NB: My one request to commentators on global affairs is this: could you please stop the journalistic shorthand ‘global north’ and ‘global south’? Or else give us a detailed list of those countries (are countries all there is?), which fall in either category? Is India ‘north’ or ‘south’? South Africa? Greece? Singapore? North Korea? Belarus? Cyprus? Chile? How do you transit from south to north? When you acquire nuclear bombs? What is the point of using vocabulary which everyone is supposed to understand but no one can actually say what they use it for? DS
For every $1 the IMF provides to poor countries for social spending, it demands $4 in cuts in public spending. Countries do everything they can to delay and avoid bailouts since, when they come, they reduce domestic policy space and autonomy, and force countries to choose between debt repayments, social spending and climate.
When we launched The Polycrisis a year ago, we set out to examine the intersecting crises in the economy, energy system, commodities markets, geopolitics, and climate. Our aim was to break intellectual and political silos to give a fuller picture of what’s going on: security and climate, political economy and commodities, domestic and foreign politics, macroeconomics and populism. In the meantime, our world crisis of ecology, economics, and empire, has continued to metastasize. It is, as Nancy Fraser put it, shaking confidence in established worldviews and ruling elites everywhere.
In twenty-eight newsletters, ten articles by contributors, and four panels with experts so far, we have mapped four main shifts:
Global South left high and dry
A new Washington Consensus has arrived. Following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden officials from Jake Sullivan to Janet Yellen have emphasized that the world can and should follow the US in its new passion for productivism. Food and energy import bills are not only a climate problem, they point out, but a security concern. Indeed, nearly every import is increasingly scrutinized through a security lens, down to Chinese garlic.
The vision, then, is for localized, manufacturing-led green growth, erring on the side of redundancy rather than just-in-time production. All countries, the story goes, should be able to achieve prosperity through derisking, paired with local content restrictions, higher taxes, and subsidies for key sectors like clean energy, biotech and digital infrastructure.
There is only one small problem. After overhauling its internal investment regime, the US has thwarted any meaningful structural changes to the global financial architecture. On IMF quotas, voting shares, taxation, and even on its measly contribution to the new Loss and Damage Fund, the US has been conservative and isolationist. There have been a few consolation prizes—Barbados’s PM Mia Mottley won debt payment pauses for natural disasters; the IMF will give slightly more interest-free loans to low-income countries—but, on the whole, the global financial safety net continues to ensnare, rather than rescue, the most vulnerable countries….
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/a-year-in-crises/
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Eric Toussaint: Concerning the founding of the Bretton Woods’ Institutions
Lee Camp: The Dark Secret History of Capitalism
Noam Chomsky: Savage capitalist lunatics are running the asylum
Big Tech is failing. The future of democracy depends on what happens next
Robert Urquhart: Capital accumulation as eternal recurrence: theology of the bad infinity
After the truth-shower 