We are now in an era of global finance capitalism, says Richard Peet. But what does this mean? What's the relationship between finance capitalism and neoliberalism? Does finance capital exploit differently than industrial capital? And what are finance capitalism's main features and contradictions? Richard Peet explains how we got to this point; he also describes the perils of the current political-economic moment. (Encore presentation.)

What might finance capitalism have to do with poetry?  And how might resistance to the former come from the latter? Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Italian political philosopher, writer, and media theorist, discusses money, precarious labor in an age of information and heightened alienation, and why a mantra might be a powerful weapon. He also talks about the autonomist movement in Italy in the 1970s and his involvement in the iconoclastic pirate radio station based in Bologna, Radio Alice.

 

We are now in an era of global finance capitalism, says Richard Peet. But what does this mean? What's the relationship between finance capitalism and neoliberalism? Does finance capital exploit differently than industrial capital? And what are finance capitalism's main features and contradictions? Richard Peet explains how we got to this point; he also describes the perils of the current political-economic moment.

At the heart of the global economy, a regime dominated by lending and finance, is a symbol we call money. What does this say about who we are and how we work, and what ethical judgments can and should be made about money, wage labor, and capital investment? David Hawkes draws connections among money, human labor-time, usury, and other cultures' beliefs in magic.

Martin Hart-Landsberg points out that free trade agreements, such as the one the US is poised to conclude with South Korea, are about much more than trade -- they expand the power of big corporations, strip governments of their ability to regulate them, and fuel capitalism's destructive tendencies. According to Hart-Landsberg, the Korea-US trade deal would also fuel the already-disastrous financialization of the US economy.

Moving your money out of the big banks that have helped create the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression may seem like an excellent idea. But leftwing journalist Doug Henwood believes such actions -- along with community currencies and attempts to abolish corporate personhood -- are misguided. Henwod discusses the long, and problematic, history of American populism, and what a radical approach to finance might look like.