7 results
Search Results
2. What You See Is (Not) What You Get? The Taiwan Question, Geo-economic Realities, and the 'China Threat' Imaginary.
- Author
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Lim, Kean Fan
- Subjects
SOVEREIGNTY ,GEOPOLITICS ,BALANCE of power ,INTERNATIONAL economic integration ,UNITED States. Taiwan Relations Act ,CHINA-United States relations - Abstract
Despite emergent trends of geo-economic integration between nation-states, the role of realist-driven geopolitical calculation appears highly enduring. This paper explores the potential contradictions between state-centric geopolitical concerns and transnational geo-economic formation through an exploration of China-US tensions over Taiwan, a territory of indeterminate geo-legal status and which China regards as its own province. I consider how the Taiwan Relations Act, a domestic public law of the US that frames US-Taiwan relations and has a major influence on East Asian geopolitics, could contradict emergent 'China region', and possibly even China-US, geo-economic integration. This is because the US-sustained arms sales to Taiwan rest on imagining and containing China as a 'threat', while geo-economic integration entails enrolling China as a strategic partner, if not an ally. Consequently, the Taiwan issue could stifle the enhancement of Sino-American relations at a historical juncture when the Chinese and American economies are more intertwined than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
3. We Need a Loud and Fractious Poor.
- Author
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Maskovsky, Jeff and Piven, Frances Fox
- Subjects
POVERTY ,PROTEST movements ,POLITICAL science ,EQUALITY ,HUMILIATION - Abstract
This article explores the political consequences of four decades of consistent humiliation of the poor by the most authoritative voices in the land, and offers insights into ways that new movements are creating spaces for poor people's political voices to surface and become relevant again. Our specific concern is the challenge that the current humiliation regime poses to those who seek to revive radical, disruptive and fractious anti‐poverty activism and politics. By humiliation regime, we mean a form of political violence that maltreats those classified popularly and politically as "the poor" by treating them as undeserving of citizenship, rights, public goods or resources, and, importantly, that seeks to delegitimate them as political actors. Our article demonstrates the historical importance of authoritative voices in inspiring political unrest involving poor and working people, charts the depoliticising effects of poverty politics and governance since the 1980s, and highlights the new political possibilities that are surfacing now not just to defeat the very dangerous political forms of Trumpism and the new white nationalism but that seek as well to create something that looks like justice, freedom and equality. We insist on the importance of loud and fractious poor people's politics and call on scholars to direct attention to the incipient political potentialities of poor people today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2020
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
4. Financialisation as Monopoly Profit: The Case of US Banking.
- Author
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Christophers, Brett
- Subjects
FINANCIALIZATION ,BANKING industry ,MONOPOLIES ,ECONOMIC competition ,CAPITALISM - Abstract
Abstract: Different economic measures afford different ways of seeing processes of financialisation. In the prototypical case of the US economy, the most compelling evidence of post‐1970s financialisation is found in corporate profits measures. This much has been clear for at least a decade. What remains much less clear, however, is the explanation for the long‐term maintenance and amplification of extreme financial‐sector profitability that financialisation in the United States has and continues to entail. With a specific focus on banking, this article turns to post‐Marxian scholarship on profit rate trends to explain this phenomenon. It argues that limited and declining levels of competition within the US banking sector during recent decades—rooted in high levels of industry concentration, collusive behaviour, and substantial entry barriers—have contributed to sustaining and boosting abnormal sectoral profitability. In doing so, the article theorises financialisation in the United States explicitly in terms of monopoly profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
5. Trafficking in US Agriculture.
- Author
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Izcara Palacios, Simón Pedro and Yamamoto, Yasutaka
- Subjects
HISTORY of human trafficking ,HUMAN smuggling ,AGRICULTURAL history ,EMPLOYMENT of agricultural laborers ,UNITED States economic policy ,HISTORY ,GOVERNMENT policy - Abstract
Based on a qualitative methodology that includes in-depth interviews with 90 Mexican migrant smugglers and 45 Central American farmworkers, this article analyzes the three separate elements of trafficking in US agriculture, namely acts, means, and purposes. We conclude that some US employers participate in human trafficking by financing or helping to recruit and transport Mexican and Central American migrants to the US by means of 'abuse of a position of vulnerability' for the purposes of involuntary servitude, debt bondage, and sex exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
6. The US Debtfare State and the Credit Card Industry: Forging Spaces of Dispossession.
- Author
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Soederberg, Susanne
- Subjects
CREDIT cards ,CREDIT card industry ,NEOLIBERALISM ,CAPITALISM ,DEBT ,CREDIT ,CAPITAL ,MARXIST analysis - Abstract
Credit card debt is a ubiquitous feature of neoliberal capitalism. To explain the notable growth of credit card usage in the US, I adopt a historical materialist approach that employs two key analytical concepts-cannibalistic capitalism and the debtfare state-to capture the material, institutional and ideological dimensions of this process. Viewed within the bounds of cannibalistic capitalism, a mode of accumulation primarily based on the expansion of fictitious capital and secondary forms of exploitation, the debtfare state enhances the social power of money by allowing major credit card issuers (banks) to generate high levels of income from uncapped interest rates and policies that ensure the extension of plastic money to those who fall within Marx's category of the surplus population. While the expansion of debt subjects surplus workers to the disciplinary requirements of the market, it is unable to suspend the main tensions of cannibalistic capitalism, prompting ongoing reconstructions of the debtfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2013
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
7. Postcards from Heaven: Critical Geographies of the Cold War Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.
- Author
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Pinkerton, Alasdair, Young, Stephen, and Dodds, Klaus
- Subjects
COMMUNICATIONS research ,CIVIL defense ,LEAFLETS dropped from aircraft ,MILITARY-industrial complex ,COLD War, 1945-1991 - Abstract
This article examines a little-known project funded by the US Air Force and CIA, and carried out by communications scientists at the University of Washington during the early 1950s. Project Revere sought to investigate how the seemingly humble information leaflet could be deployed, via air drops, as a 'flexible weapon' to spark 'interpersonal communications' and spread rumours throughout particular target populations. While the testing ground for these aerial experiments was the northwest United States (Washington State, Utah, Idaho), Revere scientists were aware that their work would find particular application in supporting America's Cold War activities overseas, not least in the Korean peninsula. At the same time, however, the Revere tests were implicated in the intensification of domestic anxieties as leaflets dropped over rural Washington State and Utah mobilised issues of civil defence, emergency procedures and warnings about 'enemy bombers'. In this way, we suggest that Revere corresponded with, and heightened, efforts by national and local governments to mobilise citizens into a Cold War 'call to arms'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
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