Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories 

UN report, A/HRC/59/23 (2025)
Focus: Gaza is not just an occupation. It is an “economy of genocide”: a profit-driven machine kept running by corporations and investors around the world. The report names names across eight sectors, from arms makers like Elbit Systems to tech giants like Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft, all profiting directly. Then it turns to finance. “Ethical” investors and their advisers simply choose to leave human rights violations in Palestine out of their ESG assessments. Instead of condemning and walking away, these new silent war financiers hide behind passive engagement, keep the profits flowing, and remain complicit.
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Tariq Fancy, former BlackRock's first Chief Investment Officer for Sustainable Investing

Three part essay (2021)
Focus: Argues that responsible investing, ethical investing and environmental, social and governance ("ESG") products, such as funds, were built to lift falling fees rather than to change the world, since "many things that are lucrative are also bad for the world." Fund managers are bound and paid to maximise returns, so good conduct survives only where it pays. His verdict is that sustainable investing is "a dangerous placebo that harms the public interest" and amounts to "greenwashing our entire economic system."
Read Part 1, Read Part 2, Read Part 3, Read Epilogue

Sophia Parker, Director of Emerging Futures at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)

Essay (2026)
Focus: Argues that our politics has become complicit in helping us look away from the polycrisis, rewarding false certainty over honesty. An economy that treats care as a cost while rewarding extraction has its values upside down; ownership and power must be at the heart of change. Yet progressive philanthropy is failing badly. It funds pilots and inspiring projects, but not the slow work of building the institutions that could carry alternatives into the mainstream and reshape common sense, as the architects of today’s market orthodoxy have done for fifty years. “We are pruning the bushes painstakingly, while others prepare for war.”
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Sai Englert, Leiden University, and Gargi Bhattacharyya, Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, University College London

Academic article, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies (2024)
Focus: Rejects the idea that the genocide in Gaza is irrational or exceptional. Instead, it is the latest chapter of the same violence that built global capitalism. From the enslavement of Indigenous and African peoples in the plantations and mines of the Americas, which enriched European merchants and financiers, to the dispossession of Palestinians today, settler colonies have served as outposts of empire, securing land, labour, resources and trade routes. Their violence is not a breakdown of the global order but a mechanism that keeps it running. “Gaza is the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee.”
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Kenneth P. Pucker – professor of the practice in sustainability at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, former CEO at Thimberland

Article (2021)
Focus: Argues that, as currently practised, "most ESG investing delivers little to no social or environmental impact." With no common definition or legal framework, asset managers can brand almost any portfolio as ESG, sustainable or ethical, even one holding companies directly involved in, or strategically supporting, the fossil fuel and defence sectors. While ESG investing has boomed, the planet has had its warmest decades on record, inequality has widened and species are vanishing, yet stock markets hit new highs and asset managers collect attractive fees. The promised "win-win" is a distraction from resetting our economic system.
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Ann Pettifor – Political economist, author, and honorary research fellow at the PERC at University of London.

Book (2026)
Focus: Argues that we are no longer governed by politicians but "by wealthy and powerful players in markets" (stock exchanges) on Wall Street and in the City of London. Asset managers and sovereign wealth funds take the world's savings and invest them as they choose, answerable to no one. In this insane casino, "bankers are gambling with our future": they push up the cost of food, homes and energy, hollow out democracy, and drive the world towards climate breakdown and biosphere collapse.

George Monbiot, Guardian columnist, environmental campaigner and Orwell Prize winner

Book (2024)
Focus: Argues that our separate crises, from climate breakdown and economic crashes to growing inequality and the rise of authoritarianism, share one root: neoliberalism, a "totalitarian capitalism" that reaches into every part of our lives. Through tax cuts for the rich, deregulation and privatisation, it channels wealth upwards and places democracy beneath the markets. It urges citizens to make green personal choices, such as recycling, while corporations plunder the planet.

Gary Stevenson, former Citibank trader turned economist and campaigner against inequality

Book (2024)
Focus: A working-class boy from East London becomes Citibank’s most profitable trader by betting that ordinary people’s living standards will keep falling while the rich keep getting richer, and he is proved right. Stevenson argues that rising inequality is not a side effect of the economy but the engine of its decline: the wealthy buy up the assets, everyone else sinks into debt, and the economy cannot recover. Disillusioned at profiting from it, he quit. He now campaigns through his YouTube channel Garys Economics for taxing extreme wealth. It is an insider’s confession of a financial system that rewards those who bet against everyone else.

Brett Christophers, Professor at Uppsala University in Sweden

Book (2024)
Focus: Directly explains why contemporary investment and clean-energy market forces are failing to fund the green transition fast enough. Christophers argues that even though the cost/price of generating renewable power (like solar and wind) has dropped, renewable generation remains insufficiently profitable for market-driven private capital.

Kirstin Munro, Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York

2022 Eva Koch Scholar Lecture, Woodbrooke Quaker Center

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Brett Christophers, Professor at Uppsala University in Sweden

Book (2023)
Focus: Details how giant financial conglomerates like BlackRock and Blackstone have taken over essential physical infrastructure. He analyzes how their business models prioritized short-term extraction and high-return metrics over long-term public benefit or stable stewardship.