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If you’re used to Westminster’s bipolar politics, Scotland’s multi-party system can seem baffling. And so it’s easier for the London media to focus on the rotting corpses of the dying regime – older men raging against their own irrelevance – than follow the forces reshaping Scotland.
The path through the five Holyrood elections to date has been cut by a group we could call ‘the radicals’. These are the people who, as bombs blew Baghdad to bits in 2003, abandoned uninspiring Labour and Scottish National Party (SNP) campaigns, and elected the ‘rainbow parliament’ that included six Scottish Socialist Party MSPs and seven Greens.
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Commodity trading firms are among the most important corporations in global capitalism, yet most people have never heard of them.
As intermediaries between suppliers and buyers of primary and secondary commodities, these shadowy entities are key players in vital international markets, from aluminium and crude oil to soybean meal and zinc. They use their transportation, processing and storage capabilities to capitalise on disruptions in global supply chains, and they trade on derivatives markets to both hedge against, and speculate on, price fluctuations.
For commodity traders, instability is good for business. When a global pandemic leads to the shuttering of factories and massive shifts in consumer demand, the traders can profit from the resulting volatility. When drought in the American Midwest leads to a reduction in the domestic supply of livestock feed in the US, they can use their transportation capabilities to ship more soybeans from Brazil. And