Trade

By Pepe Escobar | (Tomdispatch.com) — November 18, 2014: it’s a day that should live forever in history. On that day, in the city of Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang province, 300 kilometers south of Shanghai, the first train carrying 82 containers of export goods weighing more than 1,000 tons left a massive warehouse complex heading […]

Bahrain

Artificial Billionaires: Regimes’ Crony Capitalism Stifling Middle East

contributors

World Bank Across the Middle East and North Africa, countries are being forced to face up to a harsh reality—that, left as they are now, their economies won’t create anything like enough jobs for the hundreds of thousands of people entering their job markets each year. Popular discontent will continue alongside widespread economic inactivity. What […]

Climate Change

Divestment and Popular Politics: Big Oil and Israeli Occupation

Juan Cole

By Jen Marlowe On September 21 (one day before world leaders converged on New York for the United Nations Climate Summit, and one day after up to 400,000 people took to the streets of NYC for the People’s Climate March), the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund made an announcement: the Fund would be divesting […]

Economy

America’s Oil Wars on ISIL, Iran & Russia

contributors

By Michael T. Klare via Tomdispatch.com It was heinous. It was underhanded. It was beyond the bounds of international morality. It was an attack on the American way of life. It was what you might expect from unscrupulous Arabs. It was “the oil weapon” — and back in 1973, it was directed at the United […]

Economy

Does the Houthi Takeover of Yemen’s Sanaa Endanger World Trade?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole The fall of the Yemeni government to radical Zaidi tribesmen from Saadah in the north has gone relatively unremarked in the US mass media. Yemen is admittedly a relatively small country of 24 million, a little less populous than Texas. It is the second poorest in the Arab League after Somalia. It […]

Economy

Super-Rich Oil and Gas Companies Routinely Underpay own Workers

contributors

By Naveena Sadasivam via ProPublica A ProPublica review of U.S. Department of Labor investigations shows that oil and gas workers 2013 men and women often performing high-risk jobs 2013 are routinely being underpaid, and the companies hiring them often are using accounting techniques to deny workers benefits such as medical leave or unemployment insurance. The […]

Economy

Dubai to Build the World’s Largest Airport

contributors

TheLipTV “Dubai is planning to build the world’s largest airport as part of a $32B expansion. The project is expected to be long and expensive, which brings into question how it will effect the city’s already hurting economy. We take a look at Dubai’s reason for building the 54 square mile airport, in this Lip […]

Economy

Climate Change: Neoliberal Capitalism is Fundamentally at War with Life on Earth (Naomi Klein)

contributors

The National: “Naomi Klein discusses her new book This Changes Everything, in which she says it’s time to stop counting on the politicians to save the planet.” The National: “Naomi Klein: This Changes Everything author talks about climate change”

Economy

How its Iran Sanctions hurt US Economy: Cutting off your Nose to Spite Your Face

contributors

The National Iranian American Council There are very few studies measuring the cost of sanctions to the sanctioning countries. In the case of Iran, where unprecedented U.S. and international sanctions may soon be lifted as part of a deal over Iran’s disputed nuclear program, understanding the cost of the policy is particularly important since any […]