State Debts - The Primal German Fear (tags)
Unlike a private homebuilder, the state can be indebted and never expect the entire debt to be repaid. For most, taxes are a book with seven seals. A tax-cutting lobby exploits our unease over taxes for their purposes. Social cohesion declines and milieu egoism increases.
State Indebtedness as a Power Strategy (tags)
Contracting debts exploded under neoliberalism since the 1980s - unlike the state debts in the Keynesian era from the 1950s to the 1970s - and produced s structural debt bondage for the overwhelming majority.
Facing a Possible State of Emergency (tags)
The danger of authoritarian "solutions" grows when the constitutional state is dismantled, undermined or suspended. Basic western values were betrayed in the so-called "war on terror." All persons have the same inalienable human rights irrespective of nationality, origin or religion.
Poverty Returns with Misguided Policy (tags)
The state should represent the public interest and yet private or special interests are in the driver's seat. Trump's proposed 2018 budget is a sledgehammer with cuts to Meals-on-Wheels, school lunches, WIC food assistance, National Institute for Health, EPA, PBS and Legal Services
Trump and the Consequences: Democracy at a Crossroads (tags)
What appears here is another form of democracy, without the constitutional state and without opposition. Trump could operate with enemy declarations. Today Donald Trump is a radicalized Nixon. Democracy is always endangered and never given as a present.
Democracy and the Uncanny Power of Money (tags)
Growing inequality is the greatest political problem of our time. Governments are often only actors or puppets of an anonymous regime for the benefit of the privileged where the interests of simple people do not count.
Democracy and the Social State (tags)
Finance capitalism and Citizens United turn life, language and democracy upside down as the $150 million given by Wall Street to Hillary Clinton fall under the rubric "social engagement." With these theses, Franz Segbers emphasizes the social state as the foundation of democracy.
Ujnemployment is (not) a Full-time Job (tags)
There are many scandals and injustices, for example that wealth concentration in Austria and the EU is increasing. However, the debate is again about the "unemployed unwilling to work" instead of about the widening gap.
The Unending Story of the Achievers (tags)
All personal and corporate success depended on state investments in roads, schools, hospitals, community centers, airwaves, food safety and water quality. The achievers' myth ignores this, Austrian researcher Bruno Rossmann explains.
From the Free Economy to the Share Economy (tags)
n 1970 the economics Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman argued the social responsibility of business was only maximization of its profits. This is not true any more today. The responsibility of businesses goes beyond profit maximization. More can be demanded of those with power/
On the End of Capitalism (tags)
The bridge from capitalism to the new "post-growth economy" is lacking. Hardly anyone reflects about the process of transformation...If the climate should be spared, flying cannot be a human right. The R-word will be unavoidable again: renunciation.
Politics Faded Out the Constitutional Offensiveness of Trade Agreements (tags)
The arbitration jurisdiction with the ISDS mechanism is the most controversial point of the two trade agreements. US corporations could file lawsuits against the German prohibition of gas production through fracking. Public interest laws could be stylized as "indirect expropriation."
George Orwell in the Government (tags)
Writing in 1948 off the coast of Scotland, George Orwell foresaw the time when war would become a domestic necessity to divert the people from economic contradictions. Newspeak is used so lies are called truth and slavery freedom.
Victory of the Economy over Democracy and the Constitutional State (tags)
The person exists as an end-in-him/herself and not merely as a means... On the other hand, the principle of the worldwide market economy is based on treating persons and their needs as means to the end of profit realization.
The Aesthetic of Neoliberalism (tags)
The aesthetic of neoliberalism bids farewell to the bad in its environment. Originality and color disappear. Crap tends to make itself into an inquisition and banishes everything that cannot be adjusted in the trash of the system.
Reduced working hours is the only logically and historically consistent answer to the annual productivity increases that are above the real growth rates of the economy and without reduced working hours lead to a decline of work volume and unemployment.
Unconditional Basic Income is not a Wrong Way: Book Review (tags)
Every step at preventing poverty is also a step at strengthening consumer demand. Steps toward basic income can achieve that change of distribution demanded in the book.
Democracy in Crisis: The Terror of the Economy is a Danger to Democracy (tags)
There is a powerful crisis dynamic that is stronger than the will of the sovereign and its democratic institutions. When capital relations fall into crisis, everything can be instrumentalized: the basic law, democracy, human rights and human life. Economic pressure creates extremism of middle.
Uncovering the Fracture of the System (tags)
Uncovering the fracture and the dislocations of this system, proposing changes and actively interfering is the optimistic side. The collective repression of problems is carried out to a spectacular extent. The welfare state and democracy cannot be separated.
In the Towrope of the Financial Markets (tags)
"High growth has a well-known hook. Surpluses are only possible when natural resources from clear water to rare earth are available, when the energy supply is guaranteed and when the pollutant sinks are sufficient.. The debtors are now those states that had to become indebted.."
Millionaire's Tax is the Best Debt Brake (tags)
Sahra Wagenknecht is a leader of the Left party, Die Linke, in the German Bundestag and author of "Freedom instead of Capitalism." Learning from other cultures is a strength, not a weakness. The University of British Columbia had a tuition freeze for 6 or 7 years and kept tuition at $2300.
Revolting, Occupying and Refusing (tags)
The demand for the commons goes far beyond de-privatization and aims at a social infrastructure of goods and services that everyone needs and to which everyone is entitled. The real economy that must be preserved hardly exists.
Social Security for All (tags)
A Christian view of the person that insists on an undeserved right to life opposes a merciless system that produces more and more wealth for a few and forces more and more people into poverty. The narrowing of work to paid work must be broken by the new model of work for all.
Privatization as a Threat (tags)
Privatization undermines the nature of the state, the state's reason to exist, and leads to the loss of identity and sovereignty. The state revenue side is weakened by privatizing profitable state expenses. Siegfried Bross is a judge on the German Constitutional Court.