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… over two thousand bilateral and regional trade and investment agreements signed in the last few decades have created new rights for transnational corporations, including rights that humans don’t have: corporations have acquired the right to settle anywhere they want and bring with them any personnel they decide they need, they are allowed to repatriate profits without restrictions and even to litigate against governments in demand of profits lost because of democratically decided policies, not through local courts but via international arbitration panels shaped to defend business interests and where human rights do not necessarily prevail.

El Salvador effectively banned mining in 2008 and the policy has enjoyed bipartisan support there. This particular case, then – and there are other similar ones – raises very fundamental question about politics and sovereignty.

Although a tribunal recently judged that Venezuela has to pay ExxonMobil $1.6 billion for appropriated oil assets – a judgment that is now suspended as Venezuela seeks further amendments – the oil giant was seeking nearly ten times that amount, and the decision was hailed as a victory by the Maduro government.

In their letter, civil society highlighted that success in Nairobi must mean “[f]ulfilling the development mandate by strengthening SDT for all developing countries, removing WTO obstacles to food security, and operationalizing benefits for the [LDCs].”

The corporate and rich country government agenda of permanently abandoning the development mandate must be forestalled, along with the imposition of a set of already-rejected or ill-defined non-trade ‘new issues’.”

Experts have detailed how governments won’t be able to implement many aspects of the deal, however, if agreements like the TPP, TTIP [PDF] or TiSA come into force. Much the same could be said about the WTO. Developing country unity and North-South peoples’ solidarity will be essential to a positive outcome at the WTO. Let’s make sure that the United States, the EU, Japan, Australia and others realize that the imperative of development and public interests must come before corporate profit. A good deal should be struck in Nairobi. But if not, then no deal is better than a bad deal.

In the coming weeks, many progressives will be working to ensure Donald Trump isn’t elected on Nov. 8. But the election of Hillary Clinton provides us no relief on global trade issues. Indeed, her anticipated victory will only extend a long line of presidents deeply committed to pro-corporate trade practices.

Sadly, this ruling is not a fluke. Two weeks ago, the WTO ruled that U.S. "dolphin-safe" tuna labels, which allows consumers to choose tuna caught without dolphin-killing fishing practices, were also a "technical barrier to trade" that must be eliminated or weakened.

Meanwhile, economist Jared Bernstein and Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach just issued a thought-provoking manifesto on progressive principles for global trade.

Debt is the tie that binds the 99 percent. Almost everyone in the United States is a debtor of some sort. Even those excluded from mainstream credit systems are still preyed upon by lending institutions, exemplified by payday loan sharks and pawn shops that dot poor neighborhoods. Rather than a supplementary facet of the overall economy, the personal debt system is a primary engine of Wall Street profits, and it is prone to crisis.

Looming over these discussions of debtors’ movement has been the question of a debt strike, a deliberate withdraw of consent by debtors from the system designed to keep them paying in perpetuity. Millions already do not and cannot pay their debt anyway, and are by default on strike. These de-facto debt-strikers constitute what has been described as an “invisible army of defaulters” with massive political potential. Debt strike — or debt refusal, as OCSDC describe it in an online pledge — is a significant alternative to the notion of debt forgiveness, which has been advocated by some groups rallying around the Student Loan Forgiveness Act. In the words of OSDC member Christopher Casuccio:

An intriguing mutual aid pilot project is the idea of a “debt fairy” campaign in which groups of private citizens would pool their resources to purchase defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar from banks — who typically sell to collection agencies — liberating the debtor from their burden. While not a structural solution — and not applicable to student loans — scaled up it could become what David Graeber imagines as a “moving jubilee” capable of both garnering media attention around debtors’ struggles and taking business away from the intermediary companies that profit from hounding and penalizing those unable to pay.

If debt is a gateway into a radical conversation about the capitalist system itself, strategic and analytical questions arise about the role of the state — questions that have always haunted OWS as a movement grounded in anarchist principles. What can we learn from the debt cancellation forced upon the Icelandic government by citizens earlier this year? How do we connect the dots between “personal” debt and the public debt of municipalities and governments subjected to corporate bondholders and credit-rating agencies?

While it remains to be seen on what terms OWS will collaborate for S17 with its allies in the “99% Opposition” on the institutional left — ranging from the groups gathering for the Student Power Convergence in August to the 99% Spring network, to May Day partners such as SEIU — there are signs of an emerging consensus across the spectrum of the left that debt, and especially student debt, is a key note to hit for a longer-term vision of social and economic renewal. While some will attempt to yoke the energies of S17 to the timeframe of the electoral cycle and ultimately the established mechanisms of the state, OWS will push back with its own sense of time and priorities.

So there is no doubt that world banker domination – which should have been reduced by the 2008-09 financial melt – will continue. Only the occasional sovereign default – Argentina (2002), Ecuador (2008), Iceland (2008) and maybe Southern Europe this year – or imposition of exchange controls (as rediscovered by Malaysia in 1998 or Venezuela in 2003) reduces the banksters’ grip.

The strongest political effort by these libertarian anti-Bilderberg protesters is to attempt the election of Texan member of Congress, Ron Paul, as president, and with 20 percent popularity, he remains Mitt Romney’s only irritant within the Republican Party as the November showdown with Obama now looms.

But even with these and other deficiencies, Piketty, nevertheless, brings a certain degree of reality—even a sense of “class warfare” (if only implicitly)—back to bourgeois economics. The result is to heighten the crisis of neoclassical theory. Moreover, he argues—even though he dismisses the idea as “utopian”—for the imposition of a tax on wealth.33 Piketty thus represents a partial revolt within the inner chambers of the economics establishment.

Edward Wolff has pioneered the study of wealth data in the United States. In his most recent paper, he finds that the average (mean) net worth of the wealthiest 1 percent in 2010 was $16.4 million. By contrast the average for the least wealthy 40 percent was $–10,600 (that is, it was negative!).39

Piketty has no notion of capital as an exploitative social relationship.

However, beginning in the mid–1970s, capital made a remarkable comeback, and the ratio began to climb, and is now approaching the level that existed at the start of the First World War. Public capital has been privatized and political regimes throughout the world have been very well disposed toward the interests of wealth-holders.43

He shows that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and right up until the First World War, wealth in most rich nations equaled six to seven years of national income.

If the rate of return on capital r is greater than the growth rate of the economy g, then capital’s share of income will rise. Piketty shows that over very long periods of time, r has in fact been greater than g; in fact, this is the normal state of affairs in capitalist economies.

He finds that there is a direct and significant correlation between the size of the endowment and the rate of return on it. Between 1980 and 2010, institutions with endowments of less than $100 million received a return of 6.2 percent, while those with riches of $1 billion and over got 8.8 percent. At the top of the heap were Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, which “earned” an average return of 10.2 percent.49 Needless to say, when those already extraordinarily rich can obtain a higher return on their money than everyone else, their separation from the rest becomes that much greater.

Reality could not be more different than what neoclassical theory leads one to expect. In the United States, real weekly earnings for all workers have actually declined since the 1970s and are now more than 10 percent below their level of four decades ago. This reflects both the stagnation of wages and the growth of part-time employment.50 Even when considering real median family income that includes many two-earner households there has been a decrease of around 9 percent from 1999 to 2012.51

But how does this relate to issues of class struggle and class power? What are the consequences of these realities in terms of control of corporations, the economy, the state, the culture, and the media? Piketty, though making a few tantalizing allusions, tells us next to nothing about this.

“The neglect of power in mainstream economics,” as the heterodox Austrian economist Kurt Rothschild wrote in 2002, “has its main roots…in deliberate strategies to remove power questions to a subordinate position for inner-theoretic reasons,” such as the search for mathematical models with a high degree of mathematical certainty.

It goes without saying that Piketty’s acceptability to neoclassical economics is dependent on his avoidance of the question of inequality and power.

Just as class power tends to concentrate, so does the power of the increasingly giant, oligopolistic firms which, in economic parlance, reap monopoly power, associated with barriers to entry into their industries and their ability to impose a greater price markup on prime production costs (primarily labor costs).

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, declared that “Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away…. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits…. Monopoly is the condition for every successful business.” Indeed, this might even stand as the credo of today’s generalized monopoly capital.64

For Piketty himself there is no organic relation between the two main tendencies that he draws in Capital in the Twenty-First Century—the tendency for the rate of return on wealth to exceed the growth of income and the tendency toward slow growth. Nor is his analysis historical in a meaningful sense, which requires scrutiny of the changing nature of social-class relations. Increasing income and wealth inequality are not developments that he relates to mature capitalism and monopoly capital, but are simply treated as endemic to the system during most of its history.

Here it is useful to recall that for Keynes the danger was not only one of secular stagnation but also the domination of the rentier. He thus called for the “euthanasia of the rentier, and consequently the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the [artificial] scarcity-value of capital.”69 In today’s financialized capitalism, we face, as Piketty recognizes, what Keynes most feared: the triumph of the rentier.70 The “euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist” is needed now more than ever. This cannot be accomplished by minor reforms, however—hence Piketty’s advocacy of what he calls a “useful utopia,” a massive tax on wealth.71

It is significant that imperialism plays no role in Piketty’s analysis, neither in explaining the growth of wealth and wealth inequalities, nor even in the analysis of past growth, or prognostication of future growth. On the contrary the book is informed by a perception according to which capitalist growth in one region…is never at the expense of the people of another region, and tends to spread from one region to another, bringing about a general improvement in the human condition.

Significant in this respect is that he chose as the epigraph of his book a line from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the French Revolution: “Social Distinctions can be based only on common utility.”75

One could hardly pick a statement more opposed to the system in which we live, which seeks not the common but the individual utility.