Verwandte Artikel zu Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic...

Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World - Hardcover

Russell, Rupert

 
9780385545853: Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385545851 ISBN 13: 9780385545853
Verlag: Doubleday, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A fascinating, groundbreaking exposé of how commodity traders in New York and London have destabilized societies all over the world, leaving the most vulnerable at the mercy of hunger, chaos, and war.

For Rupert Russell, the Brexit vote was only the latest shock in a decade full of them: the unstoppable war in Syria, huge migrant flows into Europe, beheadings in Iraq, children placed in cages on the U.S. border. In Price Wars, he sets out on a worldwide journey to investigate what caused the wave of chaos that consumed the world in the 2010s.

Russell travels to Tunisia, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, East Africa, and Central America and discovers that unrest in all these places was triggered by dramatic and mysterious swings in the price of essential commodities. Deregulation of the commodities markets means that food prices can shoot up even in years of abundant harvests, causing hunger and protest. Oil prices and real-estate values can surge even when supplies are normal, enriching and emboldening dictators. It is this instability--fueled by banks and hedge funds in faraway New York and London--that has toppled regimes and unsettled the West. 

Price Wars is a fascinating, original, and groundbreaking exposé of the power of the commodities markets to disrupt the world.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rupert Russell is a writer and filmmaker. He has filmed in twenty countries and made two award-winning documentaries. He has a PhD in sociology from Harvard and has published inThe Independent, Dazed, and Salon. Price Wars is his first book.
 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Chaos: Why Societies Boil at 210

As the dust settled and the “I Survived 2016” T-shirts sold out, I realised that the populist explosion was far bigger than Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. They were just the English-speaking insurrectionists of a reactionary revolution that had already swept across Europe. Starting in 2015, populist parties racked up double-digit gains throughout the continent, came in close seconds in France and Austria, and won power in Poland and Italy. Something had rocked the Western world all at once. It had transcended language barriers, political peculiarities and currency unions. But what was it? Some blamed the economic collapse in 2008, but the Financial Crisis was nearly a decade old. It seemed to me that there must be a more immediate reason why voters from Rome to Raleigh to Rzeszów pushed the button marked “detonate.”

“For me, the problem is the thousands of illegal immigrants stealing, raping and dealing drugs,” said Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s Northern League, at a rally in Rome. It was 2015, in the midst of the global refugee crisis that saw over a million migrants come to Europe. Right-wing populists declared it an invasion of “barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men” (AfD, Germany), “young barbarians” (Golden Dawn, Greece), “criminals, terrorists and idlers!” (National Alliance, Latvia), and “masses of young men in their twenties, with beards singing ‘Allahu Akbar’ ” (Party of Freedom, Holland). On the campaign trail, Trump promised to extend his wall with Mexico to the Middle East, with “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The Vote Leave campaign distributed leaflets showing Iraq, Syria and Turkey joining the EU, with a threatening arrow indicating their impending migrant invasion of Britain. In case the message wasn’t clear enough, Nigel Farage personally launched a poster campaign depicting thousands of brown-skinned people with the all-caps warning: “BREAKING POINT.” The barbarians were no longer at the gates, they had broken through. “Give us back France, damn it!” Marine Le Pen demanded. “We drink wine whenever we want!”

I’m sitting in the heart of this “barbarian invasion.” Nearly half of the refugees who travelled to Europe since 2015 have passed through the Moria camp and slept in tents just like the one I’m in now. These Iraqi teenagers are the “rapist hordes” incarnate, the monsters of the populist imagination. But they aren’t singing “Allahu Akbar.” They don’t have beards. They have hip, undercut haircuts. They’re smoking, drinking wine and bragging about their secret girlfriends. What could be more French than that? I wonder.

Scenes like this didn’t make it into The Feed. Instead, images of migrants—packed in boats, dead on beaches, camped in tent cities—dominated. The accompanying headlines framed migrants as a “security threat,” lending false credibility to the populists’ alleged “invasion.” It is why the right-wing firebrands, many of whom had decades-long careers at the margins of politics, were suddenly propelled towards power. Their xenophobic message finally resonated with just enough voters to shake the foundations of the Western liberal order.

I step outside. I walk through the “jungle,” the hastily constructed overflow camp housing 6,000 refugees. I walk up a hill that was once an olive grove. UN-branded tents are scattered haphazardly among piles of plastic bottles, torn clothes and used nappies. Kids leap over the garbage and hide behind tents, firing bows and arrows made from olive-tree branches. Three women have cleared out a space between piles of garbage to light a makeshift fire to boil rice. A man leans over a bucket of water as another shaves off his hair. They say there’s a scalp fungus going around. Behind them I see the main camp they would be in, if it wasn’t already over-capacity. Built to house 3,000, it is a fortress of watchtowers and barbed-wire fences. Greek soldiers patrol the perimeter.

This camp may well be what the populists fear, but it’s also a mirror image of themselves. It’s a kind of authoritarian disorder, a militarised messiness. Trump deployed the army at the US–Mexico border, but the migration crisis surged. Johnson wants to “take back control” from the EU, but he’s losing his grip on Northern Ireland and Scotland, on secure food and medical supplies. Salvini closed down refugee camps in Italy, only to create an epidemic of homelessness as migrants were forced onto the streets. Their attempts to impose order created a new kind of chaos. Perhaps this is because they never dealt with the cause of the migrant crisis, the very crisis that had propelled them to power. Indeed, why did the number of refugees surge so suddenly in 2015 and 2016 after two decades of declining?

Another tent. One young man sits cross-legged on his stretcher-bed fiddling with his phone. He’s got a striking, John Lennon look: narrow face, circular glasses and long, curly hair. He turns the screen to me and shows me pictures of his home in Raqqa, Syria. He shows me the street, the houses, the cars—it’s all ordinary. He tells me life was peaceful growing up. But then, when he was nine years old, protests started. Assad responded with force. Protestors were shot and killed. Militias sprang up. A civil war erupted. ISIS took over his hometown. Then the Kurdish Peshmerga forces came. He shows me another photograph. The street is barely recognisable. He points to one pile of bricks: “That was my home.” The Peshmerga forced him out of the city, he says. He fled Syria, travelled through Turkey, crossed the Mediterranean to this Greek island. For him, chaos was a seven-year journey. It started with those protests in March 2011. It started with the Arab Spring. But he doesn’t want to talk about what happened afterwards. He’s worried about discussing ISIS or the Peshmerga. He’s got family still in Syria. He’s worried about other people in the camp, whom they might be connected to, and what they might do.

I hop from tent to tent. I meet young men from Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Each of them is fleeing a civil war, each started in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The protests in Yemen began a revolution which, in 2014, escalated into a civil war. Syria’s civil war spread into Iraq in 2014 when ISIS captured Mosul. But most were too young to remember the protests. Nor were they interested. They didn’t want to talk about the chaos nearly a decade ago. They want to talk about the chaos they’re living in now.

Hakar is an Iraqi Kurd. He was imprisoned by ISIS when they took Mosul. “Every day, we were in pain, we were tortured,” he says as he shows me scars on his arms and legs. He was there for nine months until the Peshmerga captured the prison and freed him. He visited his old home for the first time with a friend. When they got there, something exploded. Perhaps it was a booby trap, perhaps they triggered a dormant bomb buried in the rubble. His friend died instantly. “My face was destroyed,” he says. He parts his hair and shows me where the doctors inserted bolts to keep his skull altogether. When the hospital discharged him, he knew he had to leave Iraq. Maybe he could get a second—or third—shot at life somewhere else.

He says we have to find a different tent to film his interview. Someone here is making him feel uneasy. Mohammed’s tent seemed friendly, so I take Hakar there. Mohammed is sitting on his bed sipping a plastic cup of...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385545851
ISBN 13 
9780385545853
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
276
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

Krügerweg 1
Trebbin
Brandenburg
14959
Deutschland