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2 weeks ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
Intan Suwandi is an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Illinois State University and the author of Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (Monthly Review Press, 2019). I requested her views on how and why the world trading system helps the corporations in Europe, Japan and the U.S. (the ruling Triad of modern capitalism) and harms the Global South, an underreported viewpoint. That critique is the special focus of her book.
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3 weeks ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
Institutions, private and public, wield immense power over the lives of people in and out of the U.S. Thus, people’s organized actions to change institutions are by definition David and Goliath-like power struggles. For America, that holds true in the main because the political donor class uses its deep pockets to influence the three branches of government. Voters lack such influence.
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1 month ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
Material reality, or kitchen table issues such as groceries and rent, shapes ideology and systemic thinking about the political economy of living and working. The current moment of social tumult has been gathering steam since the end of the Vietnam War, which heralded the sunset of a postwar U.S. economy of broad-based prosperity.
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1 month ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
Politically speaking, it is useful to follow the money, the donor dollars. The more greenbacks flow to America’s bipartisan political system, the greater influence that money has to shape domestic and foreign policies. The poor and working classes in and out of America suffer the adverse consequences. In the U.S., the lack of universal healthcare, a main cause of personal bankruptcies, is a case in point. The medical-industrial complex donated a total of $750,838,554 in the 2024 election cycle.
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1 month ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
Fourteen U.S. workers, on average, died at work daily in 2023, according to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH).
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1 month ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
As a gap between billionaires and everybody else swells, a bipartisan project decades in the making, Jodi Dean, author and professor, considers if we are living through a change in the form of capitalism into what she terms “neofeudalism,” writing in Capital’s Grave (Verso Books, 2025).
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1 month ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
President Trump vows to “make America wealthy again” as he pursues a global trade policy that favors new, sweeping tariffs, a price hike on foreign-made goods arriving for sale in America. Invoking his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, he will impose a 10% tariff on all countries to begin April 5. Further, the U.S. president will impose an individualized reciprocal higher tariff on the countries with which the United States has the largest trade deficits.
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2 months ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
There is growing opposition to the Trump administration’s bid to radically slash federal spending and employment. We turn to Carolina Martinez, who joined the California Association for Micro Enterprise Opportunity (CAMEO) Network as its CEO in 2018.
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2 months ago | 
counterpunch.org | Seth Sandronsky
Score a win for the federal court system over President Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency, and its head, billionaire GOP donor Elon Musk. On the evening of March 13, U.S. District Judge James Bedar in Maryland ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to reinstate its illegally fired probationary employees in a lawsuit that Democratic attorneys general in Washington, D.C., and 19 states general had filed against the Trump administration.
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2 months ago | 
znetwork.org | Seth Sandronsky
Can you feel it? There is a palpable dread that the ruling class, which owns financial and industrial capital, will continue to invest in destroying the Earth System. One example is the half-dozen biggest American banks: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance that the UN had supported since 2021, aiming to reach net-zero carbon emissions in 2050.
