From Variant (http://www.variant.randomstate.org/28texts/poverty28.html), a concise account of the mediations through which political and financial macro-policy produces, for example, 'cold-death' in Scottish housing estates.  Which amounts to a case study of non-replacement of resources -- or 'looting' -- in action.

Since 2004 the rhetoric of Bush’s republican party has turned curiously green, integrating climate change as a legitimation for neoliberal imperialism. At the same time the unintended consequence of America’s unsuccessful adventures has been to enrich an ‘anti-neoliberal’ class of oil rentiers in Africa, Latin America and Asia. George Caffentzis plots the changes in the US energy policy as it turns from eco-naysayer to ecowarrior

Editorial from the latest Prol-position newsletter (for live links to the full articles go to: http://www.prol-position.net/) which covers the European labour frontline in depth before turning to Brazil and India...

editorial

A pertinent reminder that the so-called 'housing bubble' isn't just a matter of subprime foreclosures and repossessions: the buyers of the 'financial products' through which mortgage debt is abstracted and redivided at the outer limits of algorithmic calculation are none other than private pension funds, so that capital's 'no alternative' answer to the pseudo-problem of the 'demographic bomb' may yet manage to create a real 'pensions crisis' where none need have existed

Why the subprime bust will spread By Henry C K Liu

Morgan Stanley's Chief Economist creeps ever closer to acknlowledging the implicit content of his 'bear market' line.  In fact this time he even includes a graphic purporting to map the quantitative 'battle between labor and capital', before disingenuously diverting the question into spurious terms like 'globalization and localization' and even more oddly imagining the 'labor' side of the 'battle' as something fought by 'pro-labor' politicians like Prodi, Zapatero et al.  Notably absent are battle sites like Bangladeshi textiles, Chilean copper mines, etc., where  elected repres

As promised, Davis rolls out the opposite polarity to Planet of Slums: the inverted slum or gated Emirate.  His description bristles with empirical insight, but the rhetorical antithesis between the 'global slum' (analysed from an 'objective' distance) and gilded/fortified hyperluxury (apparently experienced firsthand) remains problematic, especially as Davis is admirably insistent on the antislum's dependence on cheap indentured labour inside it. 

Although he doesn't say so, Financial TImes columnist Samuel Brittan is effectively reclaiming the case for a 'basic income' from self-styled 'revolutionary realists' (Negri) or, to use Alex Foti's nauseating term, 'demoradicals'.  Western real wages are 'inevitably' doomed to fall by globalization, says Brittan, but the general increase in accumulation should allow some of capital's 'gains' to be transferred to 'workers who would otherwise lose out', through a tax-funded wage supplement.