Multiple crisis and catastrophe (tags)
The official self-image of bourgeois society remains strangely untouched by crises. They are understood as improbable and short-lived interruptions of what are actually successful processes. Disruptions and crises are denied, are considered technical and, through a variety of individual measures, if not solvable, then at least postponable into the future.
Trump and the Danger of Fascism (tags)
Peace is the imperative that should outweigh escalation and the unspeakable risk of global war! The constitutional state must not be confused with the security state or the emergency state as Rousseau and the social contract must not be confused with Thomas Hobbes and the punishing or fearsome state. People would fight endlessly without the state or Leviathan, he said.
A look back makes the outlook easier: A speculative boom in 1929 leads to a stock market crash and recession, the budget deficit increases, the austerity policies drive the economy into a depression. Tensions within and between countries increase, scapegoats are sought, anti-Semitism and protectionism are spreading.
A Phuilosopher's Critique (tags)
Because the declining middle classes are unable to see past individualism and economic self-interest, they stick with the fantasy that any loss of purchasing power is a temporary glitch awaiting systemic resolution – as if Capital were an eternal and inexhaustible mode of wealth creation.
The indispensable opponent (tags)
The West's hostility towards China has increased since China's engine began to stutter. At the same time, the US government is pumping massive amounts of money into the economy and has thus been able to prevent an impending recession for the time being, but is far from regaining its former role as a global engine of growth.
Cottage with a catastrophic view (tags)
According to various forecasts, between 300,000 and 1.9 million coastal properties in the USA will be affected by "regular flooding" in the coming decades. By 2100, the city center of Miami and large parts of Miami-Dade County are likely to be permanently below sea level - along with real estate currently worth 400 billion US dollars.
Too big to fail, too weak to lead (tags)
Through the World Bank and IMF, they were able to push through privatization and the dismantling of social benefits and trade union rights in the over-indebted countries of the South. They also pursued this policy domestically, while corporations and the upper income brackets were spoiled with tax gifts. There were also massive arms orders.
Housing is a human right (tags)
To guarantee the human right to housing, a fundamental change in policy would be required at all levels. At all levels - federal, state and local - the social housing provision should be enforced against private profit interests. The non-profit status of housing must be revived. Housing must not be a commodity, it must not be the object of speculation and profit interests.
Mking the Kingdom of God Present (tags)
Freedom does not come from the market. Rather, in socialist terms, we need a market to which we are free. What we have, on the other hand, is a market that dictates everything. Our Mrs. Merkel says that democracy must conform to the market. What we have developed in our work in Costa Rica runs exactly the opposite way: the market must conform to democracy.
Authoritarian Capitalism (tags)
The banks and auto corporations were bailed out and rescued and the ensuing public debt was invoked in order to cut public expenditures on health care, education, pensions, and public salaries. Furthermore, a new race to the bottom has started.
Homelessness: Structural Violence in a Rich Country (tags)
People who have no housing and become homeless in such a rich country are handed over to "structural violence." Nowhere does the capitalist economic system fail so blatantly as in the supply of living space since apartments in Germany are treated like sausages.
The pace of business rationalization has accelerated to such an extent that in the core sectors of world market production, fewer and fewer workers are needed despite growing output of goods. Thus, the development of productive power has reached a point at which it makes absolutely more labor superfluous in each period.
Nord Stream as a reason for war (tags)
Only the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines ultimately cleared the way for the EU, and Germany in particular, to become long-term buyers of U.S. natural gas surpluses and to keep the price at a profitable level for U.S. fracked gas producers, even in the long term.
Why the US Bank Crisis is Not Over (tags)
There must always be a financial crash at some point. That is because interest-bearing debt grows exponentially, but the economy follows an S-curve and then turns down. And when the economy turns down... the magnitude of financial claims on the economy exceeds the ability to pay.
Pause for Thought: Money without Value in a Rapidly Disintegrating World (tags)
The tanking economy is the cause of these “misfortunes”. What we are sold as external threats is in fact the ideological projection of the internal limit of capitalist modernity. In systemic terms, emergency addiction keeps the comatose body of capitalism artificially alive
Battle for Social Democracy and Unfettered Capitalism (tags)
Two opposing schools of thought face each other at the sickbed: neoliberalism and social democracy. Didn't the death-bells of neoliberals ring in the course of the financial market crisis? Were not neoliberals unmasked who first caused the whole mess with their deregulation?
Critique of religion and market religion and Post-colonialism (tags)
Critique of religion as critique of fetishism is a critique of earthly gods, which are false gods. "Man is the highest being for man." Marx develops it further in other words and formulates his idea of the liberation of man in the Communist Manifesto.
Who can afford capitalism anymore? and Why are prices rising? (tags)
When the state now debates the need to create relief packages for employees, pensioners, unemployment benefit recipients, trainees and families, this is official confirmation that the result of wage labor is also poverty. The majority of citizens find themselves in a dual role...
Energy crisis: market intervention by policymakers is necessary (tags)
We are in the middle of a multiple energy crisis. The supply of energy is in danger, and prices will continue to rise. This is not only a problem for private households and companies. There is a danger that persistently high inflation will become entrenched. Then severe economic depression
Hysterical Populism and the Appetite of Leviathan (tags)
The relationship between economy and social order has been turned upside down: economy is no longer a function of an overarching culture, but conversely, "human society has sunk to being an accessory of the economic system" (Karl Polanyi). RK was founder of Exit & Krisis blogs.
Tax evasion and avoidance and Democracy at a tipping point (tags)
The biggest losses from tax evasion and avoidance are caused by multinational corporations, followed by wealthy individuals. Sums in the triple-digit billions up to one trillion. Euros are evaded annually in the EU. 21-32 trillion US dollars are undeclared via tax havens
*Tourists Being Targeted in Fiji, by Police, for Fines, Prosecution, & "Likely" also Exto (tags)
**Crazy Brigadier Quiliho goes Crazy Again!** **You’d be Crazier than Crazy Quiliho to Visit Fiji While the Police are Targeting "Tourists"**
The price explosion of wheat (tags)
Many people in this country develop the willingness to explicitly freeze for an ideal. Whether for freedom of whatever kind or for the climate. Already now one could marvel at signs on "peace demos", on which was written: "Better freeze, than gas from Putin!"
Interview on The Black Book of Capitalism (tags)
The book is: 1) a history of the three great industrial revolutions (introduction of the manufacturing system with the steam engine at the beginning of the 19th century, Fordist “self-mobilization” with the assembly line and the rationalization and the microelectronic revolution.
Bidenomics, One Year Later (tags)
The Center for American Progress takes a different approach, examining the successes of President Biden’s bold economic policies and calling for the continuation and expansion of those policies in the years ahead by making permanent expansions to the safety net.
A good future beyond the market and the state (tags)
In the midst of a blindly globalized society, we are atomized workers and consumers divided by competition, who are in contact with each other primarily through monetary and labor relations and only exceptionally and temporarily represent common interests. We become increasingly helpless...
How is Corona changing the world of work? (tags)
What was born out of necessity is to become the new standard: The pandemic-related expansion of mobile work is leading to considerations to change the organization of work, to change business areas online. In addition to savings in real estate and travel costs, companies also expect this to increase flexibility.
Promoting Sustainable Economics (tags)
The protagonists of neoliberal globalization seek to fight the devastations – for which they bear responsibility – by the same means that cause the devastations. Now is the time to seize the opportunity and build up economic policy pressure to enforce the development of an economic order that is sustainably oriented...
The Endgame of Capitalism (tags)
I develop a positive vision for a system change in part four. Before that, however, the question is raised how the corporations envision the system change: Their way of wanting to preserve their power after the inevitable collapse of the Ponzi-scheme of financial capitalism is a transition from free-market capitalism to feudalism.
Put Facebook & Co. in its place! (tags)
There has been growing concern in civil society and among policymakers that these practices conflict with users' right to privacy, enable manipulation and disinformation campaigns, and ultimately undermine the principle of a public sphere subject to democratic rules.
Capitalist crisis policy is ultimately in a crisis trap... The central banks' billion-dollar "quantitative easing" may have prevented the collapse of the world financial system in 2020, but it is only a postponement of the crisis.
On the "end of the climate crisis" (tags)
"Global warming, environmental degradation, and growing inequality are primarily the consequences of an unleashed economic mode that is focused on profit and quarterly numbers, but not on the well-being of people and nature."
Is China in danger of collapse? and Anti-economics and anti-politics (tags)
In the process of modernization, the relationship between market and state can be boiled down to the formula of a general law: the more market, the more state... The bloated market and the bloated state can only live or die together.
Toward a new economic policy paradigm (tags)
Over the years, the institutionally enshrined budget discipline has created a considerable investment backlog. Important investments in infrastructure, education and climate protection have not taken place.
Is Green Growth the Solution? (tags)
Just as every millimeter of social progress must be fought for against capital interests, the protection of nature and climate must also be won against the rulers. In these struggles lies the future of the planet.
Renaissance of the Social Market Economy (tags)
A social market economy is based on two political pillars: (1) taming the market dynamics via regulation and (2) mitigating its consequences in distribution policy. (3) The development and care of an economic culture of moderation and fairness in dealing with one another forms the third, the cultural pillar of taming and civilizing
The Neoliberal Indoctrination (tags)
Homo oeconomicus fades away as an economic theory along with market fundamentalism and market radicalism. Market failure and state violence epitomized by Enron's expansive accounting method and the aggressive wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria should be lessons.
The Endgame of Capitalism: Introduction (tags)
This economic system is permanently out of joint. Interest rates have been virtually zero for over a decade, despite the fact that many consider interest a considered a cornerstone of the capitalist system. The central banks are pumping money into the system on an unprecedented scale, but this is not resulting in inflation.
For a democratic polarization (tags)
The new world economic crisis has shown yet again that one can't leave it to the market to provide for a strong economy. In any case, it is a truism that a community with a certain quality of life depends to a great extent on resources that the market does not produce.
With a plan against the climate crisis (tags)
Quality and enjoyment would be the new maxims, and the true wealth would be free time. Admittedly, a change in consciousness would remain necessary, and many a convenience in lifestyle would have to be abandoned in favor of the ecosystem. However, the standard of living could be raised significantly through free time.
Beyond market and state (tags)
The dominant, financial market-oriented factions of capital are using the crisis to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else by attempting to appropriate even the wealth of society that is yet to be generated in the medium term by indebting the state.
The new school and Farewell to capitalism (tags)
"You can never solve problems with the same way of thinking that created them." That is why copyright reform, patent and property law, and many other regulations of the material "goods economy" that have grown up in the industrial age are not suitable for meeting the challenges
How the financial market redistributes from poor to rich (tags)
"Some business models, such as high-frequency trading, where huge blocks of shares are shuffled back and forth every millisecond, have no added value for society, but bring profits to a few financial professionals at the expense of everyone else."
Housing and Public Employment (tags)
How does the interplay of supply and demand affect the housing market? What influence does the financial market have on housing prices? What happens when tenant protection in tenancy law is relaxed and the market is given more leeway?
Capitalism is not natural (tags)
Political programs in the 20th century, then, were meant to create equality, not merely alleviate poverty. How we live collectively, what we value as a society, and how we want to conceive of ourselves - all these questions were politicized by these programs...
We are all social democrats now. Almost all of us (tags)
A few weeks ago, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said rich households should pay higher taxes. Inequality in income and wealth had reached proportions that threatened social peace. The head of the IMF, Alfred Kammer, called on the German government, as in previous years, to increase its investments.
Disempowering the US cartels (tags)
Technology corporations mostly form oligopolies, if not monopolies. U.S. President Joe Biden is signaling that his administration wants to crack down on monopolies... Klobuchar's bill aims to boost antitrust action in many ways: it seeks to increase funding for the FTC and the Justice Department's Antitrust Division.
Why Karl Polanyi Still Matters (tags)
In The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi explains why the economy must be embedded in society and society must not be embedded in the economy. He describes land, labor and money as "fictitious commodities" since they cannot be multiplied and created on the market.
Post-democratic Capitalism (tags)
The fact that money can buy political influence is a central problem for democracy. All citizens are equal in terms of their voting rights, but not in terms of their wealth - this is one of the great unsolved challenges of liberal systems of government.
Corona vaccines-nothing would work without public funding (tags)
"The Covid 19 crisis is a perfect test of whether a more public health approach to innovation and production will prevail in the years ahead. Although recent vaccine news has raised hopes, it has also exposed the broken business model of the pharmaceutical industry and cast doubt on the prospects of getting a vaccine to people..."
The market is more powerful than politics (tags)
Every year more social housing units fall out of rent control than new ones are built. As a result, the stock of apartments with legally fixed maximum prices is continually shrinking. The negative effects that were feared with the introduction of the Berlin rent cap have largely failed to materialize.
Resistance against Agropoly (tags)
Food sovereignty remains the most important political program of the strongest international movement to date for a transformation of the food system: away from the agropoly of a few corporations. Tina Goethe is a sociologist and responsible for the area of the right to food at the Swiss organization Bread for All.
Strengthening the welfare state (tags)
Trump's smear campaigns, scapegoating, fear mongering, $8-trillion tax heists, corporate welfare, attacking the poor, minorities, seniors, disabled, children and students have left democracy in intensive care. Helicopter money, a Marshall Plan for journalism and ending wars could revive the debate culture.
Climate crisis and social transformation in times of corona (tags)
Companies go bankrupt, workers are laid off, and because the sources of income dry up, millions of people can no longer even buy the most basic necessities... What counts is whether the things produced can be sold on the market and make a profit.
From senseless working to senseless learning (tags)
Up to the threshold of modern times, work - as the traditional term for externally determined action(!) - had been perceived from the perspective of the biblically mediated, divine curse. It was regarded as a bitter necessity imposed on people.
Reduced working hours as a socio-economic investment (tags)
In this Austrian article, reduced working hours is seen as a socio-economic investment, not as a cost-trap. In a 1909 study by Sidney Chapman, shorter working hours leads to higher productivity and greater output. More time sovereignty and better health of workers would be long-term gains.
Is Trump failing in the fight against the pandemic and the shattered economy? (tags)
The state of the economy is rightly considered the most important factor influencing the re-election or de-election of an American president. Voters* tend to blame the leader in the Oval Office for their personal situation in the labor market and the economic situation in general.
Against the neoliberal denunciation of the welfare state (tags)
No economist is so misunderstood and misinterpreted as Adam Smith. Many consider him to be an advocate of the "free market" and narrow-minded egoism. What a mistake! Smith saw an important and strong role for the state.
Job guarantee for COVID-pandemic victims (tags)
A job guarantee for the long-term unemployed is needed. A sufficient number of jobs must be created. This is where politics is needed. The quality and range of public services can be improved. Long-term unemployment is a market failure.People who want to work cannot find a job.
Europe needs an effective guarantee of youth solidarity (tags)
The Youth Guarantee could create an entry-level job market in the public or non-profit sector - in other words, jobs that serve the common good. It is the austerity policy in the wake of the financial and economic crisis that has delayed the socio- and ecological transformation.
When Wealth Destroys Wealth: Inverse Capitalism and its Limits (tags)
Ever-increasing real estate prices was an illusion. The boom that the US stock markets have experienced in recent years deserves the name fracking boom. Fictitious capital put the US economy back on the growth track.
Capitalism, Coronavirus and the Road to Extinction (tags)
The only way to ‘re-embed’ our economies and save our lives from ecological collapse is by intervening in the very heart of the beast: land and human beings need to be taken out of the market. The beast is not tameable; it needs to be killed.
Financial Markets and National Socialism (tags)
Joseph Goebbels was appointed "Reich Minister for National Enlightenment and Propaganda "7 on March 15, 1933.: "The people should begin to think and react in a unified way. [...]" They should stand behind the actions of the government with full sympathy and support.
From the irrationalism of the market to the irrationalism of life in neoliberalism (tags)
Reason is not allowed to question the market but accepts it as a neutral and objective authority. The market takes the place of reason on a collective, social level. By definition, compulsion does not come from the market.
We cannot repay the Corona debts (tags)
Now there are exactly two ways to revive the economy. The first and best option is to push back the neo-liberal agenda, strengthen the trade unions...If we do not succeed in pushing companies back into the role of debtors, the economy cannot function w/o new state debts.
The car industry and the climate crisis (tags)
The car companies should now be converted into providers of mobility needs based on socio-ecological sustainability. Reduction of working hours-short full time of an average of 30 hours/4 days per week for all-part of the radical change for human survival amid plutocratic economics.
"We do not live in capitalism" (tags)
After the transition to Atlantic turbo-capitgalism, little can be recognized from the earlier times of the initiatives of the social market economy. In this situation, the counter-factual and fact-immune creed of all conservatives is enmeshed in a deep unconsciousness about the world.
On the Power of Money: Three by Eugen Drewermann (tags)
Only faith (as in a religion), the "invisible hand," the "law" of the "free" market can judge everything. State interventions can only be annoying. The market itself is allegedly "social". Everyone acts according to his advantage. The system is not social but criminal and unjust.
Hayek and the Social Question (tags)
Hayek, author of Road to Serfdom, said the market was self-healing and market outcomes were just outcomes. In his book "Submission is Freedom," Schreiner explains how public investments and market corrections are vital.
Less is more and Tightening the rules for the unemployed (tags)
Gainful employment is just one form of work alongside others such as care work or voluntary work. Here I would like to endorse the model of the 30-hour week... There is a need to expand investment-based active labor market policy.
Good Housing for All and Rent Madness (tags)
Apartment rents have increased faster thant he incomes of wage earners. Real estate decays to an object of speculation. Capital seeks lucrative investments. Hectic activity and bustle replaces inactivity and idleness since the protests of renters cannot be ignored any more.
A Social Change is Overdue (tags)
Social rental housing construction which has been increasingly restricted since the 1980s must be resumed on a grand scale and rapidly promoted to offer low-income earners, single parents and large families a place to stay.
How Misguided Financial Policy Strengthens the Right-Wing (tags)
Capitalism has shown how democratic processes can be easily evaded. The Chicago boys carried out their radical reform program that was known as shock therapy. This included dismantling social state structures, opening the market to foreign investors and shattering unions
The Social State in the Age of Global Capitalism (tags)
Welcome to techno-corporate feudalism-where the richest three Americans have more wealth than 160 million, where the wealthiest 86 have more wealth than 3.6 billion, where the foul-mouthed cancelled free school lunches for 1 million and where market distortions rule.
From Punitive Tariffs and Trade Conflicts to Economic War (tags)
Trump's punitive attacks on several trading partners, above all China, are changing suddenly into a destruction of the multilateral structures of the world market. With "America first," the president wants to restore the past hegemony. The wrecking ball is not the only model!
The Gigantic Chasm Between Democratic Rhetoric and Capitalist Reality (tags)
When we lose the idea of community and solidarity, we lose our capacity for collective action.
Fighting the Causes of Flight (tags)
The refugee debate is back but only the symptoms are in the spotlight. Refugees are fought instead of the causes of flight. The political failure is as dreadful as the forgetfulness of the media and politics. More than 70 million persons are fleeing from war, persecution and conflicts.
Karl Polanyi on Unfettered Capitalism (tags)
Karl Polanyi condemned profit greed and deregulated markets. Today's capitalism critics are his heirs and don't know it. An unfettered capitalism is responsible for the world coming out of joint. "Finance capital was put in the driver's seat."
Utopia, Technology and Struggle. Ways out of the Crisis of Social Democracy (tags)
The big question is still open. Must an emancipatory project aim at a changed distribution of incomes or is hedging capitalism through regulation and redistribution enough? In other words, is shifting to an eco-Keynesian path sufficient to create equal life chances?
From Enlightenment to Counter-Enlightenment (tags)
Brilliant minds elevated "the market" into a "higher being" of the post-modern age to which we must submit. The primacy of the market replaced the primacy of politics. Dr. Schulmeister is an economic researcher in Vienna whose latest book is "The Road to Prosperity" (2019).
What is a Crisis? A Retrospect on the 2008 Economic and Financial Crisis (tags)
The economic guild interprets crisis through an ideological lens. The financial crisis is redefined as a state debt crisis. Illuminating the systemic causes of crisis or discussing the crisis proclivity of the capitalist system is not possible anymore.
Housing Financialization, 66 pp (tags)
Ten Years After the Financial Crash (tags)
US economic statistics are dubious since financial markets are based on financial products and money out of nothing. Tax havens, micro-second betting, stock buybacks and corruption through lobbying are market-distorting and cause revenue shortfalls.
Right-wing Populism: Can More Madness Cure the Madness? (tags)
Neoliberal policy was always mad. But an even greater madness now appears with rightwing populism. Politics is mad because it writes off large parts of the population. Economic Darwinism has nested and established itself as market ideology in the brains of people.
Affordable Rents? A State of Emergency Intensifies (tags)
Rents explode in cities after massive sales of public housing to brutal investors. In 1987, there were 5.5 million social apartments in Germany. Today, there are 1.5 million. Land speculation was prevented in Vienna. The Vienna Housing Fund buys up possible development land.
Addendum: Benjamin Tucker American Mutualist: Tucker Did Not Advocate Voting in Businesses (tags)
This series is supposed to present the ideas of Tucker in an accurate fashion. So this article will focus on how Tucker himself intended businesses to be operated.
Against the Rent Madness and For a Nonprofit Orientation! (tags)
The Alternative Housing Summit on Sept 21 in Berlin discussed alternatives to the market-based housing policy. Exploding rents and lack of affordable housing are the most burning social questions. More market is not the solution! Housing for People, not for Profits!
The Dictatorship of Corporations (tags)
Why do the majority of politicians so often make decisions against the public interest and in favor of industry? A new quality of lobbyism arose on account of the dramatically stronger market- and financial power of companies. I sound the alarm. The power relations in our society are shifting endangering democracy andthe market economy,
Promote Public Housing! (tags)
A basic principle of the market economy is that the market only reacts to solvent demand, not to needs. If a need is not reflected in a solvent demand, the market simply does not react. The supply side expansion of affordable housing is key, not subject promotion.
Pantarchy: Voluntary State and a New Catholic Church: Stephen Pearl Andrews (tags)
The Libertarian Socialism of Individualist Anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews.
Against Market Radicalism (tags)
Capitalism is not "the end of history" as the American Francis Fukuyama postulated in 1992. The system question is open! The economy should be re-embedded in society. What seems rational in microeconomics collides with the irrationality of maximum profits as en end-in-itself
Social Policy as Social Infrastructure (tags)
Work and income must be uncoupled. In Germany, thanks to higher productivity and information technology, 30% more was produced from 1970-2010 with 30% fewer workers. Demonizing China will not resuscitate the Rust Belt. Social policy is crucial.
Housing as Infrastructure (tags)
Housing as a human right is sometimes superseded by the right of speculation. Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (a Federal program), non-profit or cooperative housing and SROs (single room occupancy) are solutions to the housing crisis.
The Beam in the White House (tags)
Iran is the "greatest supporter of terror," declared president Donald Trump. With that, he justified his peace-endangering cancellation of the nuclear agreement with Iran. Reducing foreign policy to scapegoating is Hitlerian.
Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism - A Symbiotic Pair (tags)
Rightwing populist parties mix the conventional rightwing authoritarian political style with neoliberal economic ideas emphasizing the free unregulated market and the sleek but strong state. For Hayek, unions allegedly threaten democracy and force a just redistribution policy.
Neoliberalism or New Freedom for Corporations (tags)
"The interests of merchants always differ from public interests. As a rule, they are interested in deceiving and misusing the general public" (Adam Smith). Keynes established that the market alone cannot ensure the prosperity of everyone.
Work and Digitalization and A Corpse Governs Society (tags)
On the 2018 Day of Labor, many were worried. No one can deny digitalization affects work. Artificial intelligence greatly changes professions and whole branches. Well-paid jobs become scarcer. Rebuilding the social state seems necessary. Capitalism's blind flight through history is ending.
The Market is a Universal Totalitarian Religion (tags)
The market accepts and rejects like a Calvinist God. The market only promises itself. Its highest good is the economic boom. The market theocracy makes this side into something otherworldly. The cult of money and the commodity eclipses all its predecessors.
Unemployment and New Ways (tags)
The rise of unemployment worldwide has reached unparalleled dimensions. In 1999, 700 million were affected. The neoliberal economic theory promotes the prosperity of the rich, not society as a whole. Profit maximization is often the only goal. Reducing working hours is vital.
Partial Analysis of Levi's Letting Go of Tens of Thousands of Diverse Workers in 1990's MX (tags)
Levi's is a key part of the US market and employment market. Now those jeans are made on the Mexican side of the US Mexican border.
The systemic reasons for the crisis are more important than a sudden fall in prices. Stocks are held on average 22 seconds, not 6 months or ten years. Real-capitalism is a plus-sum game. Financial capitalism is a zero-sum game.
Housing is not just another commodity (tags)
Like food, clothing, health, and education, housing is an elementary need. On'e apartment is a place of retreat of the private person, a protective- and creative space of inviolable identity, Long-term low-interest housing tax credits & SROs, are alternatives to indifference.
Adam Smith as Philanthropist (tags)
The market can only fulfill its technical function when its rules and mechanisms are politically fixed and governmentally monitored...Adam Smith's theory has nothing to do with neoliberals and market radicals who preach the sleek state, low taxes for businesses and low wages.
Liberalization of Public Service: A Democratic Achievement is Subjected to Competition (tags)
Public service guarantees and influences the living conditions of our society and has a proven tradition in Germany for over 100 years. Privatizations have mainly led to private oligopolies. Corporations evade their responsibilities and expect intact infrastructure.
Is Economic Speculation a Form of Structural Violence? (tags)
According to neoclassical economic theory, the financial markets return to equilibrium. Problems only occur because of state intervention. The roaring twenties led to an enormous stock euphoria. In 2018, companies inflate their stocks in a $70 billion stock buy back program.
The power of ideology is so great it easily creates a distorted perception of facts. Where money is spent is crucial, not the size of the public sector. The Internet, the touch screen, semi-conductors and the GPS were developed with state risk capital. Tax havens cause revenue shortfalls.
Benjamin Tucker American Mutualist: Mutual Banking Part 3 and Final Conclusion Part 4 (tags)
"The abolition of compulsory taxation would mean the abolition of the state as well, Tucker asserted, and the form of society succeeding it would be on the line of a voluntary defensive institution... There were two methods of government...The other was the anarchist method of 'leadership', inducing the individual to the 'goal of an ideal civilization' through persuasion and 'attraction'...Two aims of anarchist activity, the abolition of compulsory taxation and the abolition of legally-protected money and land monopolies, form the main theme of his critical writing..."
Survival instead of Profit (tags)
Capital is a powerful machine of commodification. Since the capitalist market economy became autonomous and "separated" from society, capital has only functioned according to its own laws, the impersonal laws of profit and accumulation.
The Welfare State in Crisis (tags)
Since 2008, crisis was the defining political theme. "No one should be fooled about the majority will of the population regarding taming wiled finance capitalism. The system could only be bailed out from collapse with taxpayer guarantees." (Habermas 2010).
Benjamin Tucker: American Mutualist Part 1 (tags)
In an Individualist Mutualist market economy of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, or Stephen Pearl Andrews employers can indeed pay themselves more money than their employees for equal time worked however even though they can pay themselves more money than their employees for equal time worked they are still Mutualists and not Capitalists. Why is this?
Fuel Bandits Stealing Fuels wiyj Stolen Credit Card Numbers Reselling on Black Market (tags)
Criminals with access to stolen data cards are taking large amounts of gasoline into yanks on picku[ trucks and then reselling the black market fuel off site according to sources in Tallahassee
The President as Businessman (tags)
Trump's gigantic tax cuts will only benefit the rich. Revenue losses of six trillion dollars are expected for the first decade after the Trumpian tax cuts start. Trump sells the illusion that the old order can be restored.
Memorandum 2017: Alternatives for a Solidarity Europe: Instead of "Germany First" (tags)
The European Union is at a crossroads. The reason lies in the neoliberal redistribution policy favoring capital incomes over many years. "Mass unemployment intensified and was not ended in Europe. Millions of those with work are in precarious working conditions."
Capitalism in the Faith Crisis (tags)
Trust in the "invisible hand" is a religious exercise ensuring a rule over people that is destructive and fatal. Christians and Marxists wage a common struggle against the spirit, logic, and praxis of the false money-god and its servants.
Competition Ideology and Power Reality (tags)
Competition cannot be an end-in-itself. Uncontrolled private power leads to misuse. Uncontrolled competition increasingly destroys itself through concentration and centralization processes. Bastard Keynesianism helps the banks. People diverted from real cause of crises
For an Unconditional Basic Income (tags)
The basic income corrects the distribution effects of the labor market. It takes something from the higher paid to give to those who earn little or nothing. A leftist fights for a just social system. Robots and artificial intelligence replace human labor.
Unemployment and Inequality (tags)
"The past will devour the future" if there is no radical change of direction in economic development. That is Thomas Piketty's prediction. Piketty sees the solution in a global capital tax or wealth tax.
Benjamin Tucker: Individualist Libertarian Market Socialist (Updated 2017) (tags)
American Individualist Libertarianism is a form of market socialism with self-employed individuals, co-operative businesses, and socialist employers. 1. (If your interested, please see: Benjamin Tucker’s State Socialism and Anarchism: Where they Agree and where they Differ) It differs from Mutualist market socialism because mutualist market socialism also has an agro-industrial federation and a regulated market (regulated market by the community or federation) to ensure equality of opportunity. 2. (If your interested, please see: Proudhon’s Principle of Federation)
Our Beautiful New Clothes (tags)
Neoliberalism seems to create "clothes no one can see" when it mystifies the market and competition and uses the austerity-model, the location-model and the adjustment-imperative or extortion to turn economics into nature.
Rethinking Economic Policy! (tags)
The economic crisis calls for social-democratic answers. The fading mass purchasing power (in Germany) is due to the increasing inequality of income and wealth. Deregulation promotes social problems like precariousness and greater income inequality.
A society of social descent, precariouisness and polarization has emerged out of the society of ascent and social integration. The modern age continues developing but backward. The social state, is a de-commodifying institution since it socializes risks.
The ABCs of Meaningless Economic Phrases (tags)
The most common myths start from the tax state that burdens the economy, the housework ordered by the state (save,save,save) to the Schwabian housewife prescribing the austerity creed. Politics must tend to every need of capital as a scared doe and therefore lower taxes.
The Consequences of a Trump Shock (tags)
Now is a good time to ask whether the global economy is in good enough shape to withstand another major negative shock. The answer, unfortunately, is that growth and employment around the world look fragile. A big adverse surprise – like the election of Donald Trump in the US – would likely cause the stock market to crash...
US mergers set new record in October (tags)
With Qualcomm’s announcement Thursday of a $39 billion deal to acquire NXP Semiconductors NV, October has set a new monthly record for US mergers and acquisitions.
Neoliberal Crisis Policy has Failed (tags)
The term "invisible hand of the market" goes back to Adam Smith. This assumes all economic activity promotes the common good. Neoliberalism's survival is surprising because its theoretical assumptions are dubious. People cling to neoliberal prescriptions against reality.
Growth Criticism and Reduced Working Hours (tags)
Today's growth critics speak of the necessity of a post-growth society, a "renunciation society" or at least of a "green" capitalist model... A political transformation process is necessary. The economist John Maynard Keynes dreamt of a time when his grandchildren would only have 15hr wk.
The Crises of Today's Economy (tags)
The market is not a subject but an instrument. Nevertheless "the primacy of the market" replaced "the primacy of politics." Neoliberalism actually serves the interests of finance capital. A doctor whose therapy causes sicknesses cannot understand this. Our elites are in great distress.
The Social State Benefits All of Us (tags)
The social state can on ly fulfill expectations when financed on a broad and just basis. The social state must be adjusted to do justice to the pressing challenges.."The social state is the greatest cultural achievement in the 20th century"
The Totalitarianism of the Market (tags)
Neoliberalism demands reeducation for its implementation like command socialism. The neoliberal view of the person is exemplified by the figure of the Homo Oeconomicus and is the antipole of the socialist person. All persons are entrepreneurs of themseves.
Social Inequality in the Descent Society (tags)
The elevator effect is not true any more. This changed from the 1990s. People no longer move up together. A society of descent, precariousness and polarization has come ou9t of the society of social ascent. Ascents and descents have a collective and an individual dimension.
Non-Profits versus Profit Maximization (tags)
Cooperation and competition strengthen each other. Creating a non-profit or cooperative housing sector is the only remedy to gentrification and commodification as rental prices go through the roof. Housing often mutates from a human and social necessity to a speculative asset.
Renters Pay the Bill for Market Failure and State Failure (tags)
The extensive privatizations of the last 15 years have contributed to a market radicalization. Privatization was the door opener for the growing influence of financial market logic in housing. Developing a cooperative or nonprofit sector is a necessary and feasible alternative.
Good work from the illegal drug trade (tags)
Hard work is never wasted.
Argentina Returns to Bond Market after Debt Settlement (tags)
Argentina returns to the bond market after 15 years with access to limited international financing.
The Financial Crisis in the Light of the Social Market Economy (tags)
In 2007 and 2008 the US housing market almost completely collapsed. The crisis was brought about by a combination of state- and market failures. Extensive deregulation and violation of the liability principle were jointly responsible.
How Much State Does the Social Market Economy Need? (tags)
The use of property is only legitimate within the limits of the public interest. Whoever takes a risk must bear it and be liable for the losses. The state has the political task of laying down effective rules for risk assessment, liability and providing transparency. Distributive battles intensify.
Capitalism as a Religion (tags)
"Capital is the only god that the whole world knows, sees, touches, smells, tastes and excites all our senses. It is the only god that doesn't encounter any atheists" (Paul Lafargue's little known genial satire "Religion of Capital" from 1887.
Neoliberal Indoctrination (tags)
Neoliberalism tells the poor and weak that they are responsible for their misery. The true extent of social poverty barely reaches the public. A re-feudalization bomb rages and investors seek privatizing the public education system. People are atomized. Fragmentation is intentional.
Free trade agreements serve geo-political goals. They are the "weapons," so to speak, in the global economic war. Critical persons see through this and rebel against "corporate rule" and against the dissolution of the primacy of politics by the primacy of the economy.
Janet Yellen's Storytime (tags)
The US economy is not picking up speed, wages are not rising and the situation on the labor market has not improved... The world economy did not get going again after the greatest wealth redistribution in the history of humanity.
Corporatization of the Tenant Movement (tags)
MakeRoom.org is pushed by a nonprofit housing corporation, Enterprise Community Partners.
Neoliberalism as a movement and ideology is a world of ideas where egoism and personal responsibiilty are celebrated, the social is faded out and no place exists for solidarity and social balance. Everyone is the creator of his own happiness here.
Criticism of Market Theory and Market Ideology (tags)
Market fundamentalists cling to the myths of the self-healing market and corporate beneficence..The real market economy functions very differently than the fantastic notions of the theoretical market economy. Maximum individual profit does not agree with social welfare.
Neoliberalism. Submission as Freedom (tags)
The society in which we live is increasingly unfree in all areas and yet successfully passes off this growing unfreedom as freedom.
Casino Capitalism and Profit Maximization (tags)
In the 1960s the average holding time for stocks was 10 years. Now the holding time is not 9 months but 22 seconds. Like shareholder value, profit maximization leads to exploding inequality and the waste of resources. States are weakened by tax cuts.
Economic Crises as Sicknesses and Catastrophes (tags)
The 2008 financial crisis is often wrongly described as a "state debt crisis" where cause and effect are inverted and economists and the market are released from responsibility. Sickness and catastrophe metaphors dominate discussion
Reviews: Submission as Freedom. Life in Neoliberalism (tags)
The challenge of neoliberalism took an offensive form in the global North with the victories of Reagan and Thatcher. No coup and no dictatorship were needed to gain mass support for carrying out the political ideological hegemony Stagnation, unemployment and futurelessness
Energy (R)evolution by Greenpeace, 364 pp (tags)
This is the year when the fight against climate change could take a dramatic turn. The conference in Paris in December presents political and business leaders with the opportunity to take the critical decisions needed if we are to keep average temperature rises to no more than 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius.
Neoliberalism Blames Individuals for Inequality (tags)
In neoliberal theories, social justice is not a meaningful category and social inequality is a necessary result of market processes. Performance justice is a necessary illusion. Responsibility for poverty and misery is often shifted to individuals with the worst genes.
Wall Street Rally: Hold the Cheers (tags)
Wall Street
Differing Views on China (tags)
China
Monied Interests Run America (tags)
Fed
Misguided Calls for More QE (tags)
QE
markets
markets
Deepening Greek Depression (tags)
Greece
Overdue farewell to dogma (tags)
Mainstream economics did not see the crisis coming – and so far it has not done much to overcome it. However, at least in the USA, a rethink has started.
Hypocritical and Hippocratic Economic Policy in Europe (tags)
The crisis is multilayered-a bank crisis, a crisis of wealth distribution and a misallocation of capital between long-term real investments and virtual financial investments.. The frugal Schwabian housewife is not a suitable model.
Growth, Prosperity and Quality of Life (tags)
"Our understanding of a modern economic and social system is strongly influenced by the phase between 1950 and 1975 when the social market economy was created and democracy was re-stabilized. Since then conditions have changed. New answers are necessary."
Homo Economicus and Dethronement of the Profit Principle (tags)
Max Frisch summarized economism int he formula: "what brings profit is rational." Economism is a business ethics conception, a justification theory for profit maximization that declares ethics superfluous. Ultimately this is an "ethic" without morality.
Profit-Making is Different Than Profit-Maximizing (tags)
Discussions of jobs and the economy are often marked by trivialization, distortion, unreality and wishful thinking, The neoliberal model promotes profits, not investments and rationalization and digitalization lead to mass unemployment. System analysis and market failure are often glossed over
In San Francisco, "Dispatches Against Displacement" -- a review (tags)
A work by a prominent San Francisco housing activist in a context of ongoing defeat for San Francisco renters...
New Geo;olitical/Financial Bombshells (tags)
geopolitics
Oil Prices: What Goes Around Comes Around (tags)
oil
Thomas Piketty and the Growing Inequality in Capitalism (tags)
"When capital profit is permanently higher than the growth rate for production and income which was the case up to the 19th century, capitalism automatically produces unacceptable and arbitrary inequalities that radically put in question the achievement principle..."
oil
Economics is Onesided and Reactionary (tags)
The homo oeconomicus cannot be our hope and is not desirable or future-friendly. The economic benefits to the capitalist entrepreneur are in contradiction to nature and to the person..We face completely oversized financial markets that have uncoupled from the real economy creating value.
San Francisco Day of Resistance March Occupies Market Street Once Again (tags)
As part of national Day of Resistance actions to protest police murders of people of color, marchers in San Francisco again occupied Market Street, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare.
For a Different Economics (tags)
Economists are criticized everywhere for their onesidedness, their focus on markets and their inability to deal with the burning problems... From neoclassical assumptions "more is better" or markets lead to efficient distribution, a perspective on the world results that sets efficiency over justice
Market Euphoria: The Mother of All Ponzi Schemes (tags)
markets
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.
PROTESTERS SHUT DOWN SAN FRANCISCO—AGAIN (tags)
For the 4th time since last Friday, people protesting killer cops who got away with murdering African American men shut down Market Street in downtown San Francisco.
Capitalism and Its Crisis Proclivity (tags)
The liberal economists of the 19th century claimed no crises could occur in capitalism since every supply creates its demand. On the other hand, Marx and Engels recognized early on the causes for crises in capitalism. The contradictions of the accumulation process lead to crises.
DOWNTOWN SF LARGELY SHUT DOWN ON BLACK FRIDAY NIGHT (tags)
Demonstrators demanding justice in the Michael Brown case, and an end to police murders of people of color across the nation, took to the streets of San Francisco Friday night, largely closing down Market Street.
Fed
The Myth of the Unexpected Crisis and Security (tags)
Many knew the rise of housing prices had to end some time or other... Four theses explain why the Fed was not active during the real estate boom: power of lobbyists, market ideology, trust in abstract academic models and inflation targeting.
S&P 500 Companies Spend 95% of Profits on Buybacks and Payouts (tags)
“Buybacks have become sort of the low-risk medicine in the C suite,” David Lafferty, the chief market strategist for Natixis Global Asset Management in Boston, said by phone on Oct. 2. His firm manages about $930 billion.
economy
Wind power is cheaper than coal, 70pp (tags)
A leaked report shows wind is the cheapest energy source in Europe, beating the presumably dirt-cheap coal and gas by a mile. Conventional wisdom holds that clean energy is more expensive than its fossil-fueled counterparts. competition.
TheInheritance of Inequality and Rethinking Growth (tags)
The economy exists for people, not vice versa. Economics should be pluralist, not a monolith. The economy should be embedded in society; society should not be embedded in the economy. Thomas Piketty and alternative economics emphasize inequality and mass unemployment.
International Monetary Fund Releases Plans to Stop Predatory Hedge Funds (tags)
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released new proposals for preventing predatory hedge funds and hold-out investors from blocking debt restructurings. The paper proposes a series of reforms to debt contracts, including strengthened collective action clauses and a modification of the pari passu clause that hold-out hedge funds used to sue Argentina.
Karl Polanyi - Still Actual 50 Years After His Death (tags)
Karl Polanyi was the author of "The Great Transformation." As in Polanyi's times, the absurdity of the market utopia must be made clear and confronted with social reality. Freedom and democracy are goals to defend, not markets.
TISA: Everything Will Be Marketed (tags)
A new agreement (TISA, Trade in Services Agreement) could privatize drinking water and health care through the back door. The resistance by many non-governmental organizations to the free trade agreement TTIP seems to pick up speed
TTIP: Threat to Democracy and the Constitutional State (tags)
The TTIP, the largest free trade zone comprising 800 million of the EU and the US is being secretly negotiated. Democracy and the constitutional state are threatened by 3-person arbitration courts where corporations can sue states and decisions are irreversible.
Self-Determination Means Market Determination (tags)
We face the continuing dissolution of traditional types, forms and rules, not a new type, a new form or a new rule... What was once called estrangement or objectification should appear as workers' own interest. .. Karl Polanyi spoke of a dis-embedded economy.
Both Germany and the US follow an economic policy without enlightenment. Slight economic stimulation will not solve problems of mass unemployment and corporate welfare. Tax evasion of corporations and tax cuts for the super-rich lead to suffering and a revenue crisis.
The "Great Transformation" of the 21st Century (tags)
An end of the Great Crisis is not insight at the beginning of the 21st century... The regime of finance-market driven accumulation has not brought forth any new formation of capitalism capable of development.
On World Economic Forum on East Asia 2014 (tags)
All Glitz, Nothing New to Solve Poverty and Inequality
Video: Why Capitalism is Killing the Planet, 27 min (tags)
Market anarchy as promoted by Adam Smith is different than prioritzing human needs. We must put the brakes on industrial growth. Equivalent jobs must be provided for closed industries.
The new indebtedness is a consequence of the crisis caused by the financial industry-and in no way owed to an excessive social state, demographic change and so forth.. There are many critics of this policy of mastering crisis by flooding the financial markets with fresh money.
An Event for All Musicians... and Bring Your Dad for FREE! (tags)
The swap meet for all things music is June 7, 2014.
Public Relations - Propaganda as an Economic Branch (tags)
"The borders between skillful PR, dull propaganda and lobbyism and corruption are flowing. The only possibility for protecting oneself is to be informed as extensively and independently as possible. This is easier said than done; information costs energy and time and assumes a basic education."
Casino Capitalism and Profit Maximization (tags)
“The state is consciously weakened to speed up the redistribution from bottom to top because that corresponds to the dogmas of the neoliberal ideology.” Our state was systematically weakened in the last 15 years by extensive tax cuts. I remember the lowering of the top income tax rate.
Obama is no FDR; We're No Mass Movement (tags)
Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It [3] Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.
TTIP: International Mega-corporations prevent social and ecological globalization (tags)
In the reality of international monopolist competition, narrow economic profit interests dominate to the disadvantage of broad prosperity gains. Protection of foreign mega-investors before indirect expropriation leads to a dispossession of nation state democracy.
Structural Weaknesses of Capitalism (tags)
Ignorance and ideology replaced facts and economic fairness under Reagan. Reagan appealed to the Laffer curve and argued tax cuts bring higher revenues, He confused investment and speculation, SROs and SUVs, militarism and security and decried government as the problem.
The Free Trade Agreement TTIP - New Version of the "Golden Age" (tags)
Lobbyists and think tanks of transnational corporations dreamt of a global market without limits. With enticing slogans like more economic growth or creation of new jobs, the population should accept the trade-and investment agreement.
The Tiger and His Trainers (tags)
How preposterous to think we can avert the next crisis without regulating or shriveling the financial sector, addressing income inequality and radically rethinking the meaning and assumptions of economics? Hans-Jurgen Urban likens the financial crisis to a tiger breaking from his cage and sees the welfare state and unions as trainers
Bracing for An Eventual Day of Reckoning (tags)
markets
Rigging Foreign Exchange Markets (tags)
markets
Book Review: "The Victory of Capital" (tags)
A society can only provide for the future by investing today in the production of tomorrow...What may be sensible economically for a private individual or individual business could be harmful for the national economy, particularly when the economy staggers.
Market Euphoria During Troubled Times (tags)
markets
Stop the TTIP - Elephants-Marriage! (tags)
TTIP Is old wine in new wineskins. Free trade- and investor-protection prescriptions from the 20th century according to the style of the WTO are not solutions for current challenges. A transatlantic partnership for social-ecological transformation would look very different.
Former Fed Official Apologizes (tags)
Fed
The economy should be a part of life, not a steamroller crushing self-determination and creativity. Crisis and chance are represented by the same Chinese letter. Finance capitalism makes the state the errand boy of the banks. State debt crisis is a crisis of the myth of deregulation.
Studying Economics Today is Like Brainwashing (tags)
The blind trust in efficient markets must be replaced and bankers given a new understanding. Profit making is different than profit maximization. Banks should be a public function, not a casino and the real economy and the environment not abandoned.
Criticism of Market Theory and Market Ideology (tags)
Market fundamentalists cling to the myths of the self-healing market and corporate beneficence..The real market economy functions very differently than the fantastic notions of the theoretical market economy. Maximum individual profit does not agree with social welfare.
Capitalism is not the Opposite of the State (tags)
Without the permanent intervention of the state, there would be no functioning capitalism. No economic branch depends on the state like the financial branch The deregulation was based on the trick of slandering state regulation as strait-jackets.that could strangle the economy.
Marijuana dispensaries love their govenrment monoplies (tags)
Marijuana dispensaries don't want marijuana legalized because it will cut into the profits from their government issued license to steal
Bernanke Stays the Course (tags)
Fed
The Thirteen Commandments of Neoliberalism (tags)
"Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the neoliberal project stood out from other strains of right-wing thought.... It was a moveable feast, and not a catechism fixed at the Council of Trent."
Ten Theses on the Crisis and its Solution (tags)
Problems don't disappear when they are ignored. Deregulation is a collective and political crisis. Language and democracy are endangered when arsonists are called firefighters, when private losses become public losses and crime in the suits is normalized as a business model.
Alternatives to Stagnation and Depression (tags)
Politics has fought the symptoms of the great crisis with banking- and economic packages while its systemic causes remain untouched… The hardest phase of the great crisis is ahead of us, not behind us. All sectors try to safeguard their position through spending cuts...
Fed
Labor Solidarity in Neoliberal Structural Change (tags)
The self-regulating market and the invisible hand were neoliberal theories of Frederick August von Hayek and Milton Friedman. Submission to the market was described as a natural law, as natural and self-evident as the rotation of the planets. Solidarity and unions were decried as barriers.
How Does Justice Come to the Economy? (tags)
"Politics prepared the ground for financial war" (tags)
The current economic crisis is a product of political mistakes, economic incompetence and criminal energy. Capitalism altogether has been a declaration of war. Politics bungled deregulation. The wisdom of the market never existed.
North Korean economy surrenders to foreign currency invasion (tags)
Chinese currency and U.S. dollars are being used more widely than ever in North Korea instead of the country's own money, a stark illustration of the extent to which the leadership under Kim Jong-un has lost control over the economy.
Are Japanese Bonds Signaling Trouble? (tags)
economy
Economic Ethics After the Crisis (tags)
Peter Ulrich is an emeritus professor of Economic Ethics at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland and author of Integrative Economic Ethics (2008). The economy should be embedded in society; society should not be embedded in the economy. The invisible hand is a myth to be unmasked.
The exodus from the casino capitalism producing ever faster and ever deeper crises cannot succeed without a broad and powerful democratic base. Parliamentary democracy is urged to finally take up the struggle around the primacy of politics
The State Should Rescue the Market Economy (tags)
A balance recession is more than a temporary slump of the economy. During a balance recession, private economic actors try to reduce their debts. The cheap money seeps out on the financial markets where it leads to new bubbles. The labor market does not function like other markets. Falling wages did not lead to more employment - as claimed for decades.
The Competition Ideology - the Greatest Evil of our Age (tags)
The competition ideology has been hammered into our heads for thirty years. Claiming better outcomes are generally realized when everything is poisoned by the competitive is pure ideology. Competition that exceeds the limits of its useful fields orders murderous measures.
Lodge Squat Provided Housing for Many in SF (tags)
After a two year run, The Lodge, a San Francisco squat started by Homes Not Jails, came to an end on March 15.
gold
Gold Drops Most in 30 Years (tags)
gold
banking
Those who do the work in the workplace should get the rewards (tags)
People are taught to have a 19th century, romantic notion of capitalism — a myriad of small enterprises competing in a free market. But a “free market” has never existed. Capitalism was built on brutal displays of force, and continues to be based on violence.
The ideology of the invisible hand of the market transforms all barbarism that is committed into human service.. The modern age is a doubled humanism..State terrorism presents itself as humanist realism, as the only true way of protecting life.
Why Don't Politicians Care about the Working Class? (tags)
The national debt is not the most important problem to address. Reversing the polarization of the labor market is much more important.
Tax Evasion and the Social State (tags)
The good social state invests in the social, in the education of children of the new lower classes... Taxes is the price we pay for a civilized society (Oliver Wendell Holmes).. The state share must increase in a developed society since ever greater demands are made on the state.
More Economic Straight Talk (tags)
class war
Spectacle of Irrationality (tags)
The bailout umbrella may establish a modern kind of feudal rule. The abdication of politics is one of the worst consequences of the financial crisis. Many politicians believe the market-radical nonsense that tax cuts finance themselves.
Newspeak Rules: How Neoliberalism Explains the World (tags)
Originally positive terms were devalued in the last decades (social state became "welfare dictatorship") Social dislocations are charged to the impacted themselves. The scandal of poverty mutates to the scandal of the poor themselves.
US Economy: Troubled or All's Well? (tags)
economy
Three Approaches to the Economic Crisis (tags)
Before 1980, wages, productivity, investments and production pushed one another and ensured general prosperity. After 1980 wages were dropped as a driving force of economic demand. Demand gaps were filled by consumer credits.
Ideology and Morality: What the Financial Crisis teaches about functioning of democracy (tags)
Moralizing is a form of argumentation found in many ideologies and academic systems of thought.. State interventions, we were taught, are bad because they run counter to the objective laws of the market.. The market is a social institution that we interpret in different ways..
Philippine campaign against high electricity rates snowballs (tags)
QUEZON CITY, Philippines – Thousands of electricity consumers from 55 cities and municipalities from 15 provinces and 10 regions are expected to stage a multi-form protest on November 22, dubbed as “National Day of Action against Epira (Electric Power Industry Reform Act), high electricity rates and privatization of the power industry.”
The Cup (R)money passes us (tags)
Remember the neoliberalism of Reaganomics was an ideology that is carried out from America in Germany-with all its consequences from deregulation of the banking sector and the labor market and the change from the market economy to market society up to rule of the financial sector.
Predicting Protracted Hard Times (tags)
class war
"The 15-hour working week predicted by Keynes may soon be within our grasp - but are we ready for freedom from toil?"
The formation of cooperatives doesn’t by itself eliminate competition (tags)
Wages — and thus the human beings who work for the wages — are commodities in capitalism, or any system in which distribution is monopolized or largely controlled by capitalist-style market relations.
Activist San Diego Shows “Genetic Roulette” Film (tags)
Activist San Diego screened “Genetic Roulette” Saturday, September 22 at the Joyce Beers Community Center. The film is directed by Jeffrey M. Smith and is based on his book of the same title, an exposé of the health risks of genetically modified organisms (GMO's) in the food supply. The showing was co-sponsored with the Yes on 37 campaign, which supports Proposition 37 on the November ballot, that would require genetically modified foods sold in California to be labeled as such.
Labor, Community Leaders Target Wal-Mart September 21 (tags)
Neighborhood activists and labor unions are organizing San Diego's biggest-ever anti-Wal-Mart demonstration Saturday, September 22 in the Golden Hill and Sherman Heights neighborhoods. Though the Wal-Mart in Sherman Heights hasn't even been built yet, it's already driving local businesses to close or cut back — and Wal-Mart has systematically refused to make any promises to the community to hire locally or mitigate the impacts of their store.
On the Solutions of Liberal Economists (tags)
The crisis has shaken economics to its foundations. The neoliberal mainstream has lost its support; economists alternate between self-doubt and arrogance. Once they believed in the rationality of economic actors and markets and the notion that financial management exists to serve the real economy.
Emergency Central Bank Intervention Coming? (tags)
class war
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.
Research as the Commons: Elinor Ostrom (tags)
Elinor Ostrom was well-known in 2009 when she was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for economics. In her analysis of governance of the commons, she put in question the past economic model that common goods can only be managed successfully by the market or the state.
New Economic Thinking - Turning Away from the Market Fetish (tags)
"New economic thinking" rejects the view of the person as "homo oeconomicus" reduced to maximization of individual benefits and offers a more comprehensive and realistic concept in which justice, norms, routines and emotions appear. "Homo recipocans" is an alternative.
On one hand, industrial capitalism made possible those reforms that are part of democracy. On the other hand, owners of capital fear too much democracy. In the 1980s, the head of Volvo said: Sweden needs Volvo but Volvo doesn't need Sweden.
Libor Scandal Reflects a Cesspool of Financial Fraud (tags)
fraud
Capitalism Can Be Cured (tags)
"The Occupy movement protests worldwide against the power of banks. The Indignados in Spain demonstrate against the system that gives them this crisis and high unemployment. No saying has been criticized more vigorously than Margaret Thatcher's `there is no alternative'."
Battles over Autonomy: The Commons Alternative (tags)
"The Commons is a way of reproducing society that opposes the market logic, puts in question private property, profit and competition and points to a future form of society beyond capitalism.. The Commons is not the solution but the change of perspectives that makes possible new solutions."
"A seeming consensus among economists can virtually force the shaping of political opinions.. For 30 years, neoliberalism marginalized all other schools, above all Keynesianism - and all of us hit a brick wall.."
The trojan horse of Ron Paul-style libertarianism (tags)
Sweeping away government means that the “market” will determine all outcomes. The “market” would mean concentrated corporate power would decide all outcomes, especially economic outcomes. That is what libertarians, Ron Paul included, would deliver if they actually were handed power.
The Loss of Respect of the Economic Elite is Enormous (tags)
The embedding of the market and the economy in the civil society is the challenge of the 21st century. Tax shelters or havens must be closed. The wealthiest 400 Americans have more wealth than 150 million people. Time for Plan B, alternative economics and reduced working hours!
Economist criticizes "pathological allegience" to economic models (tags)
The crisis was born when Maggie Thatcher and then Bill Clinton deregulated the financial markets. The explosive force that was detonated was incalculable. Economics gave support because it provides models.
Democracy, risk and liability are turned upside down when trillions bailout the banks and workers, pensioners and unemployed must pay the bill. We live from those who say No to corruption, to the state reduced to a trough or errand boy for the banks (Bill Moyers).
PHILIPPINES: How to Slay the Oil Price Monster (tags)
Leaders are elected in order to take decisive action to solve problems. What is demanded from a leader is–after a careful weighing of costs and benefits–action that cuts the Gordian Knot of a seemingly complex reality.
Renewable energy solution to oil price hikes (tags)
Manila, Philippines: Akbayan Party today urged the Aquino administration to push for renewable energy as a long term solution to oil price hikes. Akbayan lawmaker Walden Bello said that the spiraling cost of fuel should send alarm signals to the government and stress the urgency of pushing for renewable energy to address the country’s energy needs.
The market is a god that has failed (tags)
The economy should be a part of life, not a steamroller crushing creativity and self-determination. The economy should serve humankind; humanity should notg serve the economy. Once 90% of investment was productive; now 90% of investment is speculative.
The market is a god that has failed (tags)
If the “market” keeps deciding more people should be unemployed, more education should be wasted, more people should not have a decent retirement, more public services should be eliminated, more wages cut while prices rise, and more money should be concentrated in fewer hands at the expense of everybody else, then why should the “market” be a holy sacrament that cannot be questioned?
In the crisis, there was a paradigm based on the belief in unlimited economic growth on a planet with infinite resources. This paradigm identifies happiness with wealth, well-being with accumulation of material goods and progress with consumerism.
Medrciless Samaritans and 10 Causes of the Crisis (tags)
"There is no society. There are only individual men and women," said Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister, had a great share in the crisis in which Europe, capitalism and democracy find themselves.
plunder
The Autism of Economists (tags)
Analogous to a mechanical system, neoclassicists understood the economy as a perpetual cycle of production and consumption kept in balance by the price mechanism.
Economics' sharpest critics regard it as an auxiliary science of astrology, a sect that sings its same little song. Classical authors like John Kenneth Galbraith are finally rediscovered. Exactness is impossible. The coming generation should be protected from mono-cultural ideology
The Invisible Hand Doesn't Help Any More (tags)
Neoclassicism starts from the assumpti8ons that people always act rationally and market processes always lead to optimal results on account of the price mechanism. The market fails. Its view of the person as Homo oeconomicus must be replaced by the Homo cooperativus.
Wall Street Excess and Main Street Distress: the Apple Connection (tags)
Apple’s march to market supremacy has been accomplished at tremendous cost to both American and Chinese workers
From Protest Camp to General Strike (tags)
Something crucial happened in the US in 2011. The strengthening of the Occupy movement, first on Wall Street and then in hundreds of American cities, is celebrated as the revival of the revolutionary middle class. The movement in the US seems two steps ahead.
"Manage" v. "Market capitalism." The record (tags)
Neoliberal myths and fictions like the self-healing market, trickle-down prosperity and corporate beneficence have accompanied exploding inequality and generalized insecurity. Trillions for the banks is against all market rules of competition, risk and liability.
On Protest and the "Occupy"-Movement (tags)
National economies are now subject to the pressures of this supra-national financial "market" and to the institutions helpful to this market like the IMF and the European Central Bank. "Bailout umbrellas" at the expense of the common taxpayer are opened up.
The core of all western-individualist ideas of justice is the principle of personal responsibility. Everyone is responsible for the consequences of his/her actions. This motivates as well as disciplines. "We punish the virtuous and reward the squanderers."
Forecasting Economic Decline (tags)
class war
Whistling Past the Graveyard (tags)
class war
Justice Before Efficiency (tags)
The market economy must be bound to the principles of a fully-developed civil society. More is involved than a belated redistribution. A citizen is basically a social being. To overcome feudalism, precedence must be given to human- and civil rights over the power based on property.
"Nature and people are `fictional commodities. When they submit completely to market mechanisms and when markets are not regulated, this leads to people dying who don't find buyers for their labor power..."
Obama's Transfer Of The Public's Equity To The 1% (tags)
So they steal your house and will now rent it back to you at outrageous artificially inflated rent while still taking 50% of your deflated income to earn a profit margin off what used to be your equity.
Raul Zelik and Elmar Altvater discuss the nature of utopia, economics, how growth and work become fetishes, how what is rational in micro-economics can become irrational in macro-economics, time prosperity and how Marx recognized the contradictions in capitalism.
Grim 2012 Economic Outlook (tags)
class war
Criticism of Economists (tags)
Economists with their models could predict the values of economic variables but did not foresee the greatest worldwide economic crisis in 80 years. Mechanical-deterministic neoclassicism is a self-contained theoretical model offering simple answers.
Commons - Taking Charge of Things (tags)
The capitalist market economy develops more and more into a crisis economy. Capitalism is not a totality. Everything we need has never been transacted over the market, for example the whole informal economy in developing countries and the unpaid work in families.
Neoliberalism as Greatest Error in the History of Economic Thought (tags)
Efficiency and prosperity can only be realized on capitalist markets when the economic system is bound in a social order under the primacy of politics. Democratic legitimated politics and the provision of public goods is derived from the "anatomy of market failure."
The Future of the Social State (tags)
The extended family as a kind of "self-help group" replaces the social state in the backward-oriented utopia of liberal-conservatism. Nothing hurts families more than the "rebuilding" or dismantling of the social state and the marketing of interpersonal relations.
Critique of Marianne Williamson at Occupy LA (tags)
A critique of a small part of Williamson's speech regarding capitalism.
Common Welfare Economy: An economic model for the future (tags)
The Common Welfare Economy provides an economic systemic alternative to the free market as well as to the centrally planned economy, a completely different way and partly also a synthesis from both major historical concepts.
Underway to Plutocracy: Financial Crisis (tags)
No promise of salvation can be imputed to capitalism any more.. The market is regarded as a natural law and power of fate. Nothing but Darwinism was left of the liberals' hope for progress. That Darwinism rejoices in the survival of the fittest and the sorting out of weaker debtors.
Occupy Demands And Civil Disobedience Guidelines (tags)
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage.
Imploding Bubble Economies (tags)
economy
Politics in the Crisis Trap (tags)
A discontinuance of debt-financed economic programs leads to an economic slack period resulting in stagnation and recession. Crisis policy finds itself in a philosophical paradox. The political class can only choose between more indebtedness up to state bankruptcy (with hyper-inflation) or harsh austerity programs.
Localicious Gala: 30 Years, 30 Chefs, 30 Farmers (tags)
The World is Out of Joint (tags)
The financial crisis has become a state debt crisis. "The rise of democracy was not possible without the social and legal civilizing of capitalism. The deregulation euphoria of democratic governments made possible the incredible ascent of the financial oligarchy."
LIBYA, SOMALIA AND MEDIA (tags)
War, hunger and petroleum or just hunger of petroleum?
The Game with Ignorance and the Growth Panacea (tags)
A world wide economic and financial order decays to a pure end-in-itself and no longer serves people. A system build on an ideology in which everything-even the person-becomes a product is legitimated by apologists who trivialize derailments of social life as "normal."
Privatization of the State (tags)
Economics changes with the times as states and individuals change. Once savings was the elixir and then spending with John Maynard Keynes. The economy should serve humankind; humanity should not serve the economy. Privatization is part of the snake oil remedy.
economy
The Crisis of Financial Market Capitalism as a Challenge for the Left (tags)
The crisis of neoliberal financial market capitalism broke out in its center and has one central systemic cause. This crisis was triggered by the independence of the financial sphere... A solidarity mixed economy, democracy and peace are alternatives.
Visit Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon at his new home (tags)
So Mayor Phil Gordon now lives at the Chateau on Central, which is just north of McDowell Road on Central Avenue.
"Beyond Growth" congress in Berlin, May 20-22. 2011 (tags)
A "Beyond Growth" congress will be held in Berlin, May 20-22. 2011. The driving forces of growth, the limits of growth, the crisis of the work society, an economy beyond growth, justice and the globalized world, sharing and the good life will be discussed.
U.S. House of Representatives: Stupid? Crooks? or Stupid Crooks? (tags)
Some of our representatives are just plain dumb as box of shale. They may even believe that American oil can be sold at Mom and Pop's Gas-It-Up.
An Expansion of Terms Used in the Coffee Party Article by RP (tags)
I apologize for the weak structure in this article. I was hoping to write something that explained some of the material in the story, but ended up going a bit afield with the information. This article attempts to be neutral and nonpartisan, or at least not shrill, and avoids too much analysis. The nature of the Great Recession is difficult to sum up in a few pages, because it's a failure of a complex system with many parts, and many related behaviors, that led to the near-collapse of capitalism.
Causes and Consequences of the Financial Crisis (tags)
The neoliberal restructuring and globalization of capitalism has led to states becoming the spoils of financial capital. The neoliberal program is enforced with the help of states. Governments only react to the conditions set by the economically powerful. This is the end of politics.
The Government and the Housing Market (tags)
The housing market has long been the measuring stick of how well the economy is doing or how badly it is doing.
Tepco is the End of the Market Economy (tags)
Tepco operated antiquated nuclear reactors and glossed over the hard of a meltdown. The Japanese government will probably nationalize the firm since it cannot pay a fraction of its liabilities. What lessons do we learn? Should the public sector be expanded? We are all Wisconsin
The World Social Forum (Feb 6-11, 2011) (tags)
"Another world is possible," Susan George declared at Porto Alegre. 80,000 activists came to Dakar. The world has changed, not only through the financial crisis that showed the market often causes more problems than it solves. The WSF has become a source of hope for a just world.
Fukushima and Capitalism (tags)
"Capitalism and its countless horrors seem more credible to us than an alternative. We believe in capital, the deadly promise of endless growth. We cynically pay it tribute as though the rule of people over people and nature were something dignified. A world of sharing and community is possible."
Phillip Anschutz and Mayor Villaraigosa's corporate candidate Luiz Sanchez cheating again? (tags)
Just when you think corporate LAUSD hopeful Luis Sanchez couldn't be more unscrupulous and scandalous, he surprises with ever more deplorable acts of ignominy. This time around -- illegal fund-raising!
Business in Crisis: Vulnerable to Attack (tags)
Sectarian leftists love to moan about the power of capitalism. It seems it cannot be upended or even reformed. Activists are hooked on hopelessness. Is it any wonder why activists are caught blindsided by events like Tunisia, Egypt, and Wisconsin? These recent actions are manifestations of resistance against the presumed neoliberal order.
Protests Continue in San Luis Obispo (tags)
Medical cannabis activists in the San Luis Obispo area are coordinating rallies this month in support of patients and providers facing charges there. On the first two Thursdays of the month, Feb 3 and Feb 10, activists will be passing out informational flyers at the San Luis Obispo Farmers Market. Several of those arrested will appear in court on Feb 9 and 10, and another has a pre-trial hearing on Feb 14.
Engels on Capital and Surplus Value (tags)
Review of the chapters on Capital and Surplus Value in Engels' book Anti-Dühring showing the contemporary relevance of Marxist theory.
The Silence of Economists (tags)
In 1936 Keynes was the first established economist who explained how a free enterprise system in no way realized a state of balance by itself. The state must take an active role in crisis times to prevent an economic downswing ending in a catastrophe.
Successful socialism conference held in the Philippines (tags)
A successful ‘socialism conference’ was held in Manila from November 27 to 28. The conference was organized by the socialist Partido Lakas ng Masa or Party of the Laboring Masses (PLM) and the socialist-feminist regional network Transform Asia. The conference was attended by 100 delegates, leaders of the PLM from Metro Manila, and other leading socialists of the Philippine left, as well as 13 international guests.
Economics is not a Science (tags)
"Observations are central in a subject like economics where experiments are not possible.. Mathematics is misused to transport a certain ideology, the neoclassical theory of the market.. Capitalist crisis phenomena have made a fool of the harmony theory of the market.."
The Financial Crisis and the Failure of the Modern Economy (tags)
The US government debt shot up from 2.9% in 2007 to 5.9% in 2008 and 11.9% in 2009. At the summits of Washington, London and Pittsburg, the goat was made the gardener. Ineffective rules were resolved that hardly helped regulate the financial markets.
Market Failure Wherever One Looks (tags)
7-8 million jobs lost in two years, 150,000 public sector jobs lost in September, are signs of total system incompetence. It's time to redefine state and market and adopt alternative economic policy with reduced working hours and infrastructure investment.
Jerry Brown's first time as governor (tags)
Jerry Brown's first time as governor and the taxpayer revolt
Anger as the Ship Goes Down (tags)
Obama's proposed banking reforms are likely to face insurmountable opposition from Congress, where lobby interests have become all-powerful. Worse still, writes George Blecher, the proposals themselves don't go far enough.
Economy in Service of Life (tags)
The 2004 Accra confession of the Reformed World Alliance emphasizes justice in the economy and the earth. "The ideology of neoliberalism penetrating all areas of our life is incompatible with our Christian faith.. and does not serve life."
"The “Great Transition” is meant to echo the phrase used by Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, the title of Polanyi’s important 1944 book describing the shift from the world of the commons to that of the total market order..."
The Banking and Financial Crisis (tags)
"The transition from a long-term to a short-term orientation went along with the exaggerated profit goals. The approach of shareholder value sets maximum profits and dividends in the center of business policy and no longer long-term investments and the interests of employees.."
Financial Crisis as Organized Irresponsibility (tags)
In the years 2002-2006, guaranteeing mortgage credits was the greatest source of profit for investment banks. US policy massively promoted and in no way curbed awarding dubious credits. In 2003 Warren Buffett described derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction."
A Permanent Housing Collapse? (tags)
The recent chaos that erupted when 30,000 people waited hours in the Atlanta, Georgia heat to receive applications for subsidized housing is a mere symptom of a worsening national problem. The housing market appears to be on a never-ending downward spiral, with the much-discussed "recovery" always around the next corner.
A Financial Boom Despite the Crisis (tags)
For the banks, deficit state budgets become important clients. They compensate the private demand for credit. The financial boom is completely based on support measures of state organs. An economic upswing is not in sight.
PHILIPPINES: New Economics for a New Administration (tags)
The dominant feature of the Arroyo administration was pervasive corruption, but its most destructive legacy in the long term will probably be its policy failures. The ascent to power of a new president, backed by a new Congress, provides the opportunity for a fundamental shift in policy in order to end poverty and re-launch the Philippines on the road to development.
Potential Impact of Health Reform on the (tags)
Potential Impact of Health Reform on the Cost of Private Health Insurance
Life after the Peak: Capitalism and the Market Economy (tags)
All over the world there are experiments with renewable energy, solidarity economies and non-profit economic forms. A growth acceleration law will be absurd when fossil energy runs out. We will need a growth de-acceleration law.
The mainstream band RATM others like them are workers (tags)
The mainstream band RATM others like them are workers
The Financial and Economic Crisis as a Normative Orientation Crisis (tags)
Prof. Ulrich presents three core theses: (1) Economics is not an end-in-itself but the means to the good life and human coexistence. (2) There is no "free" enterprise system free of ethical and political prerequisites. (3) The need for emancipatory economic citizenship rights.
The future of the welfare state in the context of globalization - the German example (tags)
Following the political, social, economic and human catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century and the liberation from fascism in 1945, there was broad consensus in Germany that the socio-economic reconstruction should move toward securing economic prosperity...
The Financial Market Must Become a Public Service (tags)
An institutional crisis faces us, not individual failure. Egoism makes one short-sighted; greed makes one blind. Capitalism is not simply a market system. Capitalism is a social order. Therefore it cannot be left to economists to decide which laws of the market should operate.
Can a Person Own HIs/Her Mother? (tags)
No one can own what exists in nature except nature. A human cannot own its own mother. However western ownership systems have been forced on us again and again that contradict our worldview and our values. Ubunto is another example: "I only live when you live."
"The Mother of All Evil is Speculation!": Oliver Stone's "Wall Street 2" (tags)
In "Wall Street 2," Wall Street is marked by profiteering, lack of understanding for Asians and fixation on getting the customer "on the hook" at the end. "This is the biggest sellout in history... If we don't do it, there will be no history."
BRAZIL IN 2025: DESTRUCTION or DEVELOPMENT (tags)
Brazil commemorates... but the black clouds didn't vanish.
Stop the Black Market Sales of AIDS/HIV Medicine. Please Sign The Petition! (tags)
Leaked Email. “there is a major black market scam being worked on the $30 million a year in HIV/AIDS drugs we finance... I could easily name the in-house folks but my lips are sealed.” Carol Payne Flavell, Administrative Employee of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Presidential Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR). Sign
Work- and Social Criticism in the Time of Capitalist Running Amok (tags)
The term social goes through a fundamental change of meaning. Earlier social described an obligation of society to its members. Today the little word social stands for the caring duty of members of society toward the capitalist machine
Greenspan and the Guilt of Others (tags)
Before the committee, Greenspan immediately went on the offensive (cf. Creole trick). The irresponsible loans of banks caused the crisis, not the low interest of the Fed. The Fed failed in regulating the banks because its employees were not neutral.
The Bank Tribunal in Berlin (tags)
Even today most radical market liberals do not see beyond their ideological blinders and explain the financial market crisis as a state breakdown. The financial catastrophe is a fiasco of their religious doctrine. The catastrophe plunged the dominant economy into a crisis of meaning.
PHILIPPINES: Sanlakas party to file plunder raps vs Villar (tags)
MANILA, Philippines - Party-list group Sanlakas will file a plunder case against Nacionalista Party presidential bet Manny Villar based on land-grabbing allegations.
"Making Paper From Trees Is Just Plain Stupid!" - Jack Herer (tags)
Just recently my wife broke her ankle and as a typical male I am a moron in a supper market. It takes me twice as much time to shop as it would if Namiko hobbled through the store with her broken ankle. I have however noticed a frightening specter that screamed at me from the super market shelves. At least 90 percent of the paper products I was looking at in the store, which includes the packaging are all made from virgin wood fiber pulped from trees. When you add in virgin wood fiber in news print, office, shipping and school use, you see that nothing much has changed.
Human Rights Before Trade Rules (tags)
Bread for the World shows that a fundamentally different trade and economic policy oriented in human rights is possible and very necessary. Many rich countries subsidize their farmers so their foodstuffs can be produced below the real costs and sold cheaply on the world market.
There is only one economy (tags)
The stock exchange produces nothing. Speculations and bets do not create any assets, even if the daily stock market reports on television try to get us to believe the opposite. That the financial markets make themselves independent is the result of political decisions.
Bank Tribunal: In the Claws of Speculators (tags)
The enormous rise in prices of oil and food in the summer of 2008 was largely caused by speculation. Thousands upon thousands of people died of starvation at that time. Politics was a compliant accessory of the financial branch. The Bank Tribunal will be from April 9-11 in Berlin.
The Neoliberal Agenda is Over and The Despised Social State (tags)
Neoliberalism is the political-economic experiment of individualizing social risks and claiming growth and employment will be higher. This claim is refuted convincingly by the global financial crisis destroying enormous assets and causing growth and employment to crash.
VIDEO: Joseph Stiglitz' "Freefall" on BookTV (tags)
"Incentives matter. Short-sighted behavior on an annual basis involved excessive risk taking. `Too big to fail' is ersatz capitalism socializing losses.
What is Inflation? (Ver. 2.1) (tags)
Inflation is a rise in the general price of things. As a result, people believe they are able to buy less things.
What is Inflation? (Version 2.0) (tags)
Inflation is a rise in the general price of things. As a result, people believe they are able to buy less things.
Prerequisites for Overcoming the Financial Crisis (tags)
"In analyzing financial crises, real causes should be differentiated from the side-effects. One of the essential causes for the current crisis is the discrepancy between the linear growth of the real economy and the exponential growth of financial management created by the derivative-economy,"
The Next Crash is Brewing (tags)
The economic way of thinking enforced for a quarter of century is one of the structural factors that helped this "economy of depression" breakthrough. This dominant doctrine denies the role of demand and concentrates on the problems limiting the supply of goods & services
Happy New Year, For Tenants Nothing's Changed! (tags)
Unfortunately, 2009 proved for many big-city tenants that the golden rule was promiscuously traded for gold. Why would 2010 be any different?
The Recession Is Over, the Depression Just Beginning (tags)
America's economy is dire and worsening
Lessons from the Crisis (tags)
Governments are extorted by multinational corporations. Those who made massive profits with bank business must now answer for the losses. The taxpayer may not pay for their crises. If control is not exercised by politics, banks will become absolute rulers with a state guarantee.
The Origins of Modern Socialism (tags)
The specter of socialism is again haunting the minds of the corporate elite, from the Americas to Europe and beyond. This, after decades of pro-capitalist campaigning from the corporate media, which has always confused “capitalism” with “freedom.” But of course freedom and democracy cannot exist alongside tremendous inequalities of wealth — or next to corporations wielding absolute power over elections and governments.
Four Videos for the New Year (tags)
The economy should be a part of life, not a steamroller crushing creativity and self-determination. Shriveling the financial sector is vital for a future of generalized security and environmental caring.
The system itself is degenerate. The great financial crisis is the trigger for seeking another capitalism. Deregulation becomes an end-in-itself; the state per se is of the devil. The state should be taken seriously as a production factor.
End the Fed? Or End the Market Economy? (tags)
When Republican Congressman Ron Paul recently introduced legislation to audit the Federal Reserve, diverse sections of the political spectrum applauded. And rightfully so. The Fed’s role in the still-developing bank bailouts is one of utter secrecy; the total cost of which — as estimated by the bailout’s Special Inspector General, Neil Barofsky — could cost taxpayers $23.7 trillion. The fact that legislation needed to be introduced to raise the question of the whereabouts of these funds points to a larger breakdown in U.S. democracy.
Utopia: The Successful Libertarian Market Socialist Economy (tags)
A successful Libertarian Market Socialist economy based on self employment, co-op or democratic businesses and employers that pay their employees enough to buy back what they produce
The Rules of the Game, Not the Players (tags)
In the last three decades, the financial markets have grown much faster than production.. The respective players (whether public or private) are not the problem but the rules of the game.. The goals and means of production must be redefined
Will the Great Depression Be Repeated? (tags)
Global trade fell 30 percent three years after the crash. The US gross domestic product shriveled 40 percent. In 1932, every fourth American was without a job. In Germany, industry only produced half of what was produced three years before.
Forced Health Insurance Costs Could Damage Housing Market (tags)
Citizens caught in this Catch 22 which there may be millions, may not be considered poor for federal assistance to buy health insurance.
The climate- and financial crises have one thing in common. Both are consequences of a gigantic market failure. Nature and the future of humanity are not at the table when market actors negotiate conditions and aim at their advantages.
Freedom of Religion in Libertarian Spain (tags)
Hello, For anyone interested, here is Part 2 of the 'Libertarian Spain in the 1930's' series
Prohibition STILL doesn't work. It never did. Why not regulate and tax it instead? (tags)
History confirms that prohibition never worked and actually created one of the bloodiest, most corrupt periods in American history. The solution was to legalize, regulate, and tax the forbidden substance for adults.
Building community centers could be a way to learn from O Canada and break from the false religion of the market and profit. When the market and competition are made absolute, they become idols. CEOs are called job creators and workers "cost-factors."
Negotiating Our Lives Away (tags)
At some point we have to step to the plate and put our foot down. It's not going to stop on its own.
Globalization and the New Political Movements (tags)
Attac, a global justice network in many European countries, demands closing off-shore tax havens and debt cancellation for the third world. The word globalization has a function as a threat. Be flexible because capital is flexible and the state can do nothing!
Germany: The Calm Before the Storm (tags)
"The Left must become a catalyst of resistance to the crisis in order to gain strength. Impoverishment does not make anyone enlightened. Despair and anger do not necessarily lead to progressivism. People may be just as likely to give up...."
115 signatures in 4 hours at farmers market (tags)
Saturday morning farmers market + 4 hours = 115 signatures on CCI Petition to legalize marijuana
Beyond Market and State (tags)
In a "post-democracy," the interests of global corporations prevail with the continuing facade of democratic institutions and procedures. Interest in politics in the population is very low. Criticism of neoliberalism brings together many movements and groups.
Benjamin Tucker: Individualist Libertarian Market Socialist (tags)
American Individualist Libertarianism is a form of market socialism with self-employed individuals, co-operative businesses, and socialist employers. 1. (If your interested, please see: Benjamin Tucker’s State Socialism and Anarchism: Where they Agree and where they Differ)
Will The Republicans Shut The Fuck Up (tags)
The latest outburst from the moron from South Carolina during President Obama’s speech on health care is just he latest example of Nazi behavior being exemplified by Republican party
The Crisis of Capitalism: Credit-Doping (tags)
"The social market economy blows the wealth of this society in speculation rather than in higher wages, higher pensions or unemployment benefits.. All capital transactions with tax havens should be prohibited.. Instead of democratization, we growing centralization in a few hands.."
Cash for Geezers: Retirement for Boomers at 55 (tags)
Beloved Air America host in the mornings, Thom Hartmann and Eduardo Galeano could turn our days to light.
World Bankers Agree: The Recession is Over...Maybe (tags)
Few would consider the opinions of the world's central bankers to be unbiased or even accurate. These self-proclaimed wise men of international finance didn't see the recession coming until it blew up in their faces - a blast that destroyed their credibility. Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear them talk, not because they're fun to listen to, but because of "the messaging" that rich investors use religiously in placing their stock market bets, while the rest of us are given a calming sermon, so that the bankers' lackeys - the politicians - may continue ruining the country uncontested.
In the US, people have lived above their means for years and now must permanently lower their living standard. In America as in Europe, economists expect a tremendous rise in unemployment in the fall. This does not mean people will shop more.
Review: Karl Polanyi-How the State Created Capitalism (tags)
In "The Great Transformation" (1944), Karl Polanyi deconstructs the myth of a free market economy that develops naturally and spontaneously and the idea of the state as a counter-pole to capital. The transformation of labor and land into commodities was a painful process.
Obama vs Insurance:Pillow fights (tags)
Obama and the health insurance companies are pillow fighting. Ready to concede, the Democrats are already saying the ya-hoo attended townhalls have stopped them from passing through legislation, what about the townhalls against the war(s)? This fight is stopping because it never really was meant to win. Just another pillow fight with big business. The media wants us to believe that there is some sort of mass movement out there that is opposed to any sort of health care that is not run by the private sector.
Economic Policy after the Financial Crisis: Keynes (tags)
Keynes saw political control of markets and a distribution and social policy in favor of lower income groups as essential prerequisites of a stable long-term macro-economic development.. Three-hour workdays or a 15-hour week would be enough.
India vs China: finance, outsourcing, hightech, politics, trade, jobs (tags)
Watch out on China and India! Are these giants are taking advantages of global financial crisis? Will they emerge to become the leaders of 21st century?
Zhibin Gu: China stock market, outsourcing, banking, finance, politics map (tags)
how to walk out the mud of global financial cisis? How to get better world politics and business map? Is Chinese century arriving sooner? What is really behind all the changes inside Chinese and Indian politics, business, finance and society? Get most provocative economic and political lessons and knowledge from a timely book covering long history and revolution of both Mao's era and current capitalist revolution in relation to world finance, competition, and entrepreneurship.
The Face of Privatization (tags)
Under the present rule of neoliberal privatization, the all-embracing principle is conquest of the world transformed into rights of private property.. After destruction of the privatization myth, we need real democratization.
John Kenneth Galbraith: Relentless Fighter Against the Powerful (tags)
In the 1960s John Kenneth Galbraith decried the coexistence of private affluence and public squalor and denounced trickle-down economics, feeding the horse so the sparrow can live. System- and structural criticism are vital today as the myth of the self-healing market lies shattered
A 25-Hour Week Would Be Enough (tags)
Prestigious businesses urge their workers to work less. In principle, rising productivity is full of blessings. It made possible reducing working hours since the Second World War. In crisis, the music stops playing. This crisis could be a chance to reform our working hoiurs model.
The Crisis and the Left: Democratizing instead of Privatizing (tags)
"Neoliberalism has no future..Since time immemorial, (neo-) liberals have wanted as little democracy as possible as an unavoidable evil that should not get in the way of the real kingdom of freedom, the capitalist market economy.."
Obama's Cap and Trade Carbon Emissions Bill - A Stealth Scheme to License Pollution and Fr (tags)
plunder and pollution if passed
Risk Development and Dollar Inflation (tags)
Two articles by emeritus professor Elmar Altvater reveal the contradictions of credit or bubble prosperity in the counter-revolution of capital. As work cannot define us, competitiveness and profit maximization do not define the human experience Speculation could bring a new feudalism..
Border Patrol raids in the Inland Empire since December (tags)
TOTAL RAIDS (minimum): 28 raids
Zhibin Gu: how China's outsourcing, logistics, tech, manufacturing centers are created? (tags)
Get inside story about Chinese business and management. How is global financial crisis reshaping Chinese and world politics, finance, banking, trade and outsourcing? How to profit from rising Chinese trade, yuan and stock market? How to do investing, travel, trade inside China? Get real investigations from a timely book.
Zhibin Gu: China, India vs West: competition, challenge beyond global financial crisis (tags)
Which nation is to become leader for 21st century, China, US, or India? Are China, India able to move ahead of global financial crisis as next leaders? China moves ahead of India for now, but will China take the lead soon? Are the emerging giants able to beat the US and Europe in the 21st century? Get intense, provocative discussions and analysis on Chinese and Indian politics, finance, management, history and economy.
Zhibin Gu: China's illness: self-appointed government vs corruption (tags)
Watch out on the hidden corruption of China! Is China's surging economy to be ruined by a self-appointed bureaucracy? Is China able to escape the deadly traps of lawlessness and corruption? What is really inside Chinese society, government and politics in relation to global financial crisis? Get realistic discussions and forecast on China and the world in the 21st century.
Economic Crisis and the Crisis of Neoliberal Ideology (tags)
The crisis has his origins in the "real" economy. Inequality is the ideological motor of neoliberfalism. German president Kohler described the financial markets as a monster. The metaphor has changed from market as rational subject to monster.
Zhibin Gu: how is China's manufacturing center created? (tags)
Get inside story about Chinese business and management. How is global financial crisis reshaping Chinese and world politics, finance, banking, trade and outsourcing? How to profit from rising Chinese trade, yuan and stock market? How do over a half million international companies make profits in China? Learn about Chinese multinationals, society, banking, management, outsourcing, education, politics, individual life during a transition period. How to do investing, travel, trade inside China? Get real investigations from a timely book.
Zhibin Gu: how a dead China is saved by entrepreneurship, open society, outside world? (tags)
how to walk out the mud of global financial cisis? How to get better world politics and business map? Is Chinese century arriving sooner? What is really behind all the changes inside Chinese and Indian politics, business, finance and society? Get most provocative economic and political lessons and knowledge from a timely book covering long history and revolution of both Mao's era and current capitalist revolution in relation to world finance, competition, and entrepreneurship.
Manipulation - How Markets Really Work (tags)
Insiders move markets up or down for profit.
the Deeper Origins of the Economic Crisis (tags)
For all the horror the global economic crisis has caused for so many people, one progressive consequence has emerged: many of these people are becoming politically conscious — searching for information to better understand their political and economic system. They want to know how things got the way they did and what can be done about it. Unfortunately, much of the resulting analysis has focused too little on actual causes, and too much on abstract financial details and other consequences of deeper economic problems. Therefore, the typical explanation of the economic crisis goes as follows: depression-era financial regulations were tossed aside, and banks were allowed to merge into new institutions that then invented ways to transform debts into assets, which were gambled away on the stock exchange to the tunes of trillions of dollars. All of which is true. What’s missing, however, is why.
The Market Must Serve Society (tags)
In the past, the village green and market swuare were surrounded by the church, town hall, school and hospital. Without these social institutions, there would be no market. This is also true for today's global financial markets.
Free market and democracy are incompatible (tags)
Capitalism = McCarthyist dictatorship
Let's Really Attack our Economic Problems (tags)
Let’s show the trickle down theory the door. If a goodly majority ever faces economic reality, we could fashion a better world. It is however the wealthy that will have to sacrifice.
China capitalist lessons vs global financial crisis (tags)
is global financial cisis changing global politics and business map? Is Chinese century arriving sooner? What is really behind all the changes inside Chinese and Indian politics, business, finance and society? Get most provocative economic and political lessons and knowledge from a timely book covering long history and revolution of both Mao's era and current capitalist revolution in relation to world finance, competition, and entrepreneurship.
Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt:" Part IV (tags)
Federal Reserve plunder Part IV
Water is a Human Right, not a Commodity (tags)
In Bolivia there was a bloody struggle over water. Indigenous persons led the water war in Cochabamba. Water is a human right and must be withdrawn from the logic of profit maximization.
China: politics, finance, economic map: George Zhibin Gu (tags)
is global financial cisis changing global politics and business map? Is Chinese century arriving sooner? What is really behind all the changes inside Chinese and Indian politics, business, finance and society? Get most provocative economic and political lessons and knowledge from a timely book covering long history and revolution of both Mao's era and current capitalist revolution in relation to world finance, competition, and entrepreneurship.
For the Resumtion of the Class Struggle! (tags)
The economic crisis which has crashed down on society has already had and for a long time will have disastrous consequences for the lives of the masses, as every worker can see in his daily life or her work. The bourgeois economists themselves admit it: they do not know what the causes of the crisis are – satisfying themselves by blaming the greed of the bankers or excessive financial deregulation – and they do not know when it will end and give way to the long-awaited “economic recovery”. The current crisis is the crisis of the capitalist mode of production, incapable of stopping itself, forced to produce always more commodities, at a certain point it comes up against the limits of the market.
The End of Finance Market Capitalism: Renaissance of Socialism? (tags)
The crisis offers an historical chance to civilize an unbridled capitalism with reform policy. The future relation of market and state is the focus of attention.. Financial markets are characterized by herd behavior. Risk consciousness disappears.
It is not a conjunctural crisis (tags)
"instinct is the hereditary knowledge of a specific program of life"
The Vacuum of World Trade Breaks Down (tags)
The unbridled free market was an illusion that gave free rein to greed and speculation and the dominance of the financial markets. Shareholder value made the profits of shareholders absolute and set short-term gain over long-term necessity.
Leading Economist Decries Power of Wall Street "Oligarchs" (tags)
n a fascinating piece in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, outlines what he sees as the alarming influence of Wall Street firms over the American economy. He expounds on his thesis in our interview, making several points:
Disarm the Markets! New Attac Basis Text (tags)
The therapy depends on the diagnosis. Mechanisms, instruments and actors can be identified whose action and teamwork led to the crash. The age of a unipolar world was very short. An historical chance is opening against finance capitalism.
The Misery of the WTO: For a Reinvention of World Trade (tags)
The crisis of the WTO has two causes: a lack of trust and an ideological prejudice. A lack of trust exists because the countries of the North judge trade with two standards: free trade for the South and protectionism for their own economies.
The Culture of Mistrust (tags)
"Total mistrust prevails on the financial market. How can the state restore trust when trust in the state was decried for years? When all public affairs are changed into private affairs, citizens only see themselves as private citizens and the state becomes a business.."
The Crisis of Finance Market Capitalism as a Challenge for the Left (tags)
"The problems we face today cannot be solved with the minds that created them" (Albert Einstein).
Calories on the Table, not in the Tank (tags)
For decades nearly all countries of the third world had to follow the "Washington Consensus"-a strategy of opening to the world market.. Wheat and corn land in the tank, not on the table. All of our dependence on the car appears here most perversely.
When are "Ordinary Criminals" Terrorists? (tags)
Patriot Act Spin Brilliant Until You Think About It
Tremors on the Global Market (tags)
The causes of the current crisis in the international financial markets, which is threatening to develop into a genuine global market crisis, have been attributed by almost all commentators and economic experts to the uninhibited freedom granted speculation.
China wisdom: Chinese multinationals, stock market vs global financial crisis (tags)
How is global financial and economic crisis reshaping world politics, finance, banking, trade and outsourcing? Profiting from rising Chinese trade, yuan and stock market? How do over a half million international companies make profits in China? Learn about Chinese multinationals, society, banking, management, outsourcing, education, politics, individual life during a transition period. How to do investing, travel, trade inside China? Get real investigations from a timely book.
Fallen Stars: On the Greed of Bankers and a New Morality (tags)
The economic ethicist Ulrich Thielemann explains how greed, false theories and the herd instinct caused the massive financial crisis. They had the theory when we make profits that is ultimately good for everyone.
The Casino is Closed: Reasons for the Crash (tags)
Ulrich Schafer discusses the greed for fast money, a world without rules and why the market alone cannot regulate everything. The crisis has a pre-history. The state simply abandoned control over many economic areas. The financial world in particular was left to itself.
Faith in the Invisible Hand of the Market is Over (tags)
The people will not be so easily convinced of liberalization, deregulation and privatization. On the contrary, people will have a clearer consciousness of the primacy of politics. The false incentive systems in the businesses must be removed.
China speaker: stock market, finance, politics, economy vs global financial crisis (tags)
Is Chinese or Indian century emerging sooner in light of global fnancial crisis? What is the next in global job, manufacturing and research transfers? What is really inside Chinese business, politics and economic world? How to take advantages of China's expanding market, cheap labor, and rising retail consumption? Get first hand information and analysis from elite speaker George Zhibin Gu from London Speaker
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Economic Crisis (tags)
economic conditions worsening
Funding For USA's Intel Operations (tags)
Lift the veil to discover the sources for fbi/cia global covert criminal intel operations.
Obama's Bank Bailout: Bush's Plan Resurrected (tags)
To reintroduce an unpopular idea by a different name is a classic trick of politicians. Obama has done precisely this in unveiling his bank bailout plan. In a desperate attempt to distance himself from Bush, the Obama administration has added some complicated economic terms packaged into a system he simply calls the “bad bank.” The essence of the plan, however, is exactly what Bush originally proposed.
Time for a Bad Ideas Bank (tags)
The global economic disaster plunges economics into a legitimation crisis-not yet noticed by the vast majority of the affected. The current financial crisis involves dogmas that markets function best and correct their own mistakes.
Will Obama Start the Next Trade War? (tags)
While campaigning to be president, Obama gave the general impression that he would act “cooperatively” to solve international problems, moving away from the Bush strategy of irresponsible “unilateralism.” But Obama took an aggressive stance towards China even on the campaign trail, including the accusations of “currency manipulation,” “violating intellectual property rights,” and “devaluing their goods.” Of course, the average American cares nothing about these types of crimes, nor should they.
Neoliberal Definitional Power (tags)
"What is central is ending the constant expropriation of employees, not the expropriation of entrepreneurs." Market fundamentalists stylize every tax as expropriation as though they had no responsibility for paying for roads, schools, health care, police, fire departments and water-food supervision.
A New Administration, Tired Old Policies (tags)
Counterproductive policies heading America for depression
Chinese multinationals, stock market vs global financial crisis (tags)
How is global financial and economic crisis reshaping world politics, finance, banking, trade and outsourcing? Profiting from rising Chinese trade, yuan and stock market? How do over a half million international companies make profits in China? Learn about Chinese multinationals, society, banking, management, outsourcing, education, politics, individual life during a transition period. How to do investing, travel, trade inside China? Get on-ground investigations from a timely book.
No One Can Escape the Crisis (tags)
From a long-term perspective, the crisis could bring about a radical rethinking in politics and the economy away from the mantra of shareholder value and the pursuit of short-term profits. The neoliberal model of the Washington consensus has revealed its fundamental weaknesses.
Recession Raises the Question of Meaning (tags)
The facade of a sound world suddenly crumbles. Are the funds available to the productive economy or are they sinking in the swamp of a degenerate global financial- and economic system? An economy that prioritizes human needs and nature is primarily regional.
The Landless Workers Movement and the American "bubble"... (tags)
We all know that tiny and small business those that employ more, we all know that the smart guys of the market should cover the leak that they have produced and they are all free and happy while people like the federal policeman Protógenes suffers mysterious accidents. Pictures at http://rvcb.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/511/
The state wants to save the banks - why?
Liberal Prof Confronts Socialist Audience (tags)
Grossmont College economics professor Shahrokh Shahrokhi was invited to speak at the January 12 meeting of Activist San Diego, but though he attacked "market fundamentalism" and called for more government regulation of the economy,,public equity purchases iin the major financial firms and an extensive stimulus plan, many in the audience didn't think his proposals went far enough. They also bristled at his contention that homebuyers who took out mortgages beyond their means were partly responsible for the current economic crisis.
The Future Role of the State: Guaranteeing Rights (tags)
"The modern state as a constitutional state and participative democracy has a universal social security function and overall responsibility for the development of the economy according to basic rights."
lessons: global financial crisis, China, India, competition, jobs, politics, law (tags)
is global financial cisis changing global politics and business map? Is Chinese century arriving sooner? What is really behind all the changes inside Chinese and Indian politics, business, finance and society? Get most provocative economic and political lessons and knowledge from a timely book covering long history and revolution of both Mao's era and current capitalist revolution in relation to world finance, competition, and entrepreneurship.
The Genesis of the Financial Crisis: Greed and Repression (tags)
The self-healing market, the market that corrects itself, is at the heart of the perfect economic story. The financial crisis (now banking, real estate, jobs and credit crises) has forced the reconsideration of the role of the state. Psychology helps unmask religion of the market.
On the Financial Crisis in the 20:80 Society (tags)
The question is how we deal with the 20:80 society, not whether the 20:80 society is coming because the development is irreversible. In the long-term, work will disappear.. Jobless growth has become the normal condition.The end of work can be a great leap for humanity.
From Real Estate Speculation to Collapse of Global Deficit Economy (tags)
Joy to the world, the world of fallen idols and bubble transfer. The truth will set us free but the truth is a process, not a cudgel or stimulus. After the dot-com bubble, trillions were "invested" in real estate speculation. The crisis of the work society is the background for low interests.
The Danger of Right-Wing Populism (tags)
A strange trend is appearing in the political realm of the Left. Self-proclaimed political conservatives — many current or former members of the Republican Party — are being given considerable room in Left publications, for example in Counterpunch and BuzzFlash. At first it seemed accidental, with only sporadic occurrences. Now these “renegade” right-wingers enjoy ample room in spaces formally reserved for “lefties only.” How is this to be explained?
World and US Situation, 2008 (tags)
For more than two years, we revolutionaries had observed the impending total unravelling and complete discredit of the "free market" pretense of monopoly capitalism and the full bankruptcy of the policy of "neoliberal globalization." But the leaders of the US and other imperialist countries and the puppet states were always lying and boasting about the so-called strong fundamentals of their economies. Only recently have they been compelled by the circumstances to admit that the US and global capitalist system are beset by the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Economy Between Competition and Cooperation (tags)
"Market" already includes the concept of "symbiosis" in which two symbiots have advantages through their relation to one another. An increasing net consciousness will have a huge influence on economic interactions by strengthening the partnership principle.
Memorandum 2008 Summary-Crisis Underrated (tags)
Without increasing internal demand, the upswing based on replacement investments and exports cannot continue. Without reduced working hours, adequate jobs will not be created in a world of reduced work volumes, rationalization and information technology.
Letter about the Spanish Civil War in HARPERS, Dec. 2008 (tags)
A slightly different version of this was published in the most recent issue of 'Harpers' magazine...
"Wild Speculation is Sin" (tags)
"Marx recognized the core of globalization as a globalization of capital..He also warned against the economization of all areas of life..A capitalism without ethical and legal frameworks is misanthropic..The social market economy is a civilization product.."
After the Bankruptcy (Jurgen Habermas) (tags)
The privatization mania has ended. Politics is necessary for the public interest, not the market. A tension always exists between capitalism and democracy because the market and politics are based on opposite principles.
"Like the Fall of the Wall" (Joseph Stiglitz) (tags)
The mixture of low interests, excessive liquidity and lax oversight on money institutes led to the financial crisis. National indebtedness rose two-thirds in only eight years. The govt should immediately begin investing in the infrastructure, education and other projects.
Holy Scripture is the Standard, not Capitalism (tags)
Describing the dominant system as a social market economy is a deception. Social justice should be the integrating element of our economic order. Justice is not something additional to faith in God. Trust in the invisible hand is the core of the religion of the market.
economic, political lessons behind China's surge amid global financial meltdown (tags)
is global financial cisis changing global politics and business map? Is Chinese century arriving sooner? What is really behind all the changes inside Chinese and Indian politics, business, finance and society? Get most provocative economic and political lessons and knowledge from a timely book covering long history and revolution of both Mao's era and current capitalist revolution in relation to world finance, competition, and entrepreneurship.
International WShappens December the 6th to the 11th (tags)
We want a debate not from the perspective of the market because the market heralds resolved now that they will make the solution for what themselves caused, with their bad conduction of economic policy
Lurching Toward Gomorrah: More Signs of An Unstoppable Economic Meltdown (tags)
a deepening economic crisis
Bankruptcy of the Last Utopia (tags)
The economy should be a part of life, not a steamroller crushing creativity and self-realization. The economy should serve humankind; humanity should not serve bankers, SUVs and sports stadiums. The same Chinese letter represents crisis & opportunity.Will future be more human?
Worse Than the Great Depression? (tags)
a distinct possibility
International seminar to discuss how to exit the financial crisis announced (tags)
He criticized the conduction of economic policy by Brazilian Central Bank. "The CB is throwing money in the market without taking a specific concern with the change in the economic model, with public investment." Our concern is to analyze the crisis from the perspective of individuals, of the nation, and not
Welcome to Finance Market Capitalism (tags)
The financial market escapades must be the problem because capitalism itself cannot be the problem. The state bailout measure prepares the ground for inflationary developments.
Social Contract and the Emergency Hour (tags)
The financial crisis is also an opportunity to reflect on our priorities and perspectives. Elite consciousness is a frozen consciousness where there are not alternatives and bankruptcy are only normal business practices.
Greed is the Nature of the System (tags)
Politics was corrupted byt he economy and lost control to the economy. In the private enterprise system, there are too many incentives that oppose the public interest. When company pensions end, workers speculate. When high profits are the norm, companies speculate.
Tribunal for Speculators (tags)
The collapse of the delusional neoliberal idea frees our view for the necessity of a completely different society and a planetary social contract. Bankers are jungle highwaymen. Investments only pay where human rights are realized. The price of rice soared 83% within only six months.
The deepening economic crisis.
More from the Front Lines of the Financial Crisis (tags)
The worst is yet to come.
The wages of sin have come due.
Public Enemy Number One (tags)
Fed- engineered crisis.
Financial Market Capitalism: Neoliberalis become State Socialists (tags)
Neoliberalism is neither new nor liberal. All freedom is demanded for capital, even though human dependence is intensified and human existences destroyed. The state becomes a functionary for neoliberal concepts. The debts of Fannie/Freddie are added to the nine trillion.
LA's Really Really Free Market (tags)
Help organize the Really Really Free Market for Black Friday, November 28th!
Income Distribution is Perverse (tags)
Redistribution of income is central. Another economy is necessary in which people are more important than profit percentages. A shareholder value philosophy ruthlessly downsizes and closes plants in pursuit of maximum profit.
The Neediest Need Help Like the Banks (tags)
The same state haggles over every bowl of soup for welfare recipients. For banks, billions appeared overnight. There must also be money for higher wages and more social services.
"The Financial Crisis has made Heroes out of Rogues" (tags)
The state should make the economy more social and democratic. The conversions of Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel and Peter Steinbruick from market fetishism to state optimism were cabaret-style conversions. Democracy should dominate the economy.
Capitalism changed into "finance-driven" capitalism. The profit rates for industrial capital fell in the past decades. Washington could be paralyzed under the debt yoke like Japan in the early 1990s. After decades of market idolization, the US has rediscovered political power.
The Philosophies of Deregulation and Neoliberalism are Dead in the West (tags)
"The patient suffers massive internal bleeding and is given a blood transfusion. The banks lent money and accepted inflated assets as security. This bubble burst..Those who pocketed profits for years want to pin the losses on the taxpayers."
AJLPP Analysis on the Current World Capitalist Crisis (tags)
The capitalist bailout rammed into the US Congress has infused into the banks more than $ 500 B out of the $ 700 appropriations. But despite the huge infusion to the capitalist system, the crisis marched on with impunity. The Alliance-Philippines (AJLPP) believes that the latest unraveling of the “free market” dogma, the ultimate exposure of the failed concept of “neoliberal globalization” and the gravity of the current level of the economic and financial crisis of the imperialist powers headed by the US is now totally exposed to the whole world. But this phenomenon must be explained and understood and should not be feared. We must act to face this crisis with renewed determination and readiness to struggle for the people and to change this rotten system.
Banks dictate conditions of US financial bailout (tags)
The 936 point rise on the US stock market yesterday was the American ruling elite’s initial verdict on the extraordinarily favorable terms the government is granting to financial firms in the $700 billion bailout passed by Congress on October 3. Far from heralding improving economic conditions for working people, the Wall Street surge reflects the financial establishment’s success in extorting massive sums of money from taxpayers.
Lee Sustar explains that the mayhem in the markets this week is symptomatic of a deeper crisis--and the leaders of the most powerful governments aren't sure what to do.
"The Market is not a Safe Bank" by Helmut Schmidt (tags)
This crisis was avoidable. The fact that American investment banks are not subject to any normal bank supervision is scandalous. Financial transactions must be subject to rules and security standards. The heavier the traffic, the more rules and regulations are needed.
"We are in an epoch shift" (tags)
Free markets became wild markets. The post-socialist blessing became the turbo-capitalist curse. The state allowed the monitoring of banks to be de facto privatized. Politics allowed the markets to run wild. In turbo-capitalism, contracting debts was trendy and saving was Philistine.
GREEDY U.S.Banks & Real Estate Cos."Created" this Financial Apocalypse!!! (tags)
In fact the "corruption and blatant greed" of big American banks and real estate companies precipitated today's financial crisis!
Whittier Really Really Free Market (tags)
Really Really Free Market now happening in Whittier First one to be scheduled October 19th in conjunction with Whittier Food Not Bombs the same day which serves food the the hungry the first and third sunday of each month.
Bail-Out, Economic Democracy and the Socialist Path (tags)
David Schweickart, political philosopher, discusses the financial crisis, what it exposes about capitalism, how it can set the stage for economic democracy, and open the socialist path.
Pulling the plug won't mean the end of the world; there is an alternative. Let's do a Kevorkian on this rotten system.
The Bailout is a Crime. Demand Socialized Housing! (tags)
If we're going to buy the debt, we want the collateral.
Our GLOBAL ENLIGHTENMENT is LoveRockefeller Rothschild "Life-Game Shift", From & (tags)
People think that a banking or stock market collapse must be bad for everybody, but it's not. If you know a stock collapse is coming (because you are going to cause it)
The Homeless Move to Bushville. (tags)
This is what I have been watching the wires for, a report revealing the 21st. century Hooverville.
Terrorist attack May be cause of Wall Street downturn (tags)
The silence from the investigating camps could mean several things: Either terrorists are responsible for the puts on the listed stocks or others besides terrorists had foreknowledge of the trouble that was about to strike Wall Street or may have even contributed and used that knowledge to reap a nice financial harvest from the instability of the market place.
Bankruptcies Prohibited (tags)
Capitalism is a system based on debts and credit. To function, it needs trust, trust that banks will always meet their obligations. Fannie and Freddie could not do this any more. Alan Greenspan promoted market forces after extremely overrating them.
As Rome Burns, Nero Safe In His Tower, High Above the Flames, Sings Playing His Lyre (tags)
As Rome Burns To The Ground, Nero, Safe Is His Palace Tower High Above the Flames, Sings Gaely, Playing His Lyre, While Drunk on the Finest Greek Wine.
Nationalization of Freddie Mac (tags)
The Nationalization of the mortage industry by the government shows how easily the goverment can nationalize healthcare and other services. The steady now increased offensive by the bosses over the past 30 years is because of a failure of union leadership by throwing all their resources into funding the Democrats and supporting the "team" concept.
Biblical Sabbath Economy (tags)
Franz Segbers insists the Biblical Sabbath economy cares for the oikos, not speculation and accumulation When the right of speculation trumps the right of housing, we end up protecting the sharks from the sardines (cf "Housing as a Human Right")
Growth and Social Justice: Joseph Stiglitz (tags)
The trickle-down economy does not function. The left understands the market and rhe role the market can and should play in the economy. The right doesn't understand either. The Bush administration is nothing but the old corporatism in a new garment.
The Corporate State and the Welfare State (tags)
The idea of a "minimal state" may be passe. The author's two theses are: Liberalism is inconceivable without a strong state and liberalism undermines its own conditions of success. The modern welfare state is a child of democracy and can't be drowned in the bathtub.
The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis (tags)
The stock market- and real estate-bubble occur in advanced capitalism. The government response was to create a second bubble, the great bubble transfer. The real estate bubble crashed last summer. John Bellamy Foster teaches at the University of Oregon and is editor of Monthly Review.
Conservation, Conservation, Conservation! (tags)
We have lost our consumer control to the corporate dictatorships.
The Forgotten Priority of Labor Over Capital (tags)
Politics is responsible for a social market economy and its rules and structures. When the state is reduced to only setting the framework for competition and then appeals to the responsibility of individual entrepreneurs, one falls at once in a neoliberal trap.
Without Ethics the Economy Runs into the Wall (tags)
Only 27% of Germans think the population benefits when business does well. Only 40% believe the economy and the population sit in the same boat. With tendencies to screen itself socially and give priority to its own goals, the economy loses the important capital of trust.
Hunger, The Silent Tsunami (tags)
Rice, the main food for nearly half of the world's population, costs twice as much as in December. The economic policy of the World Bank forced on countries on account of neocolonial trade relations is responsible for the unproductivity, not only the traditional small farmer system.
Fannie, Freddie, Food and Fuel (tags)
The financial crisis deepens with the nationalization of IndyMac and the likely bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie May by the US taxpayer. The financial crisis has company as inflation, and in particular huge increases in global food and energy prices, enters the fray. The American economic model has been discredited and the American century has lasted but a few decades. These developments have and will further open up a new period in the struggle between capital and labor on the world stage and the US working class will have a major role to play as it re-connects with its militant traditions.
System criticism is often repressed. Private vice does not bring public virtue. Everyone pursuing self-interest does not usher in public welfare. Inequality, growth, competition and market fundamentalism are not panaceas or inevitabilities but false securities.
Hunger, GMOs and Speculation (tags)
Like many other countries, Kenya provided its own staple foods until the 1980s. Today the country imports 80% of its food. To buy up the entire grain harvest of the US, only $120 billion is needed-a small amount for speculators on currency market
Robert McChesney's The Political Economy of Media - Part II (tags)
Part II of McChesney's tour de force
Life is Gift, not Possession (tags)
In "Kaspar Hauser," Jacob Wassermann describes a town suffering under a long drought. With the wells dry, the town becomes enmeshed in violence and recrimination until a little boy plays so beautifully on his flute that water rises again in the wells.
Alternatives to Free Trade: Fair Trade and Beyond (tags)
The global debate around free-trade and its consequences has evolved tremendously in recent years, from tiny circles of leftist critics into a broad international protest movement. Although the movement began to bloom in response to the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the biggest demonstrations have been in response to the now-popular "bi-lateral" free-trade agreements that economically powerful countries sign with poorer nations. Once one has become conscious of the problems created by free-trade agreements, whether they are international or regional, an immediate task presents itself: finding a feasible alternative. Yes, the trade policy advocated by most big business politicians is "free-trade," and yes, this policy has had devastating consequences for working and poor people worldwide, while filling the already-full bank accounts of the rich. But the issue of "free-trade" alone isn't sufficient to fully explain the vast social problems that plague so many countries.
Crisis Populism and Rose-Colored Glasses (tags)
When it concerns socializing the losses of the financial disaster, the head of Deutsche Bank no longer believes in the "self-healing power of the market." The bankruptcy of neoliberalism is blatant.
Falling real interests, a weak dollar and an increasing demand from China led to a bubble on the market. In the long term, this bubble will burst.
Global Economic Meltdown (tags)
Financial Instability is Leading to an Economic Catastrophe
"A Crime against Humanity" (tags)
When you fill the tank of an ethanol car with 50 liters, you burn over 700 pounds of corn. A Zambian child could live a whole year from that. More regulation instead of more market access is vital for developing countries. A rebellion of conscience is needed.
Economic troubles are broad, deep and worrisome.
World Bank and IMF Policies Caused Food Crisis (tags)
The IMF changed its economic direction and took a market radical neoliberal economic course at the beginning of the 1980s with the rise of monetarism. Hunger inthe world can only be overcome with long-term sustainable strategies, not with the short-term horizon of Wall Street.
Will the Neoliberal Consensus Survive the Banking Crisis? (tags)
These are hard times for the neoliberal consensus whose message was forced worldwide for three decades by the ruling classes in the imperialist metropolises on free capital flows. Business data is a fetish constructed for the goal of profit maximization.
Robert Reich's "Super-Capitalism: How the Economy Undermines Democracy" (tags)
When everyone talks about stocks and consumption, what happens to social responsibility and public welfare? We suffer under a schizophrenia. The consumer in us opposes the worker. Businesses cannot be socially-responsible because they serve only one goal-maximization of profit.
Why Are Banks Failing, Mr. Giegold? (tags)
The crisis will cost massive job losses and strain public budgets. The policy of market opening that refuses social and ecological regulations is a disaster. We must raise new taxes. Closing the tax havens would also be desirable.
Sandbox Liberals Practice Damage Control: World Bank and IMF (tags)
The IMF and the World Bank are not self-critical. With their conditions on developing countries, these two institutions crafted the economic structures that led to today's disaster. The world economy functions according to the rules of power and profit logic.
The economy is not what they are saying!5 (tags)
"And another horror is that the stock market went up, which is Pretty Freaking Strange (PFS) since Barron’s reports that the earnings of the Dow Jones Industrials went down, dropping to $225.53 from $234.49. This has produced the unbelievable price-to-earnings ratio of 57! Earnings are going down, but the stocks are going up! To a P/E of 57! Un-freaking-believable!"
Shouting from the Caboose (tags)
Hope lies beyond Social Darwinism and hyper-individualism. As the end of cheap oil could be the beginning of real community, the end of everyday time could be the beginning of kairos time, the time of decision. Black is a new consciousnessness, not a skin color (Steve Biko)
Why Is Oil More Expensive? (tags)
The reason for the high price of oil is that specualtive capital after the eruption of the US real estate crisis in the summer of 2007 now wreaks its havoc in the oil- and other raw material sectors. Workers have a world to win whose contours can hardly be defined.
"We Believe, We Are What We Buy": Identity-Shopping (tags)
Happy Earth Day! That doesn't mean buy a Toyota Prius! Buying a Prius can be a substitute for sparing the environment. While capitalism, consumerism and commerce arenot evil, life is denatured when commerce is everything.
Workers Pay for Their own Impoverishment (tags)
A whole series of factors are combining to undermine the financial position of banks. None of this happened by chance. It is only to be expected that brokers should seize every opportunity to line their pockets. They use innovations to kid themselves they can abolish risk.
Militants slam lifting of rice import quotas (tags)
- Militant groups on Tuesday attacked President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s decision to lift rice import quota as a way to ease the rice shortage the country is reportedly experiencing. The farmers group Kilusang Mayo Uno said that removing the quota would benefit only the rice cartel, which KMP claims is behind the rice supply shortage and is allegedly manipulating prices. KMP chair Rafael Mariano explained that even with the quota of 300,000 metric tons of rice, the private sector only imported less than 10 percent of that volume over the past two years because of high world prices and local tariffs on imports.
"The workers who have to sell themselves bit by bit are a commodity like every other commercial article." This quotation from the 1848 Communist Manifesto is an accurate description of the current system which is morally sick and lacks consensus.
The greatest risks threaten through the crisis of the financial system, through further price increases for food, the sensitivity of global supply routes and the increasingly expensive sources of energy. 2008 could develop into a worldwide crisis year.
The Legal Criminality of Finance Capitalism (tags)
The market mechanism, the Keynesians say, is not efficient or balanced. Charles Ponzi was one of the greatest swindlers of American history. Instead of the capitalist economy holding the strings of politics, politics could use economic power to create new realities.
Giving, Forgiving and Sharing (tags)
The daily bread for "us" depends on all of us becoming free from debts. Jesus' Sermon on the Mount urges a change in power and change of the system. "You cannot serve God and mammon." The daily bread is lacking for many of us where money is the all-determining idol mammon.
Global Casino Capitalism (tags)
What began with cheap money for American homebuyers has expanded to the greatest financial market crisis since the war. The whole extent of bad credits with banks is not yet known, let alone the effects on the world economy.
A whole manager generation will have to be retrained or change its ideas. Life is measured in money by such people becaused they learned this as the ultimate truth in their training, not because they are immoral or amoral. Countries that once amassed dollars to buy oil are now unloading dollars to diversity their holdings.
Democracy and the WTO: Alternatives to Free Trade (tags)
Trade policies that benefit multinational corporations are undemocratic and promote exploding inequality. "The negotiations are carried out on a supra-national plane where democracy or civil society interests fall by the wayside."
Vivisection of Neoliberalism (tags)
"Therer is no such thing as society," said Margaret Thatcher. "The neoliberal understanding of democracy is marked by skepticism and open hostility." (Ptak) That market pressures are often more severe and oppressive is repressedf as long as possible.
The Subprime Tsunami Reaches the EU (tags)
Subprime mortgage credits in the US should not have been issued. Nevertheless subprime credits were extended in the volume of $1.3 trillion. An avalanche of expropriation roars in the valley. The banking crisis spills over into the credit system in the real economy.
Electing Canada as President (tags)
Ours is a brave new world where countries don't need dollars as in the past. Maybe we could accept our unparalleled life-and-death crisis from endless wars and melting dollar and affirm partnership and exchanging roles as we affirmed the total and absolute market
Socialists: Feds Offering Little for U.S. Economic Recovery (tags)
It is extremely unlikely that working people will benefit from the economic package presented by President Bush; millions of working people are presently behind on house payments, auto payments and are finding it difficult to pay monthly bills, including the cost for food, gas and fuel for home heating. Today, a majority of working class people are living from check to check and are struggling to keep up with the cost of living.
Welfare State in the Market Trap (tags)
"The crisis of the welfare state is a crisis in the heads of the economic and political elites. The welfare state is a political barrier against the marketing of human labor. The welfare state can be regained through democratic solidarity.. Today one farmer feeds 88 non-farmers."
European Central Bank pumps $500 bn into banking system (tags)
TO SUCCEED over the global credit crunch in aftermath of sub-prime crisis, the European Central Bank (ECB) has announced to grant a record double loan to its banks. The ECB has decided to pump 348.6 billion euros ($501.5 billion) into the banking system through its banks. Though lending to banks at 4.21% rate of interest is available only for two weeks, it is expected that the grant will boost the diminishing confidence of the bank.
"Not torturing is changed into an act of barbarism.. Torture, the atom bomb and the globalization strategy all save life. State terrorism presents itself as humanist realism, the only way of securing life. As a Chilean general said, national security is like love; there is never enough."
Bali: A Missed Opportunity (tags)
The gap between the urgent threat of global warming and the collective will to do something about it has never been greater. The recently concluded Conference on Climate Change in Bali was a grand opportunity to act. Instead, it was another missed opportunity. Unfortunately, the United States played a very negative role, standing in the way of consensus at every turn. And unfortunately, the rest of the world thought that seducing the US into a new agreement on climate action was top priority, resulting in a Bali Roadmap that was very sketchy.
profits from China; hightech, travel, outsourcing, auto, retail, politics, jobs, strategy (tags)
How do over a half million international companies make profits in China? How do Airbus, Dell, Wal-Mart, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Cisco, GM, Unilever perform there? What is really inside Chinese society, banking, management, outsourcing, education, politics, individual life? How to do investing, travel, trade inside China? Get on-ground investigations from provocative journalist George Zhibin Gu.
The Dollar and US Hegemony (tags)
The dollar devaluation since 2001 is a necessary adjustment for the twin US deficits, the national budget deficit and the foreign trade deficit. US imports are nearly double US exports. A drastic change of lifestyles is imperative where modesty and simplicity are encouraged.
The Chinese century: global competition, finance, politics, jobs, outsourcing, tech, law (tags)
Watch out on the next greatest empire! Why is China's economy and trade booming? What is really inside Chinese society, banking, management, outsourcing, education, politics, and daily life? How to do investing, travel, trade inside China? Talk to provocative thinker George Zhibin Gu.
Community Centers: Learning from O Canada! (tags)
The mosaic works in Vancouver, B. C. Community centers provide a buffer and cushion from the brutal and commodifying market. In happier days before Reagan and market fundamentalism, the Carnegie Center was bursting with activity, counseling, classes and circles.
Another Economy is Possible (tags)
The world economy increasingly has the character of a plutonomy, a wealth economy where the rich appropriate an ever larger share of the social wealth. Imagine an economy that serves justice, peace and creation, where competition and cooperation coexist and the future is safeguarded
Africa: The Next Defense Market Opportunity? (tags)
Low value. Corrupt. Aid-driven. Despite the odd exception like Algeria, and South Africa's indigenous defense industry, most people think of these terms when they think of the African defense market. Analyst firm Forecast International sees a different picture, however: "tomorrow's growth market for the global defense industry."
Santa Barbara Hosts Another Really Really Free Market (tags)
Sunday November 25 marked the 7th Really Really Free Market in Santa Barbara.
A Generalized Meltdown of Financial Institutions (tags)
By Mike Whitney 11/24/07 "ICH" -- - Reality has finally caught up to the stock market. The American consumer is underwater, the banks are buried in dept, and the housing market is in terminal distress. The Dow is now below its 200-Day Moving Average -- the first big "sell" signal. Anything below 12,500 could trigger program-trading and crash the market. The increased volatility suggests that we are watching a "real time" meltdown.
Imperial wars and genocide, Petrodollar Recycling System and meltdown of financial world (tags)
Imperial wars, crimes and genocide, Petrodollar Recycling System and meltdown of financial world order. Articles, analysis and video documentary
Criticism of Neoliberalism: Book Review (tags)
The neoliberal understanding of freedom restricts the possibilities of individuals to participation in the market. Structural and economic power are faded out.
Neoliberalism in Crisis (tags)
Liberation theology warns the future of the first world is the third world. Everyday time is replaced by kairos time, the time of decision, when lawlessness masks as lawfulness. The language of proclamation runs crossway to the language of time. Cast your net on the other side!
Rating Agencies and Prophets (tags)
Some think rating agencies inevitably take the side of their patrons - to the burden of those who buy these "financial products" in good faith in the objective judgment of the auditors. Of course, the agencies refuse liability.
A Hundred and Fifty Years Later and Marx Still Prevails (tags)
Marx Was Right But Don’t Tell Them
Social Economies and Political Conflicts (tags)
Most of our serious social, ecological and economic problems can only be solved bottom-up with the insight and will of concerned citizens. The challenge consists in a radical democratization of the economy. Otherwise we put the cart before the horse and bridle the horse by the tail.
U.S. Nuclear Weapons Being “Guarded” by Israel (tags)
American supporters of Israel were delighted to learn that an Israeli company, Magal Security Systems-owned in part by the government of Israel-is in charge of security for the most sensitive nuclear power and weapons storage facilities in the United States.
No matter what they say, the bourgeois cannot escape the fact that Marx's ideas still hold water after all these years. His analysis of the capitalist system, its laws and contradictions are as relevant today as they were 150 years ago. The serious journals of capitalism confirm this.
Submissiveness Toward the Finance Markets (tags)
Finance market transactions must be made more expensive. Finance market critics warn of a casino capitalism. Are businesses only objects of speculation for global invewstment capital?
"Capitalism and Freedom" Unmasked (tags)
The dark side of Milton Friedman's economics.
Greenspan's Dark Legacy Unmasked (tags)
Alan Greenspan's true record of public disservice.
Questions to the Maestro Alan Greenspan (tags)
Listen to Thom Hartmann interview Alan Greenspan on Air America Monday Sept 24. Greenspan was responsible tor the credit problems that now shake the world finance markets. Did the maestro drastically lower interest rates to help the Bush administration?
Reviewing Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" (tags)
The human wreckage of disaster capitalism.
The Future of Work-driven Society (tags)
When less and less time needs to be spent working for a living in Western industrialised countries, this partial freedom of gainful occupation is increasingly becoming a problem for those dismissed. The vision of working less and living longer is a utopia that is also realistic.
On the "Wealth Creation" of the Financial Sector (tags)
My counter-thesis is that a huge waste of economic resources occurs in the area of financial services. Competitive games, the worldwide casino and the invention of securities bundling rotten mortgages are not productive achievements of the capital market.
Real Estate Crisis in the US (tags)
Credit failures in the real estate business threaten the whole payment system between banks, private businesses and households handled through short-term credits..The US real estate crisis affects other economic sectors and countries and cal also lead to a shift in class relations.
Deregualtion and liberalization have contributed to the present chaos. Through deregualtion and internationalization, getting into and out of investments as fast as lightning becomes possible.
ON "POTEMKIN VILLAGES" IN IRAQ (tags)
COMMENTARY
Billions Dissolve in Thin Air (tags)
While the political class practices faith healing, all the participants know the end is coming when more speculative bubbles burst. The popular dogma that financial markets and the world economy are more efficient when deregulated and liberalized is over.
Beware of Falling Bankers! (tags)
Like the car, our sacred cow that is not discussed, speculation and prosperity based on credit are taboo subjects. The system is corrupt and its answers wrong. Will we mend our own pockets as China closes its wallet? Critical thinking, culture shock, alternative economic and Jesus' parables can be new beginnings.
The Coupon Clippers Get A History Lesson From One Of Their Own (tags)
Bourgeois theoreticians take measures to assure their class that the present crisis will pass. "Do not panic" is the message. Good times will return and the robbery can go on. Time for a history lesson.
Privatization Endangers Democracy (tags)
Neoliberal hegemony or market radicalism is a danger for democracy because economic mechanisms replace politics. Neoliberals change the understanding of justice in society. The less generous the social benefits, the more powerful must be its security machine.
BILLIONS IN PUT OPTIONS PURCHASED BETTING THAT THE MARKET WILL CRASH BY 9-21 (tags)
You can see why banks are running scared...they know the bottom can fall out at any moment. I'd suggest keeping minimal deposits in banks and holding on to cash.
Market Efficiency Hokum (tags)
Debunking the myth that free markets work best.
BLUEPORT MURDUCK TARGET MKT INDICES for the POOR (tags)
The BLUEPORT MURDUCK TARGET MARKET INDEX is intended to guide globalist investors both new, large, and small (the poor) toward more international dateline focused opportunities based on need, then greed, during expected growth cycles based on 21st century, fox-like information distribution processes, crystal balls, and dart throws on a shoestring. BMTMI is a soley owned enterprise interested in MONEY and is a grassroots superpower tool.
The present economic crisis has the capitalist class calling for state intervention again. They claim another bout of memory loss, they simply "forgot" the business cycle exists.
Who Profits From the Crash? (tags)
A criminal corruption on the highest planes is at the heart of the assets transfer. Every few decades, the real owners of the world arrange an economic crisis to steal the assets of the people. The incredible sum of $325 billion was injected into the financial system within a few days.
David Walker, comptroller general, warns of impending crisis (tags)
Learn from the fall of Rome, the US is warned. There were striking similarities between America's current situation and the factors that brought down Rome including declining moral values, an over-confident and over-extended military and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.
Stock Market Meltdown - First Signs of Global Economic Rout
HELICOPTER BEN UNLEASHES DOLLAR HYPERINFLATION (tags)
Washington DC – August 12, 2007 – By deciding to ante up $38 billion for a hopeless bailout of predatory Wall Street hedge funds and the banks that stand behind them, Federal Reserve Chairman Helicopter Ben Bernanke has placed the bankrupt US dollar on a direct course towards the precipice of hyperinflation.-
A "Slow Motion Train Wreck" (tags)
Financial market turmoil and the Federal Reserve increases it
Really Really Free Market (tags)
Santa Barbara's 3rd Really Really Free Market draws in the community to participate in an experimental alternative economy based on gift giving and mutual aid.
From the Market of Religions to the Religion of the Market (tags)
The democratic order became concrete as a form of the market. While a secular state forms around the market, the market ceases being merely profane. The market as a fate religion accepts and rejects like a Calvinist God,
Competition and the Legal System (tags)
Competition is not always a fountain of economic development..Certain academic findings are dangerous for the functioning of norm systems. The critic becomes the delinquent. Several wicked mosquitos may be criticized, not mosquitos in general.
The Underrated Power of Economists (tags)
During the Great Depression between the two world wars, the Brit John Maynard Keynes came to an insight that was implemented in the 1960s. The state must guide the economy by its spending to avert the danger of depression.
The big brother from the North misled the South.. The slogan "More Market, Less State" is losing a few old friends in Europe.. What is changing is the discourse, the eulogy of the market and its possibilities.
The Neoliberal Catechism (tags)
Turning away from the state causes old age poverty and endangers life and limb.. The consequences of privatization are faded out in the US and Germany.. Defining freedom as only entrepreneurial freedom and freedom of capital can be easily veiled.
Who Frees Us From Capital? (tags)
Whole continents bowed to the Washington Consensus..The World Bank must end its embittered attack on distribution policy.. Privatization awakened false hopes.. Evo Morales in Bolivia nationalized the oil and gas economy and raised the monthly minimum wage to $100.
Basic Income Creates Trust (tags)
No life of luxury would be possible with the basic income. People in paid work would always be financially privileged by the promotion prospects..The protestant work ethic does not aim at persons only motivated by material reward.
Financial Guru Julian Robertson : We have problems! (tags)
He has predicted every economic cycle, every debacle, every bull market, and every bear market. Of course, he´s a very old man now. But his reputation on the Street is like nothing you could imagine. When the segment of his interview was through, his comments alone took the Dow Jones down 50 points. Just on his comments alone. That's how powerful this man's reputation is.
Your house at zero cost (tags)
Today there are many people speculating in real estate as they did in the stock market. Buy something and wait for the market to go up and then sell.
"Capitalism is not the solution" (tags)
Attac turns against the unjust sides of globalization. We need the contagious power of the ideas of freedom, justice and equality. The last European revolution in 1989 succeeded despite dictatorial conditions.
Do We Need a New Social System? (tags)
Only half of all employees today (in Germany) enjoy the old standard job.. The erosion of normal working conditions has been underway since the middle of the 1970s.. The basic income is the answer to the precariousness of working conditions.
Taxes and Finance Capital: Back to the Feudal State (tags)
Taxes are the corrective to the furious free market. They safeguard the public interest, redistribution, public functions and services..For the oligarchs, tax is a confiscation and tax officials are highway robbers.. Tax reductions for the rich are the direrct cause of the debility of community.
The Market is a Universal Totalitarian Religion (tags)
Money replaces God and has become our new religion, a universal totalitarian religion that never existed before.. Commodification of goods is more important than the goods themselves.
ASSI MARKET WORKERS WIN $1.475 MILLION SETTLEMENT (tags)
After four years of litigation, heated community protests, and on-and-off-again settlement talks, Assi Super, Inc. owner Daniel Sung Chul Rhee and his former employees have agreed to settle the workers' class action lawsuit alleging unpaid overtime wages and racial discrimination and harassment for $1.475 million.
Harassment of South Central Farmers Continues (tags)
Eleven months after local authorities evict the South Central Farmers from the largest urban garden in the United States, harassment by the City continues.
US Locomotive Losing Steam (tags)
In 2006 after the crash of the New Economy boom, we are again witnessing irrational excess in the credit system and in the prices of assets and property titles.
De-industrialization reduces the long-term wealth-formation of broad sectors of the population. An extremely high indebtedness of private households also contributes to the disastrous total deficit of the US.
as traders jump
The Big Meltdown: PAUL KRUGMAN - Financial Crisis; Democrats seek more war funds than Bush (tags)
KRUGMAN: If we’re going to have a financial crisis, here’s how it will play out. THE COMPLETE ARTICLE AND MORE
Chinese multinationals, trade and politics: challenges, opportunities, globalization (tags)
learn the deeper issues about globalization, China and world development
Health Reform: Turning from the Solidarity Principle (tags)
Neoliberal economic and labor market policy, stagnating working income and continuing mass unemployment have withered the extent of employment paying into social security.. The next financing crisis of health insurance is pre-programmed.
Full Speed Against the Wind (tags)
"Whoever believes in continous growth in a finite world is either mad or an economist." (Kenneth E. Boulding)
Capitalism and Corruption (tags)
Until recently, the bribes paid by German firms abroad were deducted from the corpor-ation tax as operating expenses..The neoliberal dogma doesnt need any religion since it makes capitalism into a religion.. The cult of abstract riches cannot replace morality Mergers and takeovers are central.
Chinese entrepreneurship, politics and globalization (tags)
Learn about China and globalization
Full Employment as a Grand Delusion (tags)
The third labor market isnot a panacea. However it is the only possibility for bringing a large number of persons into meaningful employment..Whoever wants to stop right-wing extremists must take the bottom out of their arguments and expand the labor market
Governing against the People (tags)
The dream of 1989 that democracy and capitalism can be reconciled fades.. Elected governments orient their decisions in trans-national groups and global finance markets.
Optimism in the Kingdom of Phantasies (tags)
The credit-financing of the worldwide takeover batlles has built a gigantic bankrupt-cy potential in the private equity funds that can lead to a chain reaction in 2007. The hard landing of the consumer economy in the US seems programmed.
More Employment through a Different Distribution (tags)
More employment comes through reduced working hours and public investments more than tax subsidies. The state has destroyed jobs. The global attack of neoliberalism has gravely damaged the democratic welfare state.
Brazil: To whom belongs the future? (tags)
In socially mature countries , consolidated and really sovereign, the prospections of the future are made by groups of university thinkers, of governmental and enterprise institutions, as well as groups associated to national NGOS.
Lies and deceit behind condo-conversion scheme (tags)
Lies and deceit have been a driving force behind the latest proposals to weaken Oakland's condo-conversion protections!
Warning: You Are About To Enter The 4th Dimension Of Your Life. (tags)
This is about the truly astonishing story of a commodity trader of Swiss-Iranian and Baha'i origin (see www.bahai.org) who has sought refuge in the United States since 2000 and who is the object of an incredible conspiracy by the Swiss banks and other very powerful actors against him, in order to destroy him personally and professionally with the objective to prevent his democratic plans for world unity and economic justice from ever materializing. You can now access his new modest homepage at Geocities for more information.
Congress on Solidarity Economy (tags)
Solidarity economy is part of a strategy against neoliberal exactions. Economic self-help must not be used as a social fig leaf for the continued neoliberal reorganization of society.
Justice cancels auction of Brazilian oil. (tags)
In the sixth round, about 3,3 billion barrels were“sold” for approximately 1/500 of its value of market.
Reforming or Dismantling the Welfare State (tags)
The neoliberal residual state is more a criminal than a welfare state..The welfare state that has constitutional rank in Germany is now without intrinsic value for neoliberals and subject to the location logic of economic and power interests.
Theologians of the Market Economy (tags)
Mandeville's thesis that private vices often change inadvertently into collective virtues as a bee collaborates in building a beehive is a literary construction. The market in Smith's explanation is nothing but a religious paradox.
Economist Milton Friedman dies at 94 (tags)
Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who advocated an unfettered free market and had the ear of three U.S. presidents, died Thursday at age 94.
provocative book: China and the new world order (tags)
A fast developing China is creating vast opportunities. Learn how half million international businesses and investors conduct business in China.
Every School as a Small Business (tags)
The Bertelsmann foundation reorganizes German schools according to market criteria. A privatization of the political is occurring worldwide today.. Bertelsmann keeps a tight reign on public libraries, schools and universities through performance standards and control instruments.
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A symbol of American manufacturing’s decline: Ford to slash 44,000 jobs (tags)
Ford Motor Company on Friday announced a plan to drastically downsize its North American operations, cutting about a third of its salaried employees and offering buyouts to all of its hourly workers in the United States. The move—an acceleration and intensification of the company’s “Way Forward” plan announced in January—is aimed at cutting annual operating costs by $5 billion.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav:Did aljazeera.com plagiarize me ? (tags)
Hmmm,seems more like plagiarism than coincidence to me.The phrase,'appear more of a political prostitute and hypocrite rather than the morally upright ' Orthodox '..is almost identical to my indymedia article right down to 'Orthodox' in parenthesis as if cut and paste from my indymedia posts !
Impeachment as a System Remedy (tags)
The thief came to steal, kill and destroy, the Son came that we might have life in abundance.. If faith can move mountains, it can move an accidental president to retirement and save the planet.
Public Transit Could Transform The Quality Of Life For Workers And The Environment (tags)
Having destroyed it once, public transit, like health care and education, is a service that US capitalism is incapable of providing its citizens.
Counter the G8 + 5 Climate Summit! October 3-4 in Mexico City: CLIMATE JUSTICE NOW! (tags)
On Tuesday, October 3 in Mexico City, the Energy and Environment Ministers from the "Group of Eight" (G8) industrialized countries are scheduled to begin negotiating a climate change deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. They will be joined by Energy and Environment Ministers from the five "emerging" countries of Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Mexico. All together, these "G8 + 5" countries represent 58% of the world's human population, 61% of oil consumption, 80% of coal consumption, and 73% of C02 emissions.
Report Back: South Central Farmers 2nd Day in Court. (tags)
Attorneys for the farmers and the attorneys for the Horowitz and the city made their opening statements today to Judge Helen Bendix of the Los Angeles Superior Court.
All Eyes on San Bernardino (tags)
Xenophobic measure will affect more than just the undocumented
TAKE BACK THE FARM Actions for this weekend June 23-25 (tags)
TAKE BACK THE FARM Actions for this weekend June 23-25
ALEXANDER PROPOSING HOME BANK LEASING (tags)
Stewart Alexander wants to make home ownership available to everyone and he says the way to accomplish this is to offer Home Bank Leasing. His idea is similar to the automobile leasing programs that General Motors and Ford Motor Company began offering in the mid 1990’s. Now Alexander says Home Bank Leasing is the future way to make home ownership affordable and the needed boost for the housing market.
Brazilian government's decree allows increasing of foreign participation in the papers of (tags)
The Bank of Brazil will be a little less of Brazil, in the Stock exchange of São Paulo, thanks to plus an controversial decision of the petist government, totaly converted to the dogmas of international economic neolibertinism - same pathology that acomete the Toucans.
The Enron verdicts: corruption and American capitalism (tags)
The guilty verdicts handed down by a Houston jury last week against former Enron chiefs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling provide an opportunity to evaluate the significance of the company’s rise and fall within the context of American capitalism. Accounts by jurors given after the verdicts were announced indicate they all agreed that the evidence against the two executives was overwhelming. It consisted mainly of testimony from over a dozen former executives, who implicated Lay and Skilling for their roles in defrauding investors and employees through various forms of accounting manipulation. The jurors quickly rejected the absurd position of the defense that Enron was basically a healthy company that collapsed into bankruptcy in December 2001 largely as the result of Wall Street machinations and negative press coverage.
by Steve Leighton A counter view to the Fair Trade Debate
Shameless Commerce: US Policy Towards China and Taiwan (tags)
Bush’s passion for “exporting democracy” doesn’t apply where U.S. corporations think there’s money to be made in a repressive dictatorship.
EZLN announces new red alert (tags)
As of the afternoon of May 3, Subcommandante Marcos of the EZLN (National Zapatista Army of Liberation) announced during a public act in Mexico City a new red alert and closure of Zapatista caracoles and suspension of activities of La Otra Campaña, which has now become a struggle to support the people of Texcoco, who for the past two days have been experiencing severe government repression.
insightful book: power & limits of China (tags)
A Chinese journalist gives a new picture about a changing China and its evolving relations with the world.
A Week in the Life of Globalization (tags)
Wages are under pressure and cost advantages need not be passed on to consumers.. Under the pressure of location competition, Germany has lmassively lowered the profit tax and the top ncome tax.
Capital Needs a Counterveiling Power (tags)
Functionless profits do not lead to more investments..The market, competition and profit are not ends in themselves. The economy exists for people, not vice versa.
Liberation Theology and Globalization (tags)
Economic globalization leads to the exclusion of the masses..When world hunger increases, we must change the nature of the world economy to survive..We are all enslaved by a paradigm that makes us enemies of nature.
The Land Needs a New Vision (tags)
In capitalism, production is for the market instead of for satisfying needs..The postulate `Work as cheap as possible and at the worst possible conditions' leadsus back to the 19h century. We are far removed today from the watchword More Time for Living and Loving'.
WHAT THE PRICE OF GOLD MAY BE TELLING US (tags)
A political commentary on why gold prices are rising.
Memorandum 2005: Alternative Economic Policy (tags)
In Germany and the US, the corporation is often stylized as the suffering servant. The market is made sacrosanct; all problems are defined as interferencs with the market. Profits soar and investments fall. Corporations pay increasingly less tax.
DUTY- FREE, México City´s Free Trade Agreement (tags)
Hey man, enough with articles that criticize street vendors. We´re all in it together. What´s the big deal? Don´t have any money? Go out and sell something. Don´t have a steady job? What do you want it for? It´s a drag dealing with the boss, bad pay, and lousy hours. On the street, you are the king or improvisation.
Porter Goss: CIA Cyber and stock fraud ops damaged by leaks ? (tags)
Ionatron that was a CIA investment that was 'touted' or promoted over the internet to increase demand and price of its shares that the CIA employee-investors then dumped on the market thus decreasing other investors share price,basically defrauding them...If the CIA wishes to use 911 to promote lesser civil liberties from now into the future perhaps they should at least pledge not to invest in and thus tamper with our stock markets.
Report: Housing Will Slow, Claiming 800,000 Jobs (tags)
LOS ANGELES -- A sustained decline will hit the U.S. housing market next year, costing the nation as many as 800,000 jobs, according to a new economic report released Wednesday.
The Mayab - the land of the Mayans.
Today's internationalization of capital is part of a drastic crisis process.. In the 1970s, several hundred so-called multis existed worldwide. Today there are 60,000 multi-national businesses with 50 million employees.
The Work Society and the Work Religion (tags)
Work is only a part or fragment of life. Where it becomes everything as a steamroller or religion, it leads to idiotism where social questions and reproduction are ignored.
The “Free Market”: The Greatest Terror Of All (tags)
The economic system of production we live in is called capitalism or the free market. We are supposed to be fortunate because we are free to starve to death amidst abundance. This form of social organiztion has not existed for all time and need not exist in the future. The first step in eliminating it is accepting this simple idea.
Ice Cold Market Turns Red Hot Thanks to Global Warming (tags)
One brave company sees an upside to the downside of global warming and offers investors an opportunity to cash in on climate change.
Is NSA Spying a Case of China Business Blowback? (tags)
Capitalism isn’t bringing freedom to China, but it does seem to be bringing totalitarian control systems back from China to the U.S. courtesy of American business.
Against the Neoliberal "Modernization" of the Labor Market (tags)
he predicted employment effects of the neoliberal strategy do not go beyond expanding low-wage sectors and under-employment.
Possible counter-measures against structural mass unemployment and an army of marginalized working poor are well-known: public investment programs, a legal minimum wage and redistribution of labor through reduced working hours.
China's global reach: book excerpt (tags)
Huge development in China.
China's global reach (book excerpts) (tags)
China's fast growth vs international multinationals
James Angel,Georgetown:Charles Schwab Chooses NASDAQ Because It's More Corrupt. (tags)
James Angel earlier this year even made a video infomercial for what appears to be a criminal stock manipulation group whose only 'official' address as it turned out was a lap dance club in Las Vegas called the Cheetah Club !!! The only lap dance club to ever be investigated by the FBI under the Patriot Act......
No Room for Grace: Book Review (tags)
If abundance of life for all people is the heart of the biblical vision, economic thinking focuses on the shortage of resources.. Not subjecting everything to the market-benefit-calculus is vital.
The fianncial markets, the fifth branch, are probably the most important markets today. Many remain excluded from this time- and space compression. Most people are barred from the advantages of globalization like greater mobility and improved communication
Humane Freedom and the Free Market (tags)
"MOre free market is a social-political program involving a redistribution of power and money - in favor of a few special interests of the already rich and powerful.."
Competition is not a Natural Law (tags)
Instead of working out and overcoming the causal problems, people put a veil of the fun society over the whole-as in the times of Rome..Ideologues elevate the principle of competition into a natural law to immunize the market econmy from all criticism.
Since unemployment has reached an unparalleled dimension under the combination of increased productivity, global wage dumping, weakened unions and non-existent system competition, I prefer a radical redistribution of work and income.
Where would we really find the principal danger to civil liberty in a republic? Not in the governors as governors, not in the governed as governed, but in the governed unequipped to function as governors. The chief enemies of republican freedom are mental sloth, conformity, bigotry, superstition, credulity, monopoly in the market of ideas, and utter, benighted ignorance.
"The Market Has No Heart": Paul Samuelson (tags)
A post-Katrina economics must emphasize parallel worlds, solidarity and human dignity to safeguard long-term necessities and creativity. If all countries only become more competitive, mass unemployment will result. What is public must remain public.
Cal Housing Bubble May Burst Soon (tags)
The basic rule of thumb that if you cannot afford to itemize deductions on your income tax form, you cannot afford a house is as true today as ever. A house is just forced savings and if you do not need the tax write-off, you are better off renting. The World Socialist Website has a good analysis of the pending bubble burst of the California housing market, which means now is a good time to sell if your house is not a tax writeoff.
Political and Spiritual Corruption (tags)
Hope is what sets us apart from the rest of creation. We can go beyond everything past and present in the power of the coming, the power of the promise. This was Jurgen Molt-mann's discovery in a British prisoner of war camp in World War II.
There's an explanation for all this (tags)
“It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow--the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more...Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people except this reality.” (Business Week 10-12-74.)
"Unfortunately some market fundamentalists are at work in the EU who denounce every-thing the state does to protect public goods as distortion of competition.. The globalized market shatters balance of public & private.."
A Second Economy: Overcoming the Hurricane of Unemployment (tags)
"One of the problems since the so-called turn of 1989 is that the market is regarded as an ultimate natural law. The whole world was required to transform their economies into market economies.."
Uncontrolled capitalism proved to be a completely wrong track toward the end of the 19th century. The governing church of work does everything so people only have time and strength for two things in life: work and job-hunting. The 30-hour work week could be a life-giving goal.
"The Chinese have a strong national pride and are annoyed over American impairments of what they consider their sovereign rights including the Taiwan problem. They rightly view Washington's conduct as hegemonial.."
"New networks arise that support people without locking them in a cage.. We need positive freedom, the freedom to something..For that we must create new institutions. We may not return to the old.."
Literacy in Economic Questions (tags)
The neoliberal total market was created through political strategies, above all the installation of dictatorships by the secret service and military interventions of the US, not through democracy.."
Purgatory of the Market (tags)
"The new capitalism is also a totalitarian movement that cannot or will not rest until it has seized the whole world and put everything in private hands that previously was subject to state or civil control.."
Disinformation as a Strategy of Power (Part II) (tags)
"Perpetual growth is not possible in nature or anywhere else..Globalization, the free market with its absolute competition protected by the WTO agreements doesn't have anything to do with fair competition...A global network of resistance is developing.."
Economic Treason - What Kind of Country Destroys the Job Market for Its Own Citizens? (tags)
author: PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, CounterPunch, July 15, 2005 - The June payroll jobs report did not receive much attention due to the July 4 holiday, but the depressing 21st century job performance of the US economy continues unabated.
Disinformation as a Strategy of Power (tags)
"What caused this development? How could an economic system be built where ever-larger parts of the population are excluded from sharing in growth? ..In neoliberalism, the person is not regarded as a person but downgraded to mere labor power.."
Europe and the Power of Capital (tags)
"The economic form of neoliberalism is based on political decisions, not practical economic necessities.. Only the democratic nation state can show the economy its place entitling it to exist for people and not vice versa.."
Constitutional State without Human Rights (tags)
"A kind of worldwide dictatorship of the national security of the US is to be established..This policy of the worldwide totalization of markets abolishes a large part of human rights.."
Speculations on Future US Policy (tags)
Without any concessions, Condoleezza Rice suggested that gulfs could be bridged and cooperation with Europe promoted. Her sneer made it seem: cooperation on our conditions. Many factors will stop the "arrogance of power" (Sen Fulbright).
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Economism, Economic Ethics and Donations (tags)
Economism is the great ideology of our time. It claims that (1) resisting the market is impossible and (2) submitting to the market is best for everyone. Both are not true. Embedding the market in principles of useful-ness to life has a priority as an ordering task.
Shock without Therapy, Market without Order, (tags)
Half of Russia's assets are gone. Was this caused by Yeltzin, the IMF or the Washington Consensus? This article by a Ukrainian novelist tells us that the end of history and victory capitalism are over as utopias. May we be summoned to serious reflection.
Economic Growth as Myth and Sickness by Marc Batko (tags)
We are called to be subjects, to struggle for equal opportunities and the minimum essentials of life. Our gifts and talents, hidden, ignored or buried by the neoliberal steamroller, can be rediscovered as we reclaim self-determination.
Economic Growth Alone Cannot Solve Social Problems (tags)
One of the central questions of this century is: How will we deal with the losers of this economic dynamic so we don't ignore their status as free citizens?.. No country has ever solved social problems by means of economic growth alone.
Freedom according to the Stock Market (Gunter Grass) (tags)
"Our freely elected delegates are not free int heir decisions..Profit maximization is passed off as a basic value instead of the social obligation of property..Democracy perishes, not the state.."
"Managers Do Not Only Serve Shareholders" (tags)
"It is not legitimate to exploit every conceivable outsourcing chance. It is not legitimate to declare jobs superfluous to realize double-digit profits.. Profit cannot be the only maxim of good entrepreneural conduct.."
Economists on China: Silence of the Scams (tags)
Conservative economists worship the market, but don’t like to talk about China, where state control over capital allocation and rigid controls on currency exchange rates have produced a record rate of economic growth.
The market assumes control more and more while social policy is driven down with the argument of "personal responsibility." Growing impoverishment and social exclusion of ever-larger groups are the inexorable consequences.
Hybrid Car Market Booming (tags)
A couple clips from a mainstream media story.
Opposing the European Rage of Privatization (tags)
Telecommunications, postal service, gas and transportation were the first public sectors that fell victim to the rage of unbridled liberalization..A drastic structural change of the state has occurred from a producing to a guaranteeing state.
Pope Was Right But Did Wrong (tags)
“Wealth should not be accumulated for its own sake. It should not be gained by injustice or oppression. Wealth often leads to covetousness. It belongs to God, not to us; we are simply stewards. We sin if we do not use it to help the poor, the weak, and the oppressed (Ezek. 22:29)
Representatives of orthodox market theory are not weary emphasizing that the causes of crises only refer to economic errors in the afflicted countries. This 1988 Austrian warning calls us to resist the ideology of market fundamentalists.
Every search for alternatives must question the "great narratives" of the free market, efficiency, competition and entrepreneurship. Economic laws could be analyzed as social constructions and economic models as social models.
Poverty, Market Fundamentalism and the Media (tags)
In the 90s as poverty and distress deepened, the media turned away..The media like the World Bank can't understand the causal link between extraordinary affluence and miserable poverty..The media treats poverty as an event but poverty is a process.
Poems for Another World (tags)
The world, nature, women and the impoverished South cry for an alternative where workers are more than cost factors, where all persons share in the social wealth and where profit is no longer worshiped.
Greenspan: Why is Anyone Still Listening to this Partisan Hack? (tags)
He’s a schill for the President, collects full Social Security benefits and a $200,000 salary, stands to collect another $100,000 a year in federal retirement benefits, and he wants to cut your Social Security benefits! Why should anyone listen to a guy with his lousy trackrecord as an economic and stockmarket forecaster anyway?
Attny Gen. Spitzer Pulls the Pants Down on Mega-Corps (tags)
This speech was given by Mr. Spitzer at the National Press Club on 1/31/05
The End of Globalization (tags)
The economy ought to serve humanity; humanity should not serve the econmy. Beware the neoliberal idolization of growth and competition! If growth becomes a law, ecological collapse is unavoidable. If com-petition is made absolute, mass unemployment will occur everywhere.
The government must act when entrepre-neurial rationality leads to undesired results. Who else can act? The government must renew the jobs program.. The capitalist world economy is in an over-production crisis. Businesses ..are part of social life.
Self-determination means market determination.. Flexibility has nothing to do with individual sovereignty. Rather it means being completely delivered up to external demands. The flexibility of the person is nothing but the dictation of the market.
Glatt Market Immigrant Workers Struggle for Justice After Tolerating Sweatshop Conditions (tags)
Grocery workers working in the Pico-Robertson at Glatt Market were often paid less than minimum wage and not paid overtime or given adequate breaks. Recently, their store burnt down, and not they are demanding justice from their employer along with community members and anti-capitalist activists.
Hard Landing of the Dollar (tags)
The decline of the US dollar signals the economic weakness of the superpower and the structural crisis of capitalism. Since 1985 the US has become heavily indebted fo foreign countries. This foreign indebtedness amounts to 35 percent of the GDP.
Diverting our taxes into wealthy Republicans' portfolios is the American way: making the rich get richer.
Globalization and the Social State (tags)
The economy exists for people, not vice versa. The economy needs a framework offering orientation to economic actors and showing the limits of the tolerable. This framework is not a limitation of freedom but the necessary condition for success..
Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization (tags)
All the alternatives begin with resistance agaisnt the neoliberal globalization that is increasingly aggressive and openly violent. The essential levers are redistribution from top to bottom and an economic policy promoting employment.
Paid Work and Basic Income (tags)
The goal of basic income advocates is to neutralize capitalism in one of its central premises: the generalziation of paid labor as the only or at least dominant path of securing existence. The future would be brighter if this were on the agenda.
Hang on to Your Waqllet! Don't Let Them Touch Social Security! (tags)
The administration and congress are pushing a huge scam, claiming Social Security is in trouble and needs to be destroyed in order to save it. Don’t believe a word of it. After all, when’s the last time you can remember a Republican doing anything nice for a poor person voluntarily?
The Economy of the Plundered South (tags)
The panacea of export orientation that the IMF and the World Bank promoted in the last 25 years for the South has led to absoute disaster..There is an alternative, abandoning export orientation and strengthening domestic demand.
Palmdale, Ca 11/26 - Truly Free Market (tags)
A beautiful fall day, provided us with a perfect backdrop this past Friday, when local community members converged on Courson Park to give and take various items at the "Truly Free Market" including; clothes, mattresses, food, electronics, children's toys, pots and pans, books, and various other items of use.
E-Day: The Collapse of the Oil Lie (tags)
For a long time the oil market has functioned according to the laws of the monopoly game with players in Riad, Washington and Houston.. Only 50% of the necessary oil will be available in 8 years in 2012..
When the social contract, the social compromise between labor and capital, is scorned, people become wolves to one another.. The dance around the golden calf is already a disaster..
Iraqi oil is lost to the world market. Instead of the rosy promises of the neoconservatives who wanted to turn Iraq into America's private gas station, the opposite is happening.. The whole world has to pay for the disappeared oil on account of US crimes against Iraqis.
Antelope Valley (truly) Free Market - call for support (tags)
This is a call out for support by anyone who can either 1) make it up to the AV for November 26 and lend (Wo)man power 2) Support us with actual items for the Free Market or 3) Help us with any and all information or ideas you may have that will help us with this event.
AFL-CIO Leadership are Responsible for Defeats (tags)
With no serious alternative to Schwarzenegger, and with their support of the Team Concept, California's labor leaders have nothing to say to their members as usual.
The American Way: Short Poem (tags)
This short poem, "The American Way," was written in response to a comment made by Brit Hume on Fox News Sunday, September 16, 2001. Hume said that people who questioned the possible underlying motives of the 911 attacks were "un-American."
Confessions of an Anarchist Tech-Stock Speculator (tags)
The big tech-stock bubble of the 1990s was starting to sag just a little bit in the spring of 2000, when I sat down for lunch with a former coworker named Phil in a diner in midtown Manhattan. After a lot of catching up, we got onto what was still the big topic for all kinds of people who should have known better: the stock market.
Cuts to Social Security (tags)
Greenspan warns cuts to Social Security may be “abrupt and painful”
INVASION OF SOCIAL SECURITY (tags)
BUSH DECLARES"OWNERSHIP SOCIETY"TELLS CONVENTION HE’S ORDERED INVASION OF SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND
Social Security is Not for Sale (tags)
The market is a tool effective after fundamental political questions are answered: What kind of society do we want? Are education, health care, housing, water and land public goods or privileges?
Education is not a Commodity for Trade (tags)
"Educational policy can and must bring light into globalization.. The world is no longer as simploe as in biblical times when the traders could be simply chased from the temple. Education must remain master in its own house.. Education is not a commodity.."
"The Young Must Have a Chance" (tags)
"The whole financial regime between the country, territories and communities is out of order. The communes were sacrificed on the altar of tax reform. Enough money is there.. Lengthening working hours in a time of weak growth and high unemployment is absurd.."
Assi Workers Seek Settlement (tags)
Two years into the boycott suspended employees of Assi Market in Korea town have offered to settle out of court rather than continue with a million plus dollar law suit. Vi a spokesperson for Korean Immigrant Workers Advocate and the Immigrant Workers Union stated, “It Makes sense to settle, because if we don’t settle now we’re just going to get tied up in the courts. So it makes sense on both sides to settle, but sometimes Assi does things that don’t make sense ”.
ENRON and Weather Control (tags)
WHAT THE ENRON RIPOFF WAS REALLY ALL ABOUT...
"After reading stacks of documents from the investigations and talking to energy experts, I found more smoking guns in California's energy crisis than in a Clint Eastwood movie, and none of them have Ken Lay's prints on them." -- Kathryn Jones, 2001
Brave New World of Work: The Political Economy of Insecurity (tags)
"The utopia of the free market has an unintentional upshot: the Brazilianization of the West.. What is most remarkable is the new similarity of development profiles, the incursion of the precarious, intermittent, fluffy and unsanctioned in the Western bulwarks.."
The Icy Normality of Hunger (tags)
"World agriciulture in its present state of development could feed 12 billion persons.. The daily silent genocide of hunger that occurs in icy normality is not a fate. People are responsible.. For Rousseau, there was no natural law of capital.."
Secondary Illiterates: The Crisis of Education in Western Industrial Countries (tags)
"Euroepan literacy and the schooling of society were not generous civilizing gifts to people but part of that process described as `inner colonialization'..Infrastructural institu-tions are not market enterprises but overall social conditions for the market economy.."
America's Job Wonder is Pure Statistics (tags)
"Everything is only marketing.. The new statistical methods only help marketing to keep the high deficits in the US finacable. The data does not reflect reality in the US.. America wrestles with a so-called double deficit.."
Building Bridges Radio -Modest Job Gains Insufficient, America Must Do More (tags)
BUILDING BRIDGES RADIO presents this 27 minutes radio program. TO LISTEN CLICK ON LA INDYMEDIA AUDIO LINK
"The neoliberal medicine Less State and More Market does not work.. That the neoliberal medicine does not heal the economy and society but damages them must be clear to everyone who hasn't suc-cumbed to the neoliberal delusion."
Part 1- May 1st. Caravan for Justice (tags)
Los Angeles- Hundreds of immigrants and immigrants rights advocates canvassed the city of Los Angeles on May Day, otherwise known as International Workers Day, a day in celebration of working class struggles all across the world.
May 1st. Caravan for Justice (tags)
Los Angeles- May 1,2004 Hundreds of immigrants and immigrants rights advocates canvassed the city of Los Angeles on May Day, otherwise known as International Workers Day, a day in celebration of working class struggles all across the world.
International Workers Day
Libertarian think tank slams Open Source (tags)
The Institute for Policy Innovation, a non-profit libertarian-leaning public policy organization, has put out a short four-page white paper questioning the ability of open source to meet the hurdles of the mass market.
Who Owns the Sky? Reviving the Commons (tags)
"Not since the Golden Age of the 1890s has so much public wealth been shoveled into private hands with such brazen efficiency. Timber companies, corporate ranchers and foreign mining companies.. are plundering our national patrimony.."
Where Can Liberals Go to Get Respect? (tags)
Libertarian logic is circular -- If something isn't working, the solution is always the same: We need even freer markets and even less regulation -- without a mystical faith in free markets, their arguments fall apart.
Government Will Be Abolished (tags)
The Free State project already has over 5,000 people committed to relocating to New Hampshire to form a libertarian voting block -- the long term goal being the removal of all regulations, taxes, and government.
Nature as Healer and Teacher (tags)
Nature is a healer and teacher, a wounded healer and scorned teacher, a majestic fountain of awe, wonder and inspiration.. Nature cries in pain because she is reduced to a free good, external or sink by a one-dimensional economism.
The Crash has Already Begun (tags)
"The crash has already begun! Every crash comes inthree steps, the stock market crash, the banking industry crash and finally the real crash, the collapse of the economy, businesses, jobs and the financial system.. The coming depression is the correction.."
peacecoup.us - Ending Market Dictatorships (tags)
please forward
"Growth, prosperity, free trade, liberal world economy and international division of labor are all ideologically charged terms. They re-flect veiled interests more than a search for truth. The starting-point for an alternative econmics is an ideology-critical position."
Smoking Out Big Tobacco (tags)
By means of their settlement with the States, the tobacco people have achieved something else that is absolutely invaluable to them -- complacent Americans think that the tobacco problem is solved.
US Job Cuts Surge 125 % (tags)
US Job Cuts Surge 125 Percent In October
Jobs Go Bye-Bye Under Bush (tags)
Another fine example of the ecomomic policies of the cheap labor conservatives.
Why the ''Free Market'' despises Open Source software (tags)
The Micorsoft's assualt on open source is like the WTO "free trade" conflict -- a massively subsidised, genetically modified, machinery and chemical-warfare wielding colossus at war with a tiny malnourished day labourer armed with a mattock.
The Cancun Summit-WTO on the edge of abyss (tags)
WTO
SMOG: Can you breathe free in a free maket? (tags)
When asked about smog in the LA basin, Nobel Prize Economist and Libertarian Milton Friedman claimed that; "the smog went back 200 years. There are stories of the Indians describing that as a smoggy area"
WTO/Cancun issues.... Agricultural Subsidies? (tags)
"The gigantic blackout (that will certainly not be the last) was a direct consequence that the US is so exemplary in the special neoliberal disciplines privatization and lower costs..Profit maximization at any cost leads to abstract cost cutting pressure." From German
Solidarity Economics is Ecology (tags)
How can there be a global movement with no platform and no economic vision and leaders who hide? If the Brazilian constitution defends the right of the starving to steal food, then surely the poor of the world have the right - under any way of thinking - to steal back control over their lives and their local economies.
How To Produce and Distribute Bumper Stickers With Minimal Cost Using Common Home Office E (tags)
If you are like me, you've noticed that anti-fascist/anti-Bush bumper stickers are hard to find. What you probably do not realize is that the dearth of these stickers is not caused by the lack of a market. The market not only exists, but is enthusiastic and yearning to express itself. I know because I broke ground in my local area by producing and distributing anti-Bush bumper stickers in exchange for donations to my collection of anti-fascist websites.
Pentagon's Betting Parlor of Assassinations and Coups (tags)
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Pentagon's Terrorism Futures Market Plan Condemned (tags)
The Pentagon [was about to set] up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope[d] to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits.
How Brad and Emily took Jamal and Lakisha’s job (tags)
Attention African American’s struggling to find a job in today’s job market, George W. Bush’s miserable economic policies may not be the only reason for your unemployment. It could be your name.
"Another world is possible and another economy is necessary, an economy in which massive social resources are used according to plan..`We are attacked as in the dying phase of the Weimar republic'." This review is translated from the German.
DRUDGE REPORTING 46 RUN DOWN BY CAR IN BUSH'S AMERICA (tags)
KABC: 40 INJURED; 10 CRITICAL; 6 DEAD... Causalities In Crowded Market; Driver Went From One End Of Market To Other... CAR STRIKES CROWD IN SANTA MONICA SLAUGHTER
Blame Bush for California's Budget Woes (tags)
Californians provide much more to the federal government in taxes than they get back in services. The feds should bail out the states, which cannot indulge in the red-ink financing that has become a specialty of the Bush Administration.
Unintended Consequences (tags)
Soybeans Killing Rainforests Nine (9) easy steps that even lefties can understand.
Al Bore seeks to extend the liberal dominated media even further.
AS THE ECONOMY CRUMBLES - June 16, 2003 (tags)
Summarizing the crappy economic news of the week.
The Consumerist Manifesto. Book Review (tags)
"Trade is the functional equivalent to force", Bolz says self-assuredly. Whoever pursues trade and consumes doesn't wage wars apart from weapons and drug trade. Consumers as a rule are peace-loving beings. They don't hurl bombs.."
Youth Join Fight For, Against Smoking (tags)
A self-described libertarian, Hannula fought a now-defunct anti-smoking program for Minnesota youth called Target Market because he disapproved that public money was used to influence the choices teens make about smoking.
Public Order and Market Laws (tags)
This essay focuses on the erosion of international law in international relations and the undermining of democratic and social standards in the nation states of the First world. The author urges reflection on the ideas and values of civil society as weapons..
The Sweet Taste of Death (tags)
Aspartame is also the reason for the epidemic of obesity as its a neurotoxic drug that makes you crave carbohydrates so you gain weight. (See protest of National Soft Drink Association on www.dorway.com). It is also makes the liver so toxic as it embalms you (Trocho Study, l998), that its hard to even lose weight.
RW: Lost Treasures of Humanity (tags)
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Against Social Darwinism (tags)
"The conquest of Africa and large parts of Asia was not morally justified by anything. Only peace is morally justified. Today social Darwinism appears in the guise of Anglo-Saxon capitalism..Ecology and pure market ideology are in conflict.." Translated German
Against Social Darwinism (tags)
"The conquest of Africa and large parts of Asia by invading European forces was not morally justified. Only peace is morally justified..Today social Darwinism appears in the guise of Anglo-Saxon capitalism..Ecology and pure market ideology are in conflict."
Chalabi's goons present to topple Saddam statue for press (tags)
Who died and made Chalabi the new 'god' of Iraq, with the power to determine the future of both the Iraqi nation and the oil that they depend on for their future? Allow a free and truly democratic (internationally monitored) election take place in Iraq and let the Iraqis decide whether or not they want this Chalubi as the next dictator of Iraq and whether or not to keep their oil nationalized for 'the benefit of all the Iraqi people' or whether they want the profits pouring into the pockets of American oil robber barons.
"I don't care if the sun doesn't shine on you"!
THE BRITISH LIE MACHINE STRIKES AGAIN, OR PHONY BLAIR'S LATEST FIB (tags)
British Terror Minister Phony Blair offers his Lie of the Day--this time insinuating (i.e. sneakily lying) that the missiles that hit a Baghdad market were actually Iraqi missiles (of course). First Phony Blair accuses Iraq of executing British POWs only to apologize to the family when it turns out to be a lie, and now this.
Baghdad Market hit by U.S. bomb - 15 killed (tags)
U.S. tax dollars at work.
Allies blamed for Baghdad market bomb deaths (tags)
Iraqi officials said an air raid on Baghdad hit a busy market in the north of the city today, causing "many, many casualties". An Iraqi information ministry official said journalists would be shown the site of the blast later in the day, but so far there has been no corroboration of the attack from coalition sources or news agencies.
Fear of a spiral into Depression as job losses mount (tags)
Dismal sales at Christmas time were propped up by deflationary price cuts, and now the retail sector is among the hardest hit as one third of a million jobs are slashed in February. Not coincidentally, the same rise of the Extreme Right Wing is taking place as was seen during the depression of the 30s, with the same drive to seek relief in aggressive wars of conquest...
Great Depression. George Bush vs Einstein on economic policy (tags)
According to the mathematician, Albert Einstein, the policies of George Bush are likely to result in another Great Depression. To quote a recurring quip, 'I know George Bush, and let me tell you, George Bush is no Albert Einstein.'
pbnberkeley news notice - 2/5/03 (tags)
Publishing, republishing and compiling community news and event information promoting global peace and working class solidarity and NO WAR ON IRAQ!
The Will to Paralysis: The Crisis of Shareholder Capitalism (tags)
Scapegoats or black sheep are used to evade the crisis of the system. Considering matters more exactly would be very appropriate. Are manifestations of corruption and tax evasion normal side-effects of a system fixated on money?
(sf update) breakaway-- (tags)
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Hundreds of millions of people are forced to work migration between countries and continents.. People are transformed into socially uprooted vagabonds of markets..Flexibility means ..more output and more stress for less money. From German
Michael Parenti Article: To Kill Iraq: The Reasons Why (tags)
Arguments against a war on Iraq by noted political analyst and author Michael Parenti.
The fight for water. A fight for human rights (tags)
Water. We see it everywhere. (see related story below) Many of us take water for granted. All we have to do is open a faucet and this life-sustaining liquid just pours out into our glass to quench our thirst. But in many places it is not so simple to get that clean glass of water.
Antitrust Victory for Consumers - (tags)
Consumers won a major antitrust victory on Monday when a federal judge ordered Microsoft to distribute Sun's Java programming language in its Windows operating system.
The Welfare State, Globalization and the Rule of the Market (tags)
The welfare state regressing since 1974/76 or since 1982 must be reformed, democratized and decentralized.. What is central is refuting the neoliberal positional logic, reestablishinig solidarity and reorganizing and extending the welfare state
Green or Mean Returns - Investing In The Environment (tags)
The environment can provide green investments or mean investments, depending on which end of the spectrum your on. The fishing industry off the coast of Spain is going to suffer, ship builders are going to benefit.
World Bank handwashing initiative: Selling soap or saving lives? (tags)
The World Bank's Handwashing Initiative is based on the conviction that the simple practice of washing hands with soap could reduce deaths from diarrhoea by half. But its intentions are being questioned in Kerala, where people say they need safe drinking water, not multinational soap
Ten Disgusting Things about Corporations (tags)
Fast fact sheet about how corporations ruin our lives
Holloween Action: Boycott Assi (tags)
Holloweend Action. 6pm-8pm @ Assi Market, (8th & Oxford). Support Immigrant Worker Rights.
Class Struggle in China -Organise! AF (Britain/Ireland) (tags)
Ever since the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the most advanced sections of capital have sought to integrate China into the world market.
The Appetite of Leviathan (tags)
Money replaces the `cosmos' as the unifying social characteristic. Every pack of wolves is more socially organized than free enterprise persons..The little monsters should be tamed by the enormous monster"Leviathan". The state share has increased everywhere.
#1 “Thanks for Nothing”: Ch’usok at Assi
Empowering Los Angeles’ immigrant workers: (tags)
Over 100 community supporters are anticipated to mark the one-year anniversary of two emerging campaigns for immigrant workers’ rights in a town hall meeting. Supporters will discuss the larger context and national implications of the Forever 21 and Assi Market campaigns, as well as learn about the latest directions of both efforts.
Socialist Planning -- Liberation from the Market (tags)
The following is written by the Maoist political economist Raymond Lotta. It is excerpted from a larger discussion on http://2changetheworld.info where Ray posted a series of comments called "Socialist planning vs. Market Socialism."
BUSINESS LOBBIES UN AT WORLD SUMMIT ON ENVIRONMENT (tags)
In an effort to turn the WSSD's sustainable development goals into profit-making ventures that will "green" its image, the business lobby gathered yesterday for a full program of "Business Day" activities, featuring representatives from notorious environmental destroyers such as Dow Chemical and Syngenta Corporation. They blamed poverty for the woes of the planet and tried to downplay their own abysmal records.
How Revolution Can Overturn Consumer Society (tags)
The following was written by political economist Raymond Lotta -- as part of a longer analysis of "Socialist Planning vs. Market Socialism." It was posted as part of the debate over revolutionary strategy in the General Discussion forum of http://2changetheworld.info
When pro-Palestinian supporters become blind to prejudice.... (tags)
You are invited to read a debate in which a series of highly-charged comments are made against all Jews. Some might call it the harsh truth. Others might say it's typical anti-semitism wrapped up in blind zeal for justice. Wbat do you say?
Trouble Erupts In California Pollution Trading Market (tags)
News Analysis: Trouble Erupts In California Pollution Credit Market Just As President Proposes “Clear Skies” Market For Power Plants
Paradoxes of injustice: war and crises (tags)
This leads to the last and greatest paradox: The Bush Administration's use of war to resolve the domestic crises might just exacerbate all the internal contradictions...
From Lockout to Boycott!! Boycott ASSI!! (tags)
The locked out ASSI workers, and many organizations including the Immigrant Workers Union, KIWA, and Sweatshop Watch are calling for everyone to boycott ASSI Market and to join the workers picketing at the Market.
How many know the truth about the scam called wall street???
The Real Stock Market Victims (tags)
The Real Story About Who Will Pay For The Latest Stock Market Tank.
The Bush Cabal: Turning the USA into a Banana Republic (tags)
The Bush Cabal: Turning the USA into a Banana Republic
Beware! The Maussians Are Coming! This article by David Graeber discusses the concept of the gift economy, an idea first explored by Marcel Mauss in his descriptions of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia. He describes how the historical reality of such economies refutes many of the assumptions made by neo-liberal economists about the historical development of economic systems. Also discussed are contemporary groups (such as the MAUSS group in France) who take their inspiration from such findings to attack and dismantle the philosophic basis of capitalist economic theory.
Proof the CA Energy Crisis was Corporate Manipulation/Theft (tags)
Probably no one reading the LA-IMC newswire will be surprised by this -- but here's (some of) the proof that last year's California Energy Crisis was thoroughly manipulated by the unregulated, parasitic energy corporations. A similar story was on the front page of today's (5-7-02) LA Times and the New York Times also had a lead article on the matter. Sorry for re-posting corporate media here, but I think it's important for this to be accessible on the LA-IMC newswire for posterity's sake. BTW, Pacifica Radio's Democracy NOW! had an excellent segment this morning about this as well.
Calling L.A.'s Young Artists: (tags)
Grand Central Market Holds Contest to Choose Artwork for Mural Project
Market Workers Justice Campaign (tags)
Grocery and garment workers unite in Los Angeles to fight against sweatshop conditions. Market owner harasses workers in union drive. Garment workers and supporters give sweatshop boss indigestion at Take Sushi.
Market Workers Justice Campaign (tags)
Grocery and garment workers take action in Los Angeles against sweatshop conditions. Market owner harasses union activists in Koreatown. Garment workers and supporters give sweatshop boss indigestion at Take Sushi.
The Indy Business Report (tags)
The recent ramping up of American flag sales has had a stimulating effect in the antenna sector
Trickle-Down Patriotism-Nationalism-Capitalism (tags)
Corporations get billions for "Bailouts", Employee's get pink slips..... USA trickle down theory-practice in capitalist stock market. A PEACEFUL WORLDWIDE PROTEST AGAINST WAR - WAR is TERROISM! Sell Your Corporate Stock for PEACE! SUFFER THROUGH PEACE - NOT WAR!
San Francisco Examiner: The Press on Market (tags)
A look at the San Francisco Examiner's class- and race-based bias and prejudices, creating a violent climate for poor people in San Francisco
Monsanto Moves to Control Water Resources--Vandana Shiva (tags)
Since water is as central to food production as seed is, and without water life is not possible,Monsanto is now trying to establish its control over water.
People rising up to take back our power!!!
People rising up to take back our power!!!
Anti's Need a Plan, Part 1 (tags)
Anti's Need a Plan, Part 1
Terrorism Is in the Eye of the Beholder -or- Liberals at the Trough (tags)
Liberals are notorious for believing everything they hear from the government. Like dogs at raw meat they swallow down whole chunks of government press releases without breathing. At the risk of editorializing, I'd have to say that the only difference between dogs and liberals is that dogs digest what they take in.
Strange Message from Russia (tags)
In connection with the emerging tension both at the international finance market and stock market as well, considerable fluctuation in the oil prices, and some other indicators of instability in the financial world, a group which composed of Russian and foreign financial analysts has made a decision to call a special meeting to debate the current precrisis situation in order to consider ways in which we can meet these challenges and elaborate an optimum strategy for the authorities of financial structures in Russia and in other emerging market economies.
UltramegaSoulBuyer.com Inc. monopolizes Breathable Oxygen market (tags)
If Someone were to have told your grandparents that someday they would have to pay for water they would have laughed at you. They would have had a reason to. In the world they believed they lived in, it was inconceivable that something so fundamental and abundant as water would someday be limited and thusly, exploited. Yes. Exploited. They would have probably said something to the effect of “do they charge for air in this futureland too?” We laugh. Of course that would never happen. How could something so fundamental and abundant as....Oh shit.
THE Independent Media Center's FUNDRAISER AND FLEA MARKET (tags)
Help us fund our new documentary by giving us your "stuff".