Dog Days Classics: Revisiting the Long Twentieth Century

Dog Days Classics: Revisiting the Long Twentieth Century

The late Giovanni Arrighi, a star of the political economy scene at SUNY-Binghamton and Johns Hopkins, was the kind of guy who had no taste for decadism. A Marxist with an eye for the big picture, he followed the lead of Fernand Braudel by framing history in terms of grand processes and huge tracts of time. He also collaborated with Immanuel Wallerstein, the sociologist who coined the term “world-systems” to describe the coherent, interrelated web of dependency and exploitation that characterizes the world economy in any given era; as the balance of powers and the sources of wealth shift, one world-system gives way to a new one. Arrighi belonged to the school of thought that saw incidents like the Cold War or the Scramble for Africa as mere political episodes in the much bigger scheme of capitalism’s development since it emerged as an economic system in the Italian city-states of the Renaissance and gradually moved its center of power to the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and finally the United States. “The long twentieth century” was the era when the US rose and fell as the fulcrum in the capitalist world economy, with 1970 allegedly the moment when US power went into terminal decline and American capitalism turned from productive growth to cannibalize its own wealth through financial speculation – just as the British and Dutch had done before them.

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In this BLOG we will look at pensions and their impact on what are called Public Private Partnerships or P3’s.  IT will also deal with other pension matters, such as Defined Contribution Plans (DC) vs Defined Benefit (DB) PLANS, the weakness in private plans, the need for pension reform in public pensions to have shareholder rights, directorships and ethical investment directives and policies.