MUST READ ARTICLE:

"Opinion remains divided on exactly what the second Trump administration represents. Its arbitrary resort to tariffs and flagrant disregard for international norms has prompted many to condemn the supposed sabotage of Pax Americana—what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney described as a decisive “rupture” with the post-war multilateral system. Others, citing the administration’s foreign policy on the Middle East and its obedience to financial speculators, see as much continuity as change. Yet regardless of their emphasis, most commentators invoke the standard of a “rules-based international order” against which to measure the current state of global instability and insecurity.

The reality, though, is that such “ruptures” have been a recurrent feature of global governance for decades. If we are to fully understand Trump, and imagine how we might replace the world he symbolizes with a more just and stable one, we must recognize the extent to which the previous period of supposed order has, contra Carney, been a succession of US-led experiments in hegemonic destruction and reinvention. Only then will the contours of a more equitable international settlement begin to reveal themselves."

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/rupture-what-rupture/

#USA #Imperialism #PoliticalEconomy #Hegemony #Neocolonialism #Geopolitics #InternationalLaw

Dubai’s skyline is a marvel—and a mask. This essay argues the “Dubai model” is a rentier extraction system powered by the kafala labour regime, anti‑city urbanism, financial opacity, and U.S. security guarantees. Exporting it replicates spectacle without development.

Read: https://thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-dubai-model-spectacle-servitude

#Dubai #Urbanism #Labour #Geopolitics #CityDesign #AntiCity #Transport #Housing #CriticalUrbanism #Gulf #Labour #PoliticalEconomy #Migration #Geopolitics #UrbanDevelopment #Gulf

The city was humanity's greatest wager: that density creates opportunity, that proximity generates possibility, that strangers pressed together build something larger than themselves.

For most of history, that bet paid off. Then we systematically broke it.

https://thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-urban-condition-promise-crisis

#Urbanism #HousingCrisis #AffordableHousing #ZoningReform #PoliticalEconomy
#SocialHousing #CityPlanning #Housing #YIMBY #NIMBY #Gentrification
#Homelessness #Infrastructure #LandValueTax #UrbanPlanning #Fediverse

JW Mason on economic history and the neutrality of money

'when we think of money as neutral, that implies a specific kind of views about social reality in general. If we think of money as a transparent window onto a pre-existing world of goods, a pre-existing set of relative values, a pre-existing set of opportunities and resources facing us,  then we are going to see the world itself as fundamentally money-like. We are going to see the existence of prices, the division of social reality into discrete commodities with ownership rights attached to them, as a basic fact about the world, which money is simply revealing to us'

#economics #money #credit #politicalEconomy

https://jwmason.org/slackwire/at-the-new-school-against-money/