Al Jazeera: How Britain stole $45 trillion from India

New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik - just published by Columbia University Press - deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938. [...]

Here's how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, "buying" from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.[...]

This corrupt system meant that even while India was running an impressive trade surplus with the rest of the world - a surplus that lasted for three decades in the early 20th century - it showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the real income from India's exports was appropriated in its entirety by Britain.

Some point to this fictional "deficit" as evidence that India was a liability to Britain. But exactly the opposite is true. Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that rightly belonged to Indian producers. India was the goose that laid the golden egg. Meanwhile, the "deficit" meant that India had no option but to borrow from Britain to finance its imports. So the entire Indian population was forced into completely unnecessary debt to their colonial overlords, further cementing British control.[...]

Patnaik identifies four distinct economic periods in colonial India from 1765 to 1938, calculates the extraction for each, and then compounds at a modest rate of interest (about 5 percent, which is lower than the market rate) from the middle of each period to the present. Adding it all up, she finds that the total drain amounts to $44.6 trillion. This figure is conservative, she says, and does not include the debts that Britain imposed on India during the Raj.

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Politico: Why Trump can’t kill the electric car

WASHINGTON — The electric vehicle revolution, after years of hype that outpaced reality, finally seems to be taking off in the United States. The best five months for plug-in sales in American history have been the past five months. Tesla’s Model 3 has been one of America’s top five selling passenger cars this fall, surging ahead of fossil-fueled mainstays like the Ford Fusion and Nissan Sentra. The U.S. put its 1 millionth electric vehicle on the road in September, not a large chunk of the nation’s 260 million vehicles, but not too shabby considering production started only in 2010. [...]

So far, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and fossil-fuel-friendly policies have failed to even slow down America’s transition to a clean-energy economy. For example, the president has repeatedly vowed to revive the coal industry, by pushing to weaken air pollution rules and putting a coal lobbyist in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, but utilities have continued to shut down dirty and uneconomical coal plants. U.S. coal consumption has dropped to its lowest level since 1979, while zero-emission wind and solar power are booming; they now account for 10 percent of U.S. generating capacity, up from about 1 percent a decade ago. [...]

Then again, this fight isn’t really about climate policy or transportation policy or even Trump’s pique at a company that made him look bad. EVs have become yet another battleground in America’s ubiquitous culture wars, targeted by many Republicans as eco-elitist Obamamobiles. Even before Trump took aim at the tax credit, GOP Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming had introduced a bill that would not only kill it but also would slap new federal fees on EV owners. At the same time, Democratic Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont has filed a pro-EV bill that would remove the 200,000-car threshold and extend the credit for 10 years. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he’ll demand that any bipartisan infrastructure bill include permanent tax credits for EVs, while climate-conscious Democrats like incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are pushing a “Green New Deal” that would bolster government support for EVs.

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Political Critique: European Others

Being European without being white and Christian does not only put one in a strange place, but also in a strange temporality: Europeans who lack one or both of these qualities tend to be read as having just arrived or even as still being elsewhere – if not physically, then at least culturally. In European discourse (legally, culturally, socially, economically, academically…) the term ‘migrant’ describes someone who moves across borders, but also includes all racialized European communities, which are reframed as non-European through their ascribed permanent status as migrating (from somewhere that is not Europe). This status is transmitted across generations and thus increasingly decoupled from the actual event of migration, shifting the meaning of ‘migrant’ from a term indicating movement to one indicating a static, hereditary state. In other words, movement into Europeanness is impossible as long as racialized difference is still visible.

Racialized populations are thus positioned within a spatial and temporal paradox: they are permanently frozen in the moment of arrival – and the further away the actual moment/movement of migration, the stronger the paradox, i.e. the ‘queer­ness’ of their presence in space and time. The current so-called third generation of post-war labour and post-colonial migrants is perceived to be more alien and out of place and time in Europe than their grandparents, the first generation of actual migrants, exactly because they are (made) impossible as an internal presence within (and by) the ideology of normalized colour-blindness that places ‘race’ and thus racialized populations necessarily outside of Europe. [...]

Instead they are framed as an attempt at silencing necessary critiques of migrant communities and their supposed innate sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia (the prominence of discourses around ‘migrant extremism’ notwithstanding, there is an equally prominent assumption that it is taboo to criticise these communities). And indeed, at first glance it might seem as if Europe exists outside of the US American (post)racial temporality. While the latter is built on a narrative of having successfully overcome intolerance and discrimination, the myth of European colour-blindness claims that Europe never was ‘racial’ (anti-Semitism is still often analysed as both an exception to this and as clearly separable from racism). That is, despite the origin of the concept of race in Europe and the explicitly race-based policies of both its fascist regimes and its colonial empires, the dominant assumption is that this history had no impact on the continent and its internal structures.

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CityLab: A New Way of Seeing 200 Years of American Immigration

Here, the metaphorical mighty tree is the United States, and if you follow the metaphor to its logical conclusion, it has been made thicker and stronger by the waves of immigrants who have arrived over the decades. Each colored “cell” represents 100 immigrants; over time, the algorithm deposits them in concentric rings, with each ring marking a decade. The older ones encase the core, and newer ones wrap around surface. The colors and the direction of growth represent the origins of the immigrants. The yellow cells depicting immigrants from Latin America, for example, are layered by the computer algorithm towards the bottom of the circle—signaling that they come countries south of the U.S.; those from Asia grow outwards towards the left. (Cruz noted that while the trajectories of Native American and enslaved populations are also of course integral to the story of the country, but this dataset did not include information on these groups.) [...]

For example, the tree trunk swells after the 1965 Immigration Act, which replaced previous policies that intentionally excluded immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe. That legislation helped shape the demographics of the country for decades afterward: The cells start getting more colorful, and the rings thicken more towards the west and south. [...]

Perhaps Cruz doesn’t explicitly intend for it, but one effect of this approach is that it makes the viewer see that immigration’s role in the country’s demographics is something natural and organic—a response to various environmental conditions, like the dry and rainy seasons that alternately limit and encourage the growth of a tree. It also reveals that, while immigration is not the only part of the historical process that fed America’s growth, it is essential. The U.S. is a nation of immigrants, right down the very core.

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statista: The Steady Rise Of U.S. Gun Deaths

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 40,000 people died in shootings across the United States, the highest number in 20 years. The data takes into account deaths classified as unintentional, suicide, homicide, undetermined and legal intervention/operations of war.

That trend was driven by a steady rise in suicides involving firearms The U.S. now has 12 deaths per 100,000 people due to guns compared to 0.2 per 100,000 people in Japan, 0.3 in the UK and 0.9 in Germany.

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