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But what is striking about the 2005–8 food shock is this fact: more food had been produced by 2008 than at any point in human history. At the same time, demand for food was falling as the global economy weakened and then collapsed from August 2007 onwards. The economic law of supply and demand, so often called upon as explanation of the cause of such crises, did not apply here. Instead, the price volatility that led to hunger and food riots was caused by the greater participation of financial speculators in food derivatives markets. That in turn was a direct result of the Clinton administration’s 2000 change to the Roosevelt administration’s 1936 Commodity Exchange Act, changes which removed quantitative restrictions on speculative positions in agricultural futures contracts.

— The Global Casino by Ann Pettifor

One of the great advantages of asset ownership is lower taxes. Tax on income from labour tends to be higher than tax levied on assets or property. Any attempt to equalise taxes on income earned from property and labour is fiercely resisted by the wealthy, as is the way of the powerful. Equalisation is now also opposed by those who own a property but are not defined as wealthy. By co-opting a whole new class of homeowners into the world of asset ownership, the wealthy have ensured protection from higher taxation.

— The Global Casino by Ann Pettifor

Governors of the money system are based in, and operate from, financial centres in Singapore, Shanghai, Frankfurt, London and New York. After the 1960s, power was shifted away from elected politicians and central bank technocrats to private actors in global markets (often referred to in abstract terms as market forces, a phrase that renders both their power and actual governors invisible). Together with tame economists, weak regulators and compliant governments, Wall Street elites are architects of a system that by deliberate design is remote, invisible and unaccountable. That lack of accountability corrodes and corrupts democratic institutions. The lawlessness of the system encourages reckless speculation and irresponsibility. Similarly, governors of the world’s fossil markets are powerful traders and corporations, just as unseen and unaccountable. But energy prices are not solely determined by producers of fossil fuels. They are not fixed by the president of Russia, the king of Saudi Arabia, the prime minister of Norway, or the bosses of Shell, ExxonMobil and BP. Instead, prices of fossil fuels are determined by ‘markets’ – invisible traders, investors and speculators operating in detached global markets like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. This transfer of power away from the regulatory state, from democratic, public institutions, helps explain the impotencepotence and inadequacy of today’s politicians and policy-makers when faced with financial and energy imbalances. And that impotence – the failure and inability of elected politicians to use their power to regulate markets and address society’s grievances – has led to public despair, to the rise of conspiracy theories and disinformation. Ultimately that hollowing out of democratic power has led to societal demands for protection from the arbitrary actions of markets and to the rise of far-right authoritarians – strongman politics – promising protection from globalised market forces.

— The Global Casino by Ann Pettifor

the Norwegians call all polar foxes Mikkl

— A woman in the polar night by Christiane Ritter, Jane Degras, Rebecca Gallagher (Narrator)

“Now Chrissie has got 𝘳𝘢𝘳,” says Karl, shaking his head. “𝘐𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘵 𝘬𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘳. You must be reasonable.” Rar is a strangeness that overcomes many who spend the winter in polar regions. Ishavet kaller, or “the Arctic calls”, is what the Spitsbergen hunters say when one of their comrades, for mysterious reasons, throws himself into the sea.

— A woman in the polar night by Christiane Ritter, Jane Degras, Rebecca Gallagher (Narrator)

When she arrives her eyes smart from unending daylight; then comes the long night, with its psychological challenges. She experiences 𝘳𝘢𝘳, the Norwegian word for the strangeness that afflicts many who overwinter in the polar regions. All indigenous languages, such as Inuktitut, have a word for 𝘳𝘢𝘳.

— A woman in the polar night by Christiane Ritter, Jane Degras, Rebecca Gallagher (Narrator)

One reason for the persistence of a humanist, social-democratic left, one absorbent enough to take in demands related to gender, race, and sexuality, has to do with, I think, the fact that Spanish colonialism’s moral crisis came early with the Conquest. The critique launched by dissenters was frontal and all encompassing, and when independence from Spain finally came, many of those who led that movement understood “emancipation” (even if they didn’t always act on that understanding) in its fullest sense, to include, potentially at least, all forms of oppression. This, I think, helps explain Latin America’s commitment to a panoramic conception of citizenship, one that includes social rights. The Anglo experience was different. Evasion and denial were English settlement’s hallmarks. And remained so for centuries. No ethical dilemma accompanied the destruction of the continent’s indigenous people. When a moral crisis over chattel slavery did finally come, in the 1800s, it abstracted Black-skin bondage as a singular, exceptional sin. This, as the historian David Brion Davis wrote fifty years ago, had the “great virtue” of providing an “ideal” and “clear-cut” model of evil, which was useful for abolitionists when it came to fighting it but a hindrance to later historians and activists when they tried to relate it to the persistence of “other species of barbarity and oppression.” This, I think, helps explain the United States’ inability to overcome a narrow conception of individual rights.

— America, América by Greg Grandin