Scientific theories viewed the town-country antagonism as a hallmark of class society with capitalism intensifying the idiocy of rural life through isolation and exploitation. In India colonial rule disrupted pre-capitalist village communities imposing land revenue systems that facilitated primitive accumulation. Post-independence mixed economy policies prioritized urban-industrial development widening the divide. Neo-liberal reforms since 1991 accelerated uneven development bypassing classical agrarian transition and proletarianization.

The rural-urban divide represents a profound and enduring inequality, where rural areas – home to about 65% of the population- systematically subsidize urban prosperity through resource extraction, cheap food, migrant labour, while remaining deprived. This dynamic resembles internal colonialism, a concept where dominant urban centres exploit peripheral rural regions in a manner analogous to historical colonial extraction. The divide is also characterized by stark disparities in economic opportunities, political influence and access to health, education and life expectancy. These inequalities represent a structural, long-term system of internal colonization subsidizes urban prosperity through agricultural production, labour migration and resource transfers while enduring persistent deprivation.

~ Full article…

While U.S. policymakers escalate Cold War-style rhetoric and impose higher tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, most Americans remain unaware that the world’s best-selling EV isn’t a Tesla—it’s China’s BYD. Meanwhile, General Motors now sells more cars in China than in the U.S., and China is steadily expanding its influence across global industries, from technology to infrastructure. Washington’s response? Protectionist policies and economic nationalism that leave American consumers paying more for less.

In this eye-opening lecture, economist Richard Wolff explains how the U.S. has become the world’s largest debtor, borrowing from China even as it engages in proxy conflicts against Russia, China’s ally. Wolff reveals the contradictions of a capitalist system in decline: while foreign nations build railroads in Africa, Americans struggle with overpriced everyday goods. The global economic balance is shifting rapidly. BRICS countries now outpace the G7 in production, China and India grow at twice the U.S. rate, and Western governments lack a clear plan to regain competitiveness. According to Wolff, America’s challenges are not the result of foreign interference—they are the outcome of decades of corporate profit-driven decisions.

~ Full podcast…

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China’s BYD poised to overtake Tesla as world’s top EV seller for the first time

Chinese auto giant BYD on Friday is expected to dethrone U.S. rival Tesla

as the world’s biggest seller of electric vehicles on a calendar-year basis.

The milestone would cap an extraordinary rise for BYD, a company Tesla’s Elon Musk once dismissed by laughing at their products during a 2011 Bloomberg interview.

The two carmakers are poised to publish their final annual sales figures for 2025, although based on available sales data, it appears all but certain that BYD will officially surpass Tesla.

In a statement published Thursday, BYD said sales of its battery-powered cars rose nearly 28% to 2.26 million units. Tesla has not yet released its 2025 sales figures, although it is expected to do so later in the day.

On Monday, Tesla compiled an average estimate for 1.6 million vehicle deliveries in 2025, down roughly 8% from 2024, putting the company on track for its second straight annual drop.

How did the free-market ideas attain influence? It’s because capitalists and wealthy people in the United States pushed for a shift away from the welfare state for reasons that had nothing to do with the appeal of the ideas.

Why did they do it? It’s a response to a decade of economic stagnation in the 1970s. Under that stagnation, American businesses came to the conclusion that the only way they could come out of the economic malaise was by doing two things: rolling back the welfare state and dismantling the trade union movement. Why? The welfare state imposed a lot of costs on business along with the regulations that came with it, such as the demand for good pensions, the demand for safety, and the demand for a level of corporate taxation that could fund all the government programs.

When your margins are going down, when your rate of return on investments is being squeezed, now every little cost that you’re having to incur has a marginally greater impact on you than when you had high profits and high margins. And back then, you felt that you could absorb all the demands that the welfare state was making on you as a business.

Now, when your profit margins are shrinking, you’re desperate to reduce your costs. And the welfare state imposes a lot of extra costs on your normal business operations. So you’re trying to now strip down all your costs so it’s just the business operations.

The problem is, if you’re going to do that, you come up against the trade union movement, which has a place in the Democratic Party and has workplace power. If you try to take away the welfare state, you’re impacting and hurting workers. So they’re going to fight back.

This means that if you want to roll back the welfare state, you’ve got to dismantle the agency that’s been supporting it, which is the trade union movement. If you put this into economic language, you can say, “We want to return to free markets.”

How? First, you don’t want the regulations of the welfare state. You don’t want the demands that it’s making on you. You don’t want all the prohibitions that it’s put on your investment activity. And you don’t want high taxation.

Second, you want to free up the labor market. What’s the key word? “Flexibility.” You want labor market flexibility. That’s the justification; that’s not the reason you’re doing it. You don’t care about labor market regulation per se. What you care about is cheap wages and freedom to hire and fire.

~ Full article…

One of the classic effects of famine is that it intensifies the exploitation of women; the sale of women and girls, for example, tends to increase. The sexual exploitation of poor, rural, lower-caste, and tribal women by the tears (landlords) had been difficult to escape even before the crisis. In the wake of the cyclone and later famine, many women lost or sold all their possessions and lost a male guardian due to abandonment or death. Those who migrated to Calcutta frequently had only begging or prostitution available as strategies for survival; often, regular meals were the only payment. Anthropologist Tarak Chandra Das suggests that a large proportion of the girls aged 15 and younger who migrated to Calcutta during the famine disappeared into brothels; in late 1943, entire boatloads of girls for sale were reported in ports of East Bengal. Girls were also prostituted to soldiers, with boys acting as pimps. Families sent their young girls to wealthy landowners overnight in exchange for minimal amounts of money or rice or sold them outright into prostitution; girls were sometimes enticed with sweet treats and kidnapped by pimps. Very often, these girls lived in constant fear of injury or death, but the brothels were their sole means of survival, or they were unable to escape. Women who had been sexually exploited could not later expect any social acceptance or a return to their home or family. Bina Agarwal writes that such women became permanent outcasts in a society that highly values female chastity, rejected by both their birth family and their husband’s family.

An unknown number of children, some tens of thousands, were orphaned. Many others were abandoned, sometimes by the roadside or at orphanages, or sold for as much as two maunds (one maund was roughly equal to 37 kilograms (82 lb)) or as little as one seer (1 kilogram (2.2 lb)) of unhusked rice, or for trifling amounts of cash. Sometimes, they were purchased as household servants, where they would “grow up as little better than domestic slaves.” They were also purchased by sexual predators. Altogether, according to Historian Greenough, the victimization and exploitation of these women and children was an immense social cost of the famine.

~ Full article…

But according to Wolff, the rift developed after Trump went behind Epstein’s back and successfully bid on a property in Palm Beach worth tens of millions of dollars, as he told co-host Joanna Coles on the latest episode of their podcast Inside Trump’s Head.

“These guys… they’re devoted to their private plans, but the thing that really makes them crazy is real estate—their quest for real estate,” Wolff said. “If they get screwed in a real estate deal, that breaks up any rich guy relationship.”

~ Full article…

How many people will the Trump administration deport this year? Will Gaza suffer from mass famine? These are serious questions with lives at stake.

They’re also betting propositions that two buzzy startups will let you gamble on.

The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced.

Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds.

~ Full article…

Aryeh’s tours have gained a cult following, often attracting people obsessed with “liminal spaces,” a term given to places that represent in-between stages, connecting two different eras or experiences. By this definition, a parking lot or an empty hallway can be considered a liminal space, as can an abandoned structure, paused mid-demolition. Many people report feeling unsettled or haunted in liminal spaces, and some anthropologists believe this is because our bodies innately know we’re not supposed to dwell in them. They are, after all, not a destination, but a portal, a gateway to another world. But despite this disconnect, many people report feeling a strange, forbidden pull towards liminal spaces. There are digital and in-person communities around the world dedicated to sharing these experiences. r/LiminalSpace on Reddit, for example, has one million followers who post daily photos of bridges and doorways and food courts, of highways that stretch into oblivion. “Dude, that’s so liminal,” others will respond.

For the liminal space curious, semi-abandoned suburban shopping malls are a perfect example of this phenomenon: something purpose-built that’s long-since lost that purpose, yet sits in limbo awaiting its next iteration—a nod to the past, an amorphous fumble toward the future.

~ Full article…

At Defense Tech Week 2025, senior figures from Israel’s defence establishment openly described how the genocide in Gaza has accelerated weapons development, unlocked new export markets and reshaped Israel’s global identity as a defence powerhouse.

Less than 70 kilometres from where the conference was held, Gaza has been reduced to rubble. More than two years of genocide, indiscriminate bombardment and mass displacement have left at least 70,000 Palestinians dead and 90% of the Strip destroyed.
[…]
In her report on the “Economy of Genocide”, UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese stated that “for Israeli companies such as Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, the ongoing genocide has been a profitable venture.”

~ Full article…

He spoke in words of kindergarten grace,
“Tremendous,” “huge,” and “winning” filled the air,
The spray-tanned king with his ever-scowling face,
Topped by a wisp of engineered hair.

The Saudi princes lick their pens with glee,
The Russians raise their vodka, cold and neat,
While sovereignty drips from the carving tree—
A nation hung and bled like butchered meat.

~ Full poem…

Most mainstream U.S. media coverage of the TikTok deal has completely ignored the explicitly anti-Palestinian agenda of its biggest Western investors. TikTok has played a critical role in helping hundreds of millions of users see the ugly reality of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. But the Trump-favored billionaires who will take over TikTok’s U.S. operations have a documented agenda of both suppressing voices critical of Israel and supporting the very Israeli military that has killed so many Palestinian civilians. Without safeguards in place, TikTok’s U.S. operations could soon become an exercise in blocking users from seeing and reacting to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by a major U.S. ally.
[…]
This is a critical moment. The transfer of TikTok’s algorithm from ByteDance to Oracle would mean that TikTok’s content would move from being controlled by a company under the influence of a Chinese government committing genocide against Uyghurs to being controlled by U.S. investors who want to silence TikTok users’ opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

~ Full article…