Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? (tags)
Zygmunt Bauman, born in 1925, is a Polish sociologist. Since 1971, he has resided in England after being driven out of Poland by an anti-semitic campaign, engineered by the Communist government he had supported.
Occupation, Liberation, and Overcoming Contradictions Among the 99% (tags)
Which way forward for the Occupy movement and ideas on how to get there by embracing decolonization.
The Global Political Awakening and the New World Order (tags)
"The global debt crisis, which is beginning in Greece, and spreading throughout the euro-zone economies of Spain, Portugal, Ireland and ultimately the entire EU, will further consume the UK, Japan and go all the way to America.[50] This will be a truly global debt crisis. Government measures to address the issue of debt focus on the implementation of ‘fiscal austerity measures’ to reduce the debt burdens and make interest payments on their debts. ‘Fiscal austerity’ is a vague term that in actuality refers to cutting social spending and increasing taxes. The effect this has is that the public sector is devastated, as all assets are privatized, public workers are fired en masse, unemployment becomes rampant, health and education disappear, taxes rise dramatically, and currencies are devalued to make all assets cheaper for international corporations and banks to buy up, while internally causing inflation – dramatically increasing the costs of fuel and food. In short, ‘fiscal austerity’ implies ‘social destruction’ as the social foundations of nations and peoples are pulled out from under them. States then become despotic and oppress the people, who naturally revolt against ‘austerity’: the sterilization of society."
The immiseration of the working class – Marx was right! (tags)
Just a couple of weeks ago, America's government tax collectors, the Internal Revenue Service, issued a new report. The IRS found that the richest 1% of Americans earned a record 21.2% of all income in 2005, up from 19% the year before. At the same time, the bottom 50% earned just 12.8% of all income in 2005, down from 13.4%. This was a record. IRS data only go back to 1986, but other academic research suggests that the last time wealthy Americans had such a high percentage of the national income was in the 1920s. And there's more. The IRS data show that the incomes of people right in the middle of all the income brackets (where half earn less and half earn more) fell 2% between 2000 and 2005 when adjusted for inflation, to $30,881. At the same time, the income level for the top 1% grew 3% to $364,657, or over ten times as much! This shows that capitalism is not only a breeder of economic crisis, war and waste, but is also a system of grotesque exploitation and injustice. When Marx wrote Das Kapital around 150 years ago, he argued that "pauperism (poverty) forms the condition of capitalist production and of the capitalist development of wealth... in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse".
The War on Working Americans - Part II (tags)
Part II of how American workers are losing out.
A Look Back and Ahead in an Age of Neocon Rule (tags)
A review of the past year and review of year ahead.