Match in China
When the Federal Reserve cut interest rates on July 31stfor the first time in more than a decade, commentators were asking why. According to official data, the economy was rebounding, unemployment was below 4%, and GDP growth was above 3%. If anything, by the Fed’s own reasoning, it should have been raising rates. The explanationof market…
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Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be “Good Business”
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Failing to understand the systemic character of capitalism and its relation to climate change also leads to the two technologies of change McKibben advocates: the entrepreneurial potential of solar power to remake capitalism’s energy system, and the politics of nonviolent protest, not as a way to take power from rulers but as a way to…
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My Manifesto for a Post-carbon Future
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The left that’s emerged since 2008 is, in reality, an alliance of two projects: a rearguard action by the old working class of the carbon era, against austerity, atomisation and a falling wage share; and an offensive by the diverse, educated workforce of the information era to advance individual rights and social liberalisation. One project…
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Libra: Facebook’s Audacious Bid for Global Monetary Control
Payments can happen cheaply and easily without banks or credit card companies. This has now been demonstrated – not in the United States but in China. Unlike in the US, where numerous firms feast on fees from handling and processing payments, in China most money flows through mobile phones nearly for free. In 2018 these…
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The Green New Deal: Whither Capitalism
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The fact that the living standard of wage labourers has been delinked from GDP growth has an important implication: their well-being can be substantially increased under circumstances of a constant, or even shrinking GDP. We need not be concerned with maintaining or boosting GDP growth while discussing climate action. On the contrary, revealing and emphasizing…