Austerity and the financial crisis mean economics is in the news, so why is a publisher taking Marx and Engels offline?
The global economic and financial crisis has led to a renewal of interest in Karl Marx. Only a few weeks ago the New York Times ran a forum with leading economists with the theme “Was Marx right?“. Thomas Piketty's recent book, Capital in the 21st Century, conducts an implicit dialogue with Marx over how to understand capitalism and confront its contradictions. So it is very sad that at this moment the publisher Lawrence & Wishart is forcing the Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) to take down those parts of Marx's and Friedrich Engels' Collected Works that it had hosted on its website with the authorisation of the publisher. It is particularly unfortunate that it insisted this happen by the eve of May Day, when international working-class solidarity is celebrated worldwide.
The matter is settled: Fracking causes earthquakes. My prediction: The carbon energy interests see Fracking and natural gas as a way to prolong the dominance of carbon energy for another 30 years. It may bring your house down in states like Oklahoma? Destroy your kids school while they are in it? A small price to pay so that the carbon barons and their corporations can continue making their obscene profits. And the people who voted ! the politicians in that will permit this? They can be relied upon to vote against their own self-interest, even their survival. It is one of our national mysteries.
When the Seismological Society of America says that fracking earthquakes are a real thing, then it’s a good bet that they are. The annual SSA meeting last Thursday featured a daylong session on ‘Induced Seismicity” that featured new research indicating that oil and gas fracking, and the practice of disposing wastewater underground, can alter the state of an existing fault. The result is to spread the range of seismic hazard farther out from the faultline than previously thought.
Brazil is set to host the World Cup this year and the Olympics in 2016. In preparation Brazil is evicting 200,000 people from their homes, eliminating poor neighborhoods, defunding public services, investing in a militarized police and surveillance state, using slave and prison labor to build outrageous stadiums unlikely to be filled more than once, and “improving” a famous old stadium (the world's largest for 50 years) by removing over half the capacity in favor of luxury seats. Meanwhile, popular protests and graffiti carry the message: “We want ‘FIFA standard' hospitals and schools!” not to mention this one ((FIFA = Fédération Internationale de Football Association, aka Soccer Profiteers International):
The product that became Google+ developed over a lengthy gestation period. Key to its evolution was a model known as circles, which was popularized internally by Paul Adams and in a never published book called Social Circles. The idea as eventually implemented was simple: allow users to define how they relate to people by putting their contacts into different groups. That way, you could choose how you wanted your content to be shared, and complicate the limited sharing options offered by competitors like Facebook and Twitter.
In many key ways, Google+ was ahead of its time. Its internal product focus was on choice and privacy, which Google felt was the competitive advantage needed to beat the incumbents. It was reaching out to a demographic of users who had been turned off by the news about personal information leaking on Facebook, yet who were still interested in engaging socially online. The product leadership correctly predicted the trend in social that has made 2014 a banner for ephemeral communication.
What few understood, though, is that Google itself was part of the problem.
Almost $2 trillion has left Africa illicitly since 1970, thwarting poverty reduction and economic growth.
This is far more than the external aid the continent received over the same period, and almost five times its current external debt. According to researchers, the continent also loses at least $100bn a year in this financial haemorrhage.
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African leaders convened this week in the Ethiopian city of Bahar Dar to discuss illicit financial flows and what can be done to staunch them. A study commissioned by the Tana High Level Forum on African Security, which organised the conference, found that illicit flows from Africa grew at an average rate of 12.1 percent per year since 1970, and that capital flight from West and Central African countries accounted for most of the illicit flows from sub-Saharan Africa.
Illicit financial flows consist of money earned illegally and then transferred for use elsewhere. The money is usually generated from criminal activities, corruption, tax evasion, bribes and smuggling. Yet the numbers tell only part of the story – a story that exposes how these highly complex and deeply entrenched practises have flourished, with a devastating impact on Africans' efforts to extricate themselves from grinding poverty.
You probably haven’t heard of Helen Slottje, or, for that matter, of her husband, David. But in the past few years, the former corporate lawyers have become arguably two of the most powerful opponents of fracking in New York – not to mention the most successful. As the (sort of) public face of the duo’s efforts, Helen Slottje on Monday was honored with the Goldman Prize, the world’s largest environmental prize.
Like most fracktivists, the Slottjes became embroiled in the issue when they moved to an area targeted by drilling companies – in their case, upstate New York, which sits atop the gas-rich Marcellus Shale, and where Gov. Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly put off making a decision about whether to lift the state’s five-year moratorium on hydraulic hydrofracking. Lacking confidence in the power of the picket sign or citizen engagement on oil-funded big government, they instead decided to approach the program at the most basic level. Their weapon of choice is a principle known as home rule: If individual communities decide that these industries pose a significant risk to common resources like air and water, then those communities can decide to keep those industries out, regardless of what state and federal laws say.
One by one, the Slottjes have helped small towns in New York enact such bans, to the point at which, even if New York’s moratorium were to be lifted tomorrow, the oil and gas industry would find itself effectively barred from drilling in 172 communities. After being decided in the towns’ favors at all of the state’s lower courts, two of those cases, in Dryden and Middlefield, are now up before the Court of Appeals. A decision, which will determine whether towns have the right to override state law, is expected this fall, and its anticipated impact can’t be overstated. As Thomas West, a lawyer for the energy company seeking to have the ban overturned, told the New York Times last year, ‘It’s going to decide the future of the oil and gas industry in the state of New York.” (The Slottjes, it should be noted, weren’t even mentioned in the piece.)
Maybe They are Killing Bankers for Their Life Insurance?
Criminality can take many forms, based on the breadth and depth of human depravity and pathological ingenuity. Applying life insurance to pay off corporations when a current or former employee dies, in this case for bankers, a life insurance program called BOLI (bank-owned life insurance), has to represent a new low in corporate psychopathological viciousness and depravity in the corporate pursuit of money at all costs, even that of life itself, as long as is another's life and not that of schemers who pursue such routes to profit themselves. To paraphrase a famous country song, Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Bankers if you them to have a long life:
“It doesn’t get any more Orwellian than this: Wall Street mega banks crash the U.S. financial system in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of financial industry workers lose their jobs. Then, beginning late last year, a rash of suspicious deaths start to occur among current and former bank employees. Next we learn that four of the Wall Street mega banks likely hold over $680 billion face amount of life insurance on their workers, payable to the banks, not the families. We ask their Federal regulator for the details of this life insurance under a Freedom of Information Act request and we’re told the information constitutes “trade secrets.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the life expectancy of a 25 year old male with a Bachelor’s degree or higher as of 2006 was 81 years of age. But in the past five months, five highly educated JPMorgan male employees in their 30s and one former employee aged 28, have died under suspicious circumstances, including three of whom allegedly leaped off buildings – a statistical rarity even during the height of the financial crisis in 2008. There is one other major obstacle to brushing away these deaths as random occurrences – they are not happening at JPMorgan’s closest peer bank – Citigroup. Both JPMorgan and Citigroup are global financial institutions with both commercial banking and investment banking operations. Their employee counts are similar – 260,000 employees for JPMorgan versus 251,000 for Citigroup.
