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Trump’s Phony Trade War
GlobalizationSo what’s all the talk about a Trump ‘trade war’? Is it media hype? Typical Trump hyperbole? Is there really a trade war in the making? Indeed, was there ever? And how much of it is really about reducing the US global trade deficit—and how much about the resurrection of Trump’s ‘economic nationalism’ theme for the consumption of his domestic political base in an election year? One thing for certain, what’s underway is not a ‘trade war’.
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Amazon Is a 21st-Century Digital Chain Gang
GlobalizationWhen Amazon announced plans to locate a $5 billion complex as its second headquarters somewhere in North America, state governments fell over themselves offering billions in tax abatements and corporate subsidies to secure the prize. It might behoove the remaining 20 cities that have made the final cut to heed the warning from Virgil’s Aeneid: “I fear the Greeks, even when they are bearing gifts.” Especially when the gifts come in the form of a modern-day digital chain gang.
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Airbnb: short-term rentals, short-term thinking
GlobalizationOur research on the short-term rental market reveals an increasingly concentrated, commodified landscape in which a few large players are making large amounts of money. Small-scale home sharing is a modest and shrinking piece of the market, and long-term housing for residents is being converted into de facto hotels. Canadian cities should respond to these facts by severely restricting the ability of commercial operators to make money converting long-term housing into short-term rentals.
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Radical Municipalism: The Only Solution to Amazon’s Extortion of Cities
GlobalizationThis is the near-dystopian endpoint of the neoliberal city: gargantuan corporations forcing cash-strapped cities to publicly bid against each other with tax breaks, subsidies and crass public relations campaigns. In the excellently titled “Amazon’s New Headquarters Should Be In Hell,” author Hamilton Nolan argued: “This is what the extortion of public resources looks like.”
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Trump in the Time of Trumpism
GlobalizationMost of us don’t like to admit of this litany of the bad. Yet it lives on. Neoliberalism in recent decades has pushed things further. Thatcher famously said that there is no such thing as society. This is dangerous talk for it risks opening the door to authoritarianism, even fascism, the better to fill the void and make people, in the gaze and embrace of the leader, feel they belong.
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Why Aren’t Corporations Required to be Socially Responsible?
GlobalizationImagine if a corporation had to justify its existence beyond making money for capitalists. What would happen if a social balance sheet, as well as financial one, had to be filed every year and companies continually in a deficit position would eventually disappear? Consider Barrick Gold. Would the world be better off if the world’s largest gold miner ceased to exist?
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NAFTA Redux
GlobalizationThe new Trump administration has made the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the United States, a major issue in its relations with its two neighbours. Recently, Trump has threatened to tear it up. With his standard nationalist demagogy, he claims “previous bad trade deals,” have cost the United States many jobs as a result of American manufacturers moving plants off-shore.
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NAFTA Kills: Who will Speak for the Working Class?
Economic CrisisA recent report out of the US raises questions about politicians’ (in Canada and the US) obsession with the state of the middle class and highlights why Donald Trump won the US election. It is a sobering picture and an scathing indictment of neo-liberalism – particularly so-called free trade. While the authors don’t say so explicitly the conclusion is inescapable: NAFTA kills.
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Why the system will still win
Economic CrisisThat means facing the probability the EU is now so path-dependent as a neoliberal construction that reform of it is no longer seriously conceivable. It would have to be undone before anything better could be built, either by breaking out of the current EU, or by reconstructing Europe on another foundation, committing Maastricht to the flames. Unless there is a further, deeper economic crisis, there is little likelihood of either.
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The Liberal addiction to the Washington Consensus
Canadian PoliticsThis is the grim future under the corporate state. So grim, that the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s 2016 Annual Report was essentially a scathing denunciation of the whole Washington Consensus, blaming “[T]he entire edifice of liberal market finance…” The UN’s solution, only hinted at by those still struggling to overcome their addiction to this pernicious ideology, is as clear as neoliberalism is brutal.
