Imagine Jeff Bezos cloned 7.5 times. That would be the equivalent of the financial wealth of everyone in Scotland (including everything; pensions, properties, etc). Maybe even less, as the Scottish financial wealth calculation (£1.097 trillion) was in 2018 – after the pandemic crisis it has probably shrunk quite a bit. Bezos doesn’t have that problem. […]
United States
The most remarkable thing about US President Donald Trump is not the amount of enemies he accrues. Nasty attacks on opponents is his way of doing politics. The remarkable thing is that he’s willing to throw all his friends under the bus at a moment’s notice; he has no loyalty to anyone. “I’m not a big […]
The US Presidential election will set the tone for post-Pandemic politics
“News that 649,000 UK workers have fallen off payrolls between March and June, and that millions more lost hours, means the dispute over the meaning of, and solutions to, mass unemployment is once again in motion.”
David Jamieson: Mass unemployment can challenge our economic model, but not without a fight
Of all the crazy stories of 2020 so far, the hand-to-hand combat between Chinese and Indian troops on the high-altitude rocks of the Galwan Valley is right up there. It sounds like something from a film. For hours, on steep, jagged terrain, around 600 troops fought each other with rocks, studded-batons and their fists. Most of […]
What hand-to-hand combat in the Galwan Valley tells us
“Solidarity will mean nothing if the people voicing it aren’t also doing what they can to advance the causes of those who are disenfranchised in their own countries. Anti-Blackness and white supremacy are global domination projects and they have affected every place on the planet.”
Black Lives Matter: Perspectives on an uprising
“The extent of US influence engenders the most profound questions of democratic sovereignty, war and peace, and economic and social life. These questions are posed afresh by the post-Cold War decline of US hegemony and its always questionable moral authority. Is there a viable alternative to being a province of the empire?”
After the US: Is Scottish neutrality a viable future?
Take a step back and look at the United States, 2020. Over 100,000 dead from Covid-19, by far the most in the world. Responding to a global crisis by exiting the World Health Organisation, stirring conspiracy theories about how the virus originated and using its Navy to steal global supplies of ventilators in acts of international piracy. […]
A world after the US Empire?
There’s few clearer signs of the carnage in the global economy than US oil trading as low as -$40 a barrel, the first time in history it has ever traded negative. There’s simply too much supply in the US due to demand crashing, and therefore there’s nowhere to store them. The main delivery point in Cushing, […]
‘Won’t someone take my oil!?’
“The idea of a guaranteed income has gone from the cranky flagship proposal of eccentric Democratic candidate Andrew Yang to a concrete proposal in an editorial of the Financial Times, the paper of the global banking elite, in a matter of months.”
UBI: An idea whose time has come?
The coronavirus pandemic is the latest and perhaps most significant shock to an already unstable global order, writes David Jamieson