Category: featured

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Glencore’s Economics Lessons

Reposted from The Guardian.

What does it take to make the food speculators at Goldman Sachs look like they’re playing for lunch money? A secretive Swiss-based company, and one of the world’s largest commodity trading firms, knows. With its initial public offering announced on Thursday, Glencore – a multibillion-dollar mining, energy and food trader that will soon list in London and Hong Kong – is the envy of Wall Street. When Goldman Sachs was floated, the then CEO Hank Paulson made off with $219m. Glencore’s chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg, has already earned the moniker “The Ten Billion Dollar Man” for his share of the bonanza.

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The Symphony Way

Before the Soccer World Cup last year, I was asked to write a foreword to an anthology of life stories told by South African pavement dwellers, living on Symphony Way, near Cape Town. The stories blew me away. It was very easy to write the short introduction below, just as it’s easy to encourage you to take a look at it now. The book is called No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way, and it’s available here.

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Neutron Bomb Inflation

Here’s a piece that I wrote for The Guardian about the global rise in food prices. Think of this inflation as a neutron-bomb-style inflation: a kind that goes after workers, but leaves their homes and places of work intact. Trouble is that the responses to this inflation that might protect the poor – government feeding and public works programmes – are the ones in the deficit hawk’s cross-hairs. It’s entirely possible to balance a budget and have large public works, but that means taxing the rich. In this political climate, that’s unlikely. So, watch out for more food rebellions in 2011. Continue reading “Neutron Bomb Inflation”

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Restoring Sanity

Although the Rally to Restore Sanity was, strictly speaking, neither a rally — it was more of a comedy/concert/show — nor terribly restorative of sanity –there were an unusually large number of people with bonkers things to say — it was a hoot. That said, I worry that many folk were lured there in the expectation that they might actually be part of a movement to restore sanity: I spoke to dozens of people, and for all but two, this was their first rally. I fear that their hopes will be swiftly dashed. There’s unlikely to be a new wave of sanity breaking over Washington any time soon.

So how to think about this? One of my favourite pieces is by a writer I’ve just been introduced to by Joe Costello, Mark Ames, whose fine piece, Rally to Restore Vanity, is a powerful dissection of the event and its absent politics. On the other hand, Arianna Huffington has more complementary things to say. My take, also at the ahem Huffington Post, is below.

And, incidentally, if you’d like to hear some back and forth about this, I’ll be interviewing Arianna Huffington in a couple of weeks here in San Francisco (and I’ll post the podcast when it becomes available). If there are any questions you’d like me to ask Arianna, about restoring sanity or her book Third World America or anything else, leave em in the comments.

Polite Laughter on the Mall

Hundreds of thousands came. Theresa Floyd, a 19 year old student and poet, flew from California to try to make the world “marginally better”. Wassim Shazad, a 36 year old brick shithouse of a former-Marine drove four hours from North Carolina, to take aim at racial stereotypes of Muslims in America. For nearly everyone I spoke to, this was their first rally. Continue reading “Restoring Sanity”

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Food Rebellions: Mozambicans Know Which Way the Wind Blows

[A version of this article appear’s in The Observer, Sunday September 5, 2010.]

It has been a summer of record temperatures – Japan had its hottest summer on record.[1] Same with South Florida and New York.[2] Meanwhile, Pakistan and Niger are flooded, and the Eastern US is mopping up after Hurricane Earl. As any climatologist will tell you, none of these individual events can definitively be attributed to global warming. But to see how climate change will play out in the twenty-first century, you needn’t look to the Met Office. Look instead to the deaths and burning tyres in Mozambique’s ‘food riots’ to see what happens when extreme natural phenomena interact with our unjust social and economic systems.

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The Daddy State

When those who rant against The Nanny State are pressed about what they’d like to see instead, they often point to philanthropy as their preferred model of social progress and uplift. Proven, effective, and – most of all – voluntary, they’d offer. The billionaire Giving Pledge, in which ultra-wealthy individuals promise to give more than half their loot to ‘good causes’ after they die, hit the headlines earlier this month to the usual cooing from those fulminating against progressive taxation. See? The rich can redistribute their wealth without the state doing it for them. The rich aren’t just rich – they’re generous too!

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