NBC presents falling stocks, rising Treasury yields and volatile oil as separate market reactions to war. Put the pieces back together and a deeper political economy appears. The struggle over Hormuz is raising the cost of energy and global circulation while Washington is already refinancing enormous debts under sharply higher real yields. Those pressures don’t fall evenly: workers, indebted households and vulnerable importing countries absorb higher costs while energy producers and concentrated technology capital occupy very different positions. What looks like market turbulence is really a struggle over the rising material and financial cost of American command—and who gets forced to pay the bill.
Apples to Apples: Superexploitation from Orchards to iPhones
What appears to be a comparison between two unrelated commodities—apples picked in U.S. orchards and Apple devices assembled across the Global South—is in fact a comparison between two forms of the same capitalist-imperialist labor regime. In U.S. agriculture, superexploitation is organized through settler-colonial land relations, racialized migrant labor, H-2A dependency, deportability, and the broader coercive... Continue Reading →