C'est l'esclavage salarié...
Biodiversité ou la nature privatisée (tags)
Mais aujourd'hui la pollution comme principal thème...
Tout nationalisme est un suprémacisme (tags)
S'abstenir même à l'abstentionnisme...
Paraphysique de la dictature étatique (tags)
Plus la peine de procréer, il vaut mieux adopter...
Habeas corpus du spectaculaire intégré (tags)
De l'intérieur, entraver la contestation...
Paraphysique du coup de gueule (tags)
Tout faisant défense du capital...
The center will not hold (tags)
The existing late capitalist ideology in the center of society, the tattered national identity, is being driven to barbaric extremes in reaction to the crisis. Neo-liberalism, with its social Darwinism and economic nationalism, provided the springboards that the new right used.
The Enemy and the Libidinal Economy of the Apocalypse (tags)
The West continues to avoid introspection by invoking the Other as pure evil. While the terminal crisis of capitalist civilization is truly global, and no emancipatory model can be seen on the geopolitical chessboard, it is also evident that today’s anti-Russian sentiment stems from a consolidated ideological framework. To West, Russians have always been an inferior race,
Ukraine: Expansion of the battle zone (tags)
Russia is vastly superior in this type of warfare – which resembles an industrially operated process of destruction – because the Kremlin can draw on far greater reserves. Putin's gamble on a war of attrition is paying off. It is not just about the superiority of tanks, artillery and ammunition, or about the increasing Russian air superiority. It is above all about manpower.
Postmodern consciousness is completely absorbed in the present, the point of the now, indeed is eager to be absorbed in it - a state of affairs that manifests itself in the fact that all thought and action relates solely to it: There is the present - and nothing else. Or to be more precise: there is the present of the now (which continues indefinitely) and the past presents.
Our Zone of Interest: The Noise of Permanent Warfare (tags)
Wars (especially when marketed as humanitarian, defensive, or “against terror”) are, in essence, criminal means to “easy money”, which is what keeps today’s financial bubbles inflated to record-breaking highs while the actual economic conditions of millions of workers (or “inactive workforce”) are cratering at an equally record-breaking pace.
Trust in Institutions and the War Dividend (tags)
Even if almost no one wants to admit it, our “system” is obsolete, and for this reason it is now morphing into a “closed system” – totalitarian in nature. It is equally clear that the few who continue to benefit materially from the capitalist system (the 0.1%) are willing to do whatever it takes to prolong its obsolete existence. Debt is issued from one door and purchased from another.
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.
Capitalism is not in a position to solve the social and ecological crisis that it is causing. An open-ended transformation of the system is inevitable, and a struggle for transformation will be waged – especially against the fascist threat. Conscious reflection on the systemic crisis is the best antidote to the conspiratorial crisis talk of the New Right.
Car il n'y a que de l'inhumanité et pas d'humanité...
The presumption of mainstream economists and business journalists (as well as political and economic elites) is that the capitalist machine is the only possible one, and that it will work. Except it’s not: corporate profits have been growing (the red line in the chart above) but investment has been falling.
Qualitative Break: Why a Radical Critique of Work is Necessary Today (tags)
Capital has increasingly decoupled itself from directly expended labor and accumulation is now taking place predominantly on the level of financial markets... In large parts of the Global South, the majority has long since been declared ‘superfluous.’
Shock therapy without end (tags)
Ukraine must not sell out its resources, minerals, fertile lands, but must be able to rebuild the infrastructure necessary for life and economy on its own. It needs living and housing space, labor laws and incomes that are attractive for the people who want to live there and, moreover, for the numerous refugees who want to return to a livable country of origin.
Climate catastrophe and `freedom of consumption' (tags)
It is not five to twelve, but five past twelve, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes. The fact that climate change is a fact (the details may well be debated) and poses a serious threat to humanity is something that the last fool should have realized by now.1 It is also clear that the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases must be radically and rapidly reduced.
Welcome to post-democracy! (tags)
In the current systemic crisis, this capitalist pseudo-democracy is producing a real dystopia on a par with the nightmares of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley: the apparently responsible citizen (in reality a powerless object in the heteronomous process of capital exploitation) chooses the way in which his intensified exploitation and alienation is to be concretely organized and perfected.
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.
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.
Michael Hudson on de-dollarization (tags)
Krugman is saying that other people have no reason at all for what they’re doing. And when they move out of the dollar, there’s no reason for them to do it. If you read what these countries say, they explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. .
Senile Economics: Bubble Ontology and the Pull of Gravity (tags)
The entire banking system is closing in on folding, which is why it so desperately needs new inflationary liquidity to keep afloat. The Great Reset is our owners’ authoritarian attempt to respond to this systemic threat by taking control of the collateral (our lives).
The contradictory capitalist mode of production is thus not only the driving force[11] behind the mounting debt and economic crises,[12] it is also the cause of the unfolding climate catastrophe. “Man-made” climate change is in large part the result of the social system.
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
"One must expect a tsunami of global inflation, further impoverishment and mass migration (of cheap labor) - and all of this will be blamed on Putin. One must expect the return of pandemic threats that support ongoing efforts to globalize vaccine passports and the digitization of life."
The final system question Parts 1 and 2 (tags)
The enrichment elites of the West in particular have been trying for decades to extend their influence to the whole world. That is their declared concept. The worldwide "final victory" has been part of capitalism and imperialism from the very beginning.
Against the cannabilism of capital (tags)
Hundreds of Billions in New Lending on the Table at Cote d’Ivoire Gathering (tags)
World Development Banks Meet for Third Annual Summit
The subjectless rule of capital and Working class hero (tags)
Fortunately, his death did not silence him. The opposite is the case. Because John Winston Lennon became more immortal through the assassination than he already was as a member of the most successful band of all times. Not a martyr - but a working class hero.
The necessary breach and Rackets and Rockets (tags)
The climate movement should not be afraid of being accused of radicalism. It is a matter of sheer collective will to survive to solve this monstrous problem. Capitalism, in its compulsion to grow, is incapable of reducing resource consumption and emissions.
Making yourself comfortable in capitalism (tags)
"Whoever has a wife should behave as if he had none, ... whoever buys as if he were not the owner, whoever makes use of the world as if he did not use it" (1 Cor 7:29f). Paul is speaking here to people who were "called" as slaves into the messianic church (1 Cor 7:21).
95 Theses Against the Rule of the Financial Markets (tags)
The financial markets have made themselves independent of the real economy. As the selling of indulgences led to Martin Luther's 95 Theses in 1517, the rule of speculative financial markets has led to revenue shortfalls of US cities and states. Tax havens hide between $22-33 trillion.
Myths of the Crisis and Enemy Images in the Media (tags)
The Ukrainian ambassador was quoted in the FAZ as saying: "All Russians are now our enemies". This rhetoric is classic enemy image cultivation... This homogenization is so pre-Enlightenment and always wrong.
A new quality of crisis (tags)
From the systemic urge to self-destruction arises the survival necessity of the emancipatory overcoming of capital. The capitalist regime of constraint must be transformed into history. The struggle for the transformation of the system has to be the central moment of left practice.
Labor fetish and anti-semitism (tags)
"Work makes you free" was written above the gate of the Auschwitz death camp. How did the Nazis come up with that? Isn't work something meaningful, something good? What does it have to do with Auschwitz, of all places? Because work and meaningful activity are, two different things.
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.
The Last Stage of the Middle Class (tags)
Money capital is fleeing into the speculative financial markets because investments in new factories have become unprofitable. While growing parts of society are impoverished or even impoverished outside of production, only a simulative accumulation of capital through financial bubbles takes place...
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...
Capital is losing its capacity for productive investment and is turning to the financial markets, which are more profitable. It is with this money that the war machine and the trade deficit are financed. The US is under great pressure to constantly show that it is in control.
System Transformation or Barbarism (tags)
Overcoming capital is thus a necessity for survival. Consequently, the climate question is not a question of burden sharing, it is not a question of social security. The global exploitation process of capital, in which resources and energy are burned to make more money...
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.
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.
We only live in half a democracy (tags)
The machine used in the production process counts more in the constitution than the working person who created this machine in the first place. As a result, the employees in the production process are hopelessly inferior to the capital owners. That is the legal situation. But it doesn't have to stay that way.
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.
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 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.
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.
Workout. The Crisis of Labor and the Limits of Capitalist Society (tags)
The Third Industrial Revolution represents a qualitative break in the history of productivity growth. This is because microelectronics facilitated a radical reorganization in production overall such that labor lost the central importance that it previously had and the application of knowledge became the main force.
The present crisis means that, to a degree previously undreamt of, ever-greater numbers of human beings will simply be declared “superfluous.” The much-invoked “new role of the state” has not the slightest chance of recreating a 1960s style social welfare capitalism, with full employment and a rising standard of living.
Collective working-time reduction is long overdue (tags)
The overall economic fact is further that from 1960 to 2019 the volume of work (despite reunification) increased only from 56.2 to 62.6 billion hours (by 11.4%), while the potential labor force grew from 26.3 to 46.5 million persons, i.e. by 76.8%.
The 'doo-doo' Running San Francisco (tags)
San Francisco has been named the ‘doo-doo’ capital of the United States
Criminal banks and criminal capitalism (tags)
Since the 1970s, the real economy and the financial economy have been increasingly diverging. Gigantic assets vagabond around the globe, desperately looking for profitable investment opportunities.
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.
Austerity's Hidden Purpose & From California Economics to Bidenomics (tags)
For governments pursuing austerity, spending cuts mean lower national income and fewer taxes. Unlike a household or a business, if the government cuts its spending during tough times, it is cutting its revenues, too.
What does socialism mean in the 21st century? (tags)
"Socialism" should be much more than a mere buzzword. In light of the fact that current capitalism is in the process of destroying our planet and our prospects for a free, democratic, and good life, "socialism" must become a genuine systemic alternative.
Noam Chomsky Without Regrets (tags)
We learn more about human beings and their nature from 19th-century novels than we do from academic psychology. It’s a way we not only enrich our lives, but enrich our understanding and conception of what it is to live a good life. Literature, arts, music or painting are some of the most profound ways of understanding.
The issue of white-collar crime, on the other hand, is apparently impossible to address. None of the major parties has so far shown any inclination to take up the demonstrable threat to the welfare state and democracy posed by white-collar crime in the election campaign.
The Last Stage of the Middle Class (tags)
The emancipatory overcoming of the modern commodity-producing system and the associated separation requires a social intervention on a high level. The second article "The Collapse of Modernization" was published in Oct 2004. Robert Kurz, editor of the German leftist Krisis journal, died too early at 69.
Never waste a good crisis (tags)
The negotiation of society after Corona is now beginning, and it is now important to strengthen positive tendencies such as the expansion of the public health system, a more planned economy and social solidarity. But these appeals only cover up their own helplessness and lack of advice. .
Why capitalism compels renunciation and we could work less (tags)
How much human and natural resources are squandered on taxation, trade and advertising, how much on labor administration, justice, police, prisons, armaments, military? How many people work overtime without end, suffer heart attacks and burnout, wear themselves out in the brutal competition?
How should our economy grow? (tags)
If, on the other hand, the inequality distribution is reduced via increased spending on education, positive growth effects may result. In addition, too much inequality can destabilize the political system through social unrest, creating great uncertainty for investors, for example with regard to the protection of property rights.
8 points for a global agenda of structural change in the COVID-19 pandemic (tags)
"We can have democracy or concentration of wealth, not both," said Justice Louis Brandeis, the longest-serving Supreme Court justice."
Self-reference in capital and in ourselves (tags)
"Lateral thinkers" defend their freedom. Capital serves no other purpose than the irrational end in itself of the multiplication of itself.
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.
The discussion about Corona (tags)
Corona can only become a kairos if we gain the theoretical capacity of recovery and create the conditions for a transformation. Taking the healthcare system away from the markets and obliging large companies to be oriented in the common good would be steps to infrastructure socialism.
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.
COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism (tags)
The scale of the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences on world accumulation are unprecedented, with the global economic costs still increasing. At the end of March, some three billion people on the planet were in lockdown or social-distancing mode.36
The new normality is characterized by fear, social distancing and increasing state control. Many fear that the current situation could become permanent and that our liberal democratic legal system could be transformed into a dictatorial system of injustice.
Behavior and body in the sights of capital (tags)
The proclamation of states of emergency in the spring of 2020, even if not in all countries, helped to consolidate a state crisis management system that overturned constitutions and now completely bypassed democratic decision-making processes.
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.
The economy for faith healers (tags)
Due to the sharpening contradictions of late capitalist socialization, barbarism, not reason, is increasing. Reason is not advancing in the overall historical movement, as once postulated by Hegel. Only the overcoming of this false whole, would offer humankind a chance of survival.
The contagion of revolt spreads…Revolts everywhere! (tags)
against the pandemic of capital, social revolution! (tags)
The state measures justified by the coronavirus are a qualitative leap, decisive and homogeneous, in the global counter–insurrection and in the bourgeois intentions to attempt to initiate a new cycle of the accumulation of capital. And in the face of this war the proletariat only has two paths: to sacrifice their lives in it or to oppose themselves to it in order to defend their human needs.
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.
Capitalist conditions are characterized by the fact that there is no rationality in society as a whole that coordinates the interests of the many and the overall direction of social development.
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."
NLG Review - Death Penalty Focus (tags)
NLG Review
Housing Financialization, 66 pp (tags)
De l'esprit troupeau, l'effet imitateur (tags)
Toute une reproduction...
The Financial Market Casino Controls Politics (tags)
Financial markets seem to be the measure of all things. Corporations are subsidized with trillions. In their "competition," small and medium-size businesses are the fools. A complex subsidy jungle exists in nearly all states, a "socialism for the rich" or "new feudalism."
The Crisis of Democracy (tags)
Decisions affecting social development are in the hands of private investors and state policy depends on their actions. The increasingly unequal income and wealth distribution was the result of a strategic government policy that reacted to a capitalist crisis.
"Capitalism will make migrants out of all citizens" (tags)
No one speaks about the right to be deeply rooted in one's country and not to be uprooted by global capitalism. In reality, the elite is demophobic. That means, it hates people and democracy. We must be populist and not elitist today, democratic and not demophobic.
What are the Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization? (tags)
Capitalism seemed to have a more social or civilized face for a time. After Roosevelt's New Deal and the defeat of fascism, gradual development of the social state occurred in Europe. Unions were accepted. The rulers were forced to political and social concessions.
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.
The Populist Makers and Dangerous Optimism (tags)
The people vote and capital decides. Another capitalism appears that is marked by an anti-liberal and intolerant culture. The goal of the new capitalists is the same as the old capitalists: to make the rich even richer. The governing elites gamble away the future of coming generations.
Markets as a Fetish, Globalization, and Dissent Management (tags)
Economic inequality must be reduced and democratic participation regained. Resisting tax avoidance, financial market regulations, climate policy, and globally combating poverty should be priorities.
Driven to Consumption and Money out of Nothng (tags)
Growth originally created a material prosperity about which earlier generations could only dream. However, more economic growth does not lead to people becoming happier. We are prisoners of a system that forces us to permanent growth. Banks create credits.
The Criminality of the Elites (tags)
The offenses of the upper classes are hardly publicized. People wait in vain for strong interventions in the economic realm. Financial criminality harms the state, the community and economic growth (e.g. high-frequency trading, shadow banking, financial products)
Finance Capitalism and the Digital Economy (tags)
The financialization of the economy and the rise of the commercial Internet are directly connected... At the beginning of the digital economy, as Marianna Mazzucato and others showed, was an investing state that took over the installment financing for digitalization.
Crisis Regulation in Global Capitalism (tags)
The globalization euphoria waned with the 1997 Asian crisis. Hundreds of billions were needed to bailout bankrupt banks. The US with its high solvent demand stabilized the world economy for a long time. The US could become indebted in its own currency.
Capital as Climate Killer (tags)
The growth pressure of the world economy makes a resource-sparing social order only possible beyond capital. The seeming rationality of capitalist goods production serves an irrational end-in-itself - the multiplication of capital.
The System Question as a Survival Question (tags)
A fundamental social alternative to the permanent capitalist chaos is sought. A rational social discourse on system alternatives would be an antidote to populism and to the irrational identity-mania that spreads. The public discusses headscarves while late capitalism sinks in crisis
Against The Capitalist Catastrophe (tags)
Leaflet to copy spread for the 1st of may
The Struggle against Aggressive Tax Avoidance (tags)
Experts estimate a fifth of world wealth is hidden from the tax authorities of states and considerable parts of international corporate profits are not taxed. Google and Amazon parked billions in shadow financial centers. Tax avoidance makes a functioning state impossible
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.
Crisis 2.0: A Policy for the 99% (tags)
The capital surpluses are a constant source of new speculative waves and maneuvers. The crisis of state finances is mainly a crisis of tax refusal. The elites shifted the tax burden from businesses and high incomes to consumer taxes and fees.
The Future as Transformation (tags)
There is no future with present-day capitalism. Capitalism stands for a movement of endless profit-making. Only a radical breach with the capitalist accumulation dynamic can nurture the hope of a reasonably tolerable future for human civilization on this planet.
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.
Refused sharing and rediscovery of sharing are signs of this time. "This economy kills." So Pope Francis judges socio-economic conditions. Taxing the rich is vital. With additional revenue, workers would not feel threatened by immigrants
Capitalism Criticism 2.0 (tags)
"Capitalism contains crisis as rain clouds contain rain" (Jean Juares, 19th century socialist). Profits increase in the neoliberal model, not investment (Nicolas Krowall). The competitive pressure drives businessmen to reduce investments in labor and wages.
Jerusalem: Reality vs Impracticality – The Protection Racket of the Jewish State (tags)
In that tight piece of geography, two nations simply cannot be constructed justly; the one with the bigger guns will always dictate the terms. And it is truly no ordinary piece of geography. It is so steeped in the history and intermingling cultures of all three Abrahamic religions that try as the transplanted European Zionists may, to obliterate the vestiges of the other two, its history and its emotional affiliations cannot be divorced from that geography. Abolishing apartheid and eliminating the racist Zionist philosophy, and replacing it with a society with secular, civil and moral laws that are based on the common moral teachings of all three religions and which treat all three peoples as equals, permitting each to practice their own faith, to hold sacred their own heritage without encroaching upon the rights of each other, is the only just solution today. That is the actual ground reality when primacy is replaced with fairness. It is also the solution that the ordinary Palestinian peoples themselves demand. It is high time the Palestinian and Muslim leaders listened, and dared to lead as history's actors in their own right. Other nations' leaders will follow suit once the singular demand is tabled by the Palestinian and Muslim leaders, with no back-off whatever the pressure and consequence. In time, all wounds will heal naturally, as all three peoples have far more in common than they have the courage to recognize and accept. The status of Jerusalem is then naturally and organically resolved as the common sacred heritage of all three faiths. Surely some formula for administering the holy city in fairness to the peoples of all three faiths can then be devised by the citizens themselves and ratified as the fair law of the sacred land that is named in the Holy Scriptures of all three faiths as “The City of Peace”.
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.
Palestinians, Beware Jewish Days of Rage, Hanukkah is Coming to Israel! (tags)
This article surveys responses to Trumps declaration on Jerusalem.
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.
In Praise of Taxes by Nicola Liebert (tags)
Our tax system p[romotes private wealth and impoverishes the community. Even if no one pays them gladly, most are aware taxes int he interest of the community are sensible. "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society" (Oliver Wendell Holmes, former Supreme Court justice).
La loi du capital...
The Purse is Mightier than the Pen (tags)
The climate crisis is here now, but a compromised, corrupted media doesn't want to know. What is salient is not important. What is important is not salient.
Punishing the Poor. The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (tags)
Inequality hurts. Poverty returns with misguided policy
Israeli Jews Say, It’s Our Jerusalem! (tags)
A review of some Israeli opinions about Jerusalem.
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
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)
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.
We Must Choose: Capitalism or Democracy (tags)
Middle-class democracy only knows formal political equality. Rule over public opinion grows out of the dominance of capital. The alternative is authoritarian capitalism or solidarity democracy. Resistance is the command of the hour.
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"
Why Philippine President Duterte is not a socialist (tags)
As new Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte prepares to assume office, a growing number of Filipinos seem to – or want to – believe his surprising claim that he will be the country’s first “socialist” President.
The Language of Neoliberalism (tags)
Knowledge enables people to interpret reality. Metaphors and pictures give things a new meaning and can change reality. Capital isn't so frightened and isn't the same as a deer. The financial crisis is compared to a thunderstorm that is not man-made.
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.
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.
US Judge Explores Lifting Argentina Sanctions After Country Offers $6.5 Billion (tags)
US District Judge Thomas Griesa ordered "hold-out" investors on Thursday to explain why various sanctions on Argentina should not be lifted.
"Who is saving Whom?" shows what remains hidden. A tremendous redistribution from the bottom to the top.. Rescuing is taking place, for the 99% however there is no sign of a rescue.
Paris Attacks - Bourgeois Terrorism (tags)
statement on Paris attacks from Internationalist Communist Perspective
"The Great Transformation Has Begun" (tags)
The core of this system, its over-arching law, is the endless accumulation of capital. That is its main goal to which everything else is subordinated. Persons and nature are used to make more money out of money. Therefore we are degraded to little wheels in this machine.
Deepening Greek Depression (tags)
Greece
Zoo Animals May Starve in Greece (tags)
Greece
Sunday's Referendum in Greece (tags)
Greece
BDS Effect on Israel's Economy (tags)
Israel
Obama Wants Regime Change in Ecuador (tags)
Ecuador
US-Attempted Color Revolution in Ecuador? (tags)
Ecuador
The United States of Injustice (tags)
police state
Despotic Saudi Regime Lobbies to Chair Human Rights Council (tags)
police state
Wealth is not a Private Affair (tags)
The US faces a revenue- and a war-spending crisis. The top tax rate was over 70% from 1938 to 1982; corporations put trillions in tax havens. Alternative economics emphasize profit maximizing is not profit making. In financial capitalism,Profits explode, not investments.
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
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..."
Unconditional Basic Income and Solidarity Economies (tags)
Without the social contract, we become wolves to one another. Basic economic, social and cultural human rights include the right to participate. Everyone should share in the wealth and prosperity brought by automation, labor-saving technology and higher productivity.
Inequality and Liberal Democracy: A Disturbing Association (tags)
How do we bring fundamental reforms about at a time when organized minorities and disorganized, quiescent majorities appear to be the norm in both the North and the South?
The empirical-historical analysis of the top incomes and their wealth are in the center with Thomas Piketty's "Capital" (2014). The share of the top 10% was never below 60% from 1917 to 2012. A wealth tax is vital to reverse the exploding inequality.
Neoliberalism forms a free entrepreneur out of the oppressed worker, an entrepreneur of himself. Everyone is a self-exploited worker of his own enterprise. Everyone is master and servant in one person. The class struggle is also changed into an inner struggle. One problematicizes oneself...
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.
The Coming Alternatives and The Function of the Enemy (tags)
Future criticism of capitalism is not a taboo any more. Why is there so little resistance against capitalism. Capitalism is a secular religion... Thanks to ISIS, "we" can forget all the other problems. If an enemy disappears, the possibility of shifting our conflict to it also fades.
Massive Explosion in Iranian nuclear facility. Fatalities reported
Why a Global Wealth Tax Reduces Inequality (tags)
The distribution of income and assets is one of the most controversial themes today. History teaches us that economic forces press in different directions - either to more equality or away from equality. Which will prevail depends on what political decisions we make.
The BRICS: Challengers to the Global Status Quo (tags)
Can the BRICS wrest control of the global economy from the United States and Europe, or will their internal contradictions tear them apart?
The wealth of others has become more a problem and less an incentive. Capital is blind, Thomas Piketty says. Capital grows faster than the economy. Differences in wealth are inherent in capitalism but do not represent a natural law. A society can accept them or act against them.
Banks and Investors Challenge Predatory Funds Solutions Fall Short of Comprehensive Prot (tags)
The International Capital Market Association (ICMA), a group of banks and investors, released a new debt framework this morning aimed at reducing the ability of predatory funds and holdout investors to undermine debt restructuring. The plan was created after meetings convened by the US Treasury Department in the wake of Greece's debt restructuring and comes in the aftermath of the landmark debt case between Argentina and NML Capital.
A Frenchman Admonishes Americans to Equality (tags)
With his book and the data, Thomas Piketty has shaken the self-understanding of American society.. In 2010 the richest one percent had around 20 percent of the total income. In the 1970s the share was under 10 percent.
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.
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.
The Middle Class Continues Shriveling (tags)
A century ago people said a progressive income tax would never happen. Today it is reality. The top tax rate in the US between 1930 and 1982 was 82 %. That was a very interesting experiment because very high incomes were covered.
Financial Market Inflammation (tags)
Bubble formation covered up a period of long-lasting stagnation... Former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers even spoke of stagnation as a "new normality"... The crisis consequences are shifted to other subjects. Unemployment and indebtedness are exported.
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.
Proposal: Piketty and Saez Meme Project (tags)
Capital in the Twenty-First Century memes
The Neoliberal Model: Profits without Investments (tags)
According to the neoliberal myth, higher profits would lead to more investments and more jobs. In truth, higher profits lead to corporations buying back their stock and currency speculation. In truth, higher investments lead to higher profits.
In polls many people massively criticize this system of market-conforming democracy and then vote for it with large marge majorities. This cognitive dissonance is the result of a reeducation of society. The values and norms are success and efficiency...
Argentina Requests Supreme Court Reverse Federal Court Rulings that favor Predatory Hedge (tags)
Argentina officially requested that the US Supreme Court hear an appeal in a debt case that will impact people living in extreme poverty around the world. The case dates back to Argentina's 2001 default, after which 92% of all Argentine bond holders restructured their defaulted debt. Predatory hedge fund, NML Capital leads a small group of holdouts who won judgments for payment in lower US Courts. NML Capital never invested in Argentina and bought the debt cheaply after Argentina's default. Because sovereign lending is contracted in the United States, the precedent the case sets impacts some of the poorest economies around the globe and allows these hedge funds to target assets that benefit poor people. The International Monetary Fund, the Paris Club, legitimate investors, the US and most governments oppose this predatory behavior because it cancels the benefits of debt relief, makes sovereign debt restructuring more difficult and limits credit to poor countries.
Is McDonald's Going To Burn These Hedge Funds (tags)
Drought affecting western state cattle ranches, growing knowledge of the heart attacks, strokes, cancer, Alzheimer's etc associated with cow flesh consumption, the animal rights movement's critical mass... some of the factors in McDonald's declining stock performance. State pension funds, hedge funds and mutual funds invested in mammal flesh are at risk.
36 Billionaire Hedge Fund Managers Invested in War, Warmonger Media, Animal Slaughter, Def (tags)
Who manages your state retirement funds, your corporate pensions? Who invests Social Security trust fund money?
The Rent Crisis in Los Angeles (tags)
There is a growing housing and rent crisis in Los Angeles. The resistence is here and growing.
Capitalism as a Secularized Religion (tags)
It is never too early or too late to challenge the dominant narrative. Capitalism is a fetish social formation, a demolishing of being not a reform of being. Capitalism may be the first case of an indebted cult, not an atoning cult, possibly the most bloodthirsty cult of humanity's history.
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.
Is Capitalism at an End? (tags)
The capitalist system in its current form is no longer fit for today's world. The system that led us into crisis has long been ourdated. The brave new world of neoliberalism lies in ruin. Surveys show that a majuority of people regard capitalism as unjust and unsocial.
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.
Supreme Court Considers Taking Hedge Fund/Argentina Case with Global Poverty Impacts (tags)
The US Supreme Court is considering whether or not to accept an international debt case that will impact global poverty and poor country access to credit.
General Wesley Clark: Whistleblower, Warrior (tags)
anti-war
Budget Cuts and Happy Times (tags)
For around three decades, a Troika from Wall Street, the US Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve pushed global (capital) investments with a mixture of tax cuts, cheap credits and overrated securities.
Are Reforms of the Financial Sector Enough? (tags)
This article focuses on seven errors and seven remedies of the financial crisis. The financial crisis was also a crisis of easy money. For years and again today, speculators exploited the situation that money was and is very easy to borrow in the US and Japan.
class war
Responding to financial crisis: are austerity and suffering inevitable? (tags)
Austerity in a recession is counter-productive. Lower taxes and lower wages mean lower demand, lower GDP, lower state revenue and higher unemployment.
Cancellation of Illegitmate Debts Instead of Bailout Umbrellas for Financiers (tags)
The inflation of public indebtedness was an essential element for the enhanced power of financial capital. That inflation was a result of a conscious under-financing of the state and is a lever to enforce an austerity policy. Financialization intensified the pressure to precariousness.
Is Capitalism Collapsing? (tags)
One of the causes for the obvious helplessness of the governments is that they function as simple receivers of orders of the financial industry. The financial industry has no interest in a policy that would make it liable for its inflicted disaster..
Cloud-sourcing and Cloud-working: Brave New World of Work (tags)
"Nothing is more absurd than to try to enforce capitalist property relations within the expanse of the World Wide Web.. In the ideal case, the competing persons in the asocial networks should become part of a `cloud' of living workers.."
Neoliberalism was the Godfather of the Financial Industry (tags)
Keynesianism was replaced by neoliberalism that guided the fallow investment capital into speculation.The development of social systems and the rise of real wages contributed to social peace and stabilizing the economic upswing by strengthening mass consumption.
Democrats Throw Palestinians Under the Bus (tags)
Palestinians
The Capitalism of Hopelessness (tags)
Regulated capitalism reached its peak in the class compromise of the 1960s when representatives of workers could put the screws on the steamroller CEOs a little. The enemy and dynamic are lost to capitalism. Capitalism flows into a society without utopia and alternative.
Democracy in Crisis: The Terror of the Economy is a Danger to Democracy (tags)
There is a powerful crisis dynamic that is stronger than the will of the sovereign and its democratic institutions. When capital relations fall into crisis, everything can be instrumentalized: the basic law, democracy, human rights and human life. Economic pressure creates extremism of middle.
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.
class war
Groups urge world leaders to reject “Green Economy” in Rio+20 summit (tags)
MANILA, Philippines - Various cause-oriented groups warned the Philippine delegation and world leaders attending the three-day United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil not to fall into the trap of believing that the proposed "Green Economy" is "a tool and mechanism for sustainable development."
Violence-Wracked Honduras (tags)
police state
Debt Tribunal and Green Socialism (tags)
Qualitative growth, breaking out of the box of quantitative growth, is the key to solving mass unemployment, environmental destruction and trade imbalance. A job in education costs 1/10 what a job in a chemical dye plant costs. The media is part of a system that refuses change.
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).
Workers and Immigrants of All Nationalities, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win (tags)
May Day in LA was another success! Again, 10,000 workers and immigrants of all nationalities led by the May Day Coalition in Los Angeles marched along the downtown LA in unity against oppressive capital and the 1% that kept them exploited and oppressed through the years. Despite the troubled winds, besides all the other marches, the workers movement remained united. This is the second year that the workers marched under one banner. All despite the machinations of other groups to divide and disperse the movement.
Democracy instead of Fiscal Pact (tags)
Against the authoritarian-neoliberal EU, we champion a democratic and social-ecological Europe of the many!
BTL:Connecticut Poised to Become 17th State to End Capital Punishment (tags)
Interview with Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center , conducted by Melinda Tuhus
Obama Authorizes Greater Wall Street Theft (tags)
class war
The Criminal Class in Washington is Bipartisan (tags)
politics
The Error is in the System (tags)
The financial crisis mutated into a global economic crisis and a state debt crisis. The financial crisis was not a "bump in the road" or an industrial accident but a systemic and structural crisis that caused $11 trillion of wealth to vanish while millions lost their jobs. homes and pension
So much crisis was never analyzed with a crisis-conditioned satisfaction guarantee! Instead of seeking culprits, we must seek the systemic causes of the indebtedness dynamic. These gigantic debt mountains were necessary to keep capitalism functioning. Fewer and fewer workers can producer more and more goods in an ever-shorter time.
The Twilight of Capitalism (tags)
Those who defend more capital will be the instrument of destruction of capitalism.
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.
Book Review: "The Great Crash or the Century Crisis" by Elmar Altvater (tags)
Capitalism is at an end and the whole world is drawn into the mess. Preventing this is an ethical imperative and a political duty. The multiple crisis has dragged on for years. The political class allows this to happen. Political answers to the debacle can only be found with clarity on causes.
Dominant Finance Capital Institutions (tags)
money power
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.
State-Sponsored Murder: Official US Policy (tags)
police state
On the Failure of the Mainstream Economy (tags)
The neoliberal mainstream economy and its political backers experienced their Waterloo with the most serious financial and economic crisis in eight decades. States bailed out banks and banks made money by lending back to states. A policy of reduced working hours is necessary.
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.
America's Barbaric Death Penalty (tags)
barbarism
"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.
We live on credit, shift costs and risks into the future and make possible a prosperity with the help of a policy of cheap money that is paid for by others. An interest-free money system would be a counter model to the growth pressure inherent in the present system.
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.
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."
Speaking truth to Camino Nuevo Charter Academy Revisionists (tags)
While the charter-voucher supporters dominate the narrative, public school supporters still have the facts on our side. Rather than allow corporate voices drown us out, we must choose to explain why communities want public schools.
The End of the Long 20th Century (tags)
The US no longer has the necessary financial means to maintain its worldwide military machine (which now drives the US deeper in indebtedness to the international financial markets). The failure of the Project for a New American Century shows the US has not succeeded in subjecting the world
Continued Middle East Protests and Violence (tags)
liberating struggles
imperialism
Gates' Yolie Flores displays an all new level of mendaciousness on ACLU settlement (tags)
Addressing the outrageous mendaciousness of Yolie Flores' recent anti-community and anti-labor op-ed on the Reed Settlement.
The End of the "Golden Age" of Capitalism and the Rise of Neoliberalism (tags)
"The central point is that the financial sphere has the potential of developing into an autonomous subsystem of the whole economy with an enormous capacity of self-expansion..Like cancer, it has no internal control mechanism. It can only be brought under control by external interventions"
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.
True and False Causes of the Financial Crisis (tags)
If we can produce enough for all in superfluity-and we are already technically in this position-why must the whole enormous social wealth be squeezed through the needle of buying and selling, money, profit and growth? We all deserve something better than capitalist crisis economy.
Israel's Jerusalem Master Plan 2020 (tags)
Israel plans to Judaize Jerusalem
Honduras: Latin America's Murder Capital (tags)
murders in fascist Honduras
The ABCs of Marx’s Capital (tags)
Every day when you go to work your labor creates wealth, but you’re still broke. Why? Karl Marx answers that question in Capital, his book that demystifies capitalist economics.
Worldwide Economic Crisis 2.0 or the Collapse of Neoliberal Finance Capitalism (tags)
The present crisis is a consequence of the fact that exploding business profits found inadequate investment opportunities in the productive sector and turned instead to financial speculation. Deregulation created "law-free" spaces" with the abrogation of all political controls.
Destructive Neoliberal Austerity (tags)
austerity, not stimulus coming
CORPORATE MEDIA IS COMING TO HOME (tags)
Capital’s most severe crisis in seventy years ought to be a moment of significant opportunity for the left. But as the right mobilizes disgruntled Americans via its vast radio, television, web, and print empires, the one mass medium available to the left is driving out its best and brightest.
In the 1960s, JKGalbraith warned of two worlds: private affluence and public squalor. Now after the neoliberal counter-offensive, more than half of US states struggle with deficits. Without the social contract, we become wolves to each other.
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."
Fear of Crash: Book Review (tags)
In "Crisis without Resistance," Werner Seppmann analyzes the "intimidation offensive of capital." "The attack on the living standards of wage-earners becomes an essential component of capital accumulation." Fear of falling is a reason for defensive conduct of crisis victims.
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.
JERRY BROWN SHOULD JUST TELL ELITE MRS. WHITMAN ~ IT'S THE BUSH ELITE TAX CUTS MEG !!! (tags)
ARE CALIFORNIA MIDDLE~CLASS RESIDENTS WILLING 2 CONTINUE SUPPORTING OUR U.S. ELITE'S 2 TRILLION $$ BUSH TAX CUTS & PLANNED ESTATE TAX ABATEMENT ??
AFTER TAKING 750 BILLION $$ BAILOUT THEY NOW ARE ALSO DEMANDING 2 TRILLION $$ TAX CUTS ? (tags)
WOW ~ OUR AMERICAN WEALTHY ELITE REALLY MUST THINK OUR MIDDLE~CLASS AMERICANS CAN CONTINUE TO BE FOOLED AGAIN INTO BUYING INTO THEIR BILLIONAIRE MULTI~MILLIONAIRE ESTATE & PERSONAL TAX CUT WELFARE SCENE ??
True and False Causes of the Financial Crisis (tags)
The jubilant singing about free enterprise as the supposedly best of all worlds sounds much quieter than at the beginning of the 1990s. We urgently need alternatives. This is now a matter of survival. As it was taboo to doubt the rule of the church in the Middle Ages, the thought prohibition of questioning the market economy is in effect.
Haiti Earthquake: Capitalism, Occupation and Revolution (tags)
The earthquake that wrecked the capital of Haiti and surrounding areas on January 12 produced human tragedy of almost unfathomable proportions. It has been termed “the most destructive natural disaster in modern times.” Five months later, Haiti is no longer in the headlines or on the nightly TV news, but for the hard-hit Haitian population the scene has hardly changed. Now a new disaster is in the making as the hurricane season begins. This was a calamity made by capitalism: the earthquake was predictable and was predicted; the inferior construction methods are the result of Haiti’s poverty, and the swollen slums were the result of U.S. policies that have destroyed Haitian agriculture, forcing peasants off the land. On top of everything, Haiti is under imperialist occupation: Washington makes sure it has ultimate control of the strategically placed island, as it has throughout the Cold War and since. Haiti's devastation is not the result of “natural” causes or even “neo-liberal” policies – it is the product of the oppression of this semi-colonial country by the imperial masters ever since black slaves rose up to abolish slavery and throw out the colonialists two centuries ago. No new “economic model” can resolve this: what’s required is a new Haitian Revolution, a workers revolution overthrowing capitalism throughout the Caribbean and extending into the heart of imperialism.
Saving is not a Solution (tags)
The capital markets repeatedly force the real economy to its knees. The savings orgy should help heavily indebted states regain the trust of the financial markets. In a play from the madhouse, states must run into debt to bailout their money-houses.
U.S. SENATOR BLANCHE LINCOLN ONLY SHOPS TIFFANY'S !!! (tags)
~ WEALTHY ELITE AMERICANS DO NOT SHOP AT WALMART,THEY SHOP AND BUY IN THE PEOPLES U.S. CONGRESS ~
cada pueblo conservaba su lengua y sus costumbres
Overcoming the Dominance of Finance Capital (tags)
Changing power relations means taking up the social and political struggle against finance capital and regaining control over social resources. Reversing the redistribution of income from top to bottom is a prerequisite for containing the money flows in the financial sector.
The IMF's mid-life crisis (tags)
The IMF has long been opposed to capital controls and punished countries. Now the IMF is wrestling with this issue. Exchange rate stabilization should be a priority in the context of unraveling economies. The IMF will be meeting in Toronto in June 2010.
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
FORMAL DEMOCRACY x TRUE DEMOCRACY (tags)
Is America a true democracy?
FAILURE OF ELECTIONS IN THE OFFING? (tags)
The Armed Forces of the Philippines has started fielding more than 7,300 soldiers in Metro Manila even as it declared 10 cities in the capital region as election “hotspots.” These with news filtering to PESANTE NEWS that politicians are arming their forces and deliberately ignoring the gun ban. PESANTE NEWS also learned that the airport are packed with supporters of candidates from LA who are trying to get out of Manila due to the situation. The situation turned to the worst when 78,000 PCOS machines cocked out and and there was a call for manual elections to the COMELEC. PGMA's lawyers have formally called for a postponement of elections for the next two weeks.
California Governor Candidate Wants Death Penalty on Spending Chopping Block (tags)
Stewart Alexander says “The Democrat front-runner Jerry Brown and Republicans Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner support the death penalty and the Three Strikes law. The truth is, these three candidates for governor are aware that capital punishment is robbing the public of billions of dollars to subsidize a broken down criminal justice system.”
The 2010 Worldwatch Report was compiled by 60 scholars. "To avoid collapse, nothing less is urged than a revolution of the dominant cultural model, the replacement of our consumer culture with a model of sustainable prosperity."
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.
Brazil-Paraná-Curitiba: The creation of a new transport company in the big city. (tags)
A very specific historical-political phenomenon has happened here : the bus companies have become so important and powerful, in such a close symbiosis with politicians of the city, that simply was not possible to walk the steps that everyone has walked, in the direction of urban trains, the subways and other solutions universally enshrined.
Education as Tranquilizer (tags)
"A false strategy of combating poverty results inevitably from a flawed analysis of the causes of poverty. Whoever culturalizes the problem relies on education reforms without repairing the structural causes.."
Finance Capitalism Devalues Labor (tags)
Businesses are capital investments in the hands of shareholders. Consequently managers only serve the interests of shareholders.
Climate Justice, Not Growth Mania (tags)
"In green capitalism, the bio-crisis is at the center of the growth strategy. The Green New Deal represents a kind of ecological inversion of Kennedy's famous sentence: Ask not what you can do for the environment but what the environment can do for you..."
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.
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
Protecting Capitalists or the Welfare State (tags)
Banks and hedge brought disaster upon themselves and their customers with their "innovations" and financial products.. Financial management may never be uncoupled from the real economy and lead a life of its own without economic justification or social responsibility.
El capitalismo, ¿Riesgo o Usura? (tags)
¿Son las ganancias una recompensa al riesgo del inversor, o simplemente el resultado de la usura y de las condiciones que se ve obligado a aceptar el trabajador?
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
The High Risk Business of Banks (tags)
The model of financial market capitalism collapsed with the greatest crisis of the financial markets since the worldwide economic crisis at the end of the 20s. The enormous accumulation of financial assets was based on redistribution of incomes continuing for 30 years.
Capitalism Criticism 2.0 (tags)
Marx identified the falling rate of profit and the self-destruction of competition as contradictions of capitalism. Wages do not keep up with investments in machinery. Speculation and the explosion of the financial markets were encouraged by deregulation and higher profits.
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!
Honduras Insurrection - Assassination attempts foiled (tags)
Ricardo Salgado from Honduras - 88th day of the coup, protest, and now insurrection, with people defying the coup regime's attempts to impose a round the clock curfew. 50,000 people are still demonstrating in the capital Tegucigalpa, and the military have taken over two sport stadiums to hold the people they have arrested and held.
GERMANY: What Lessons Do We Learn from the Financial Crisis? (tags)
Rating agencies were paid by the firms to be rated. Ultimately rational individual conduct led to an irrational collective result. The lesson is clear. On the way of regulation or taxation, banks must be given a massive incentive to remain small.
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.."
Capitalism is the Problem: System Error (tags)
The chaos that we now witness is only the latest crisis of the global economic system. The system has not succeeded in keeping profits at the level of the postwar years. What is good for one capitalist is not necessarily good for the system. Triple-digit billions have been pumped into system
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.
Global Depression and Regional Wars (tags)
economic hard times and wars
Investments of the state in the infrastructure, in educational- and social services, are urgently necessary. One positive aspect of the crisis is that the financial sector has begun to shrivel. The shriveling of the financial sector must be accompanied and controlled by the state.
Democracy Alarm: Financial Management (tags)
After the stock market crash, financial management acts as though nothing happened. The state was obviously treated only as a useful idiot by parts of the moribund financial management. The little taxpayers pay for the repair.
"The Open Internet is in Danger" (tags)
The IT-branch is part of the solution. The best solution is balance or eco-social equalization. The Finnish constellation produces the greatest prosperity. Higher prosperity arises out of a state of balance, not under Brazilianization conditions.
The Return of the State (tags)
The state is welcome again in this plight. The brazenness with which those who caused the crisis now demand state subsidies to bailout the financial system is just as breathtaking as the state readiness to fulfill this demand.
"Crises belong to capitalism as the cyclone belongs to the weather.. A social division went along with the neoliberal turn. The welfare state mutated to a repressive crisis management of a growing mass poverty..Greenspan's dollar glut kindled a global deficit economy.."
"We are moving into a world-historical situation where all the points of social, economic and political life will be reset..A revolutionary process is only possible when a radical reform gets going.. A radical redistribution from top to bottom must be fought for.."
Ecological Justice Instead of Growth Economy for the Rich (tags)
"Now the market, the god of neoliberals, cannot help any more and speculators cry for the already instrumentalized state.. Studying pre-capitalist approaches is vital to develop a post-capitalist vision. The vision of the Bible is an economy of enough for all, an economy for life."
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 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.
Austria: Crash Instead of Cash (tags)
In 1978 the Bretton Woods system broke down since the US abandoned the key function of the US dollar to print money to finance the Vietnam War.. The liberalization of the financial markets started a mechanism in which the worldwide population loses.
The End of Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Capitalism (tags)
"Guaranteeing the social infrastructure and social security for everyone should be central instead of guarantees for banks and corporations and socialization and democratization of the economy instead of nationalization!"
Attac Catalogue for Democratizing the Financial Markets (tags)
The financial industry contributed over $5 billion in the last year in campaign gifts and lobbying to ensure that Wall Street oligarchs have their way in the media and congress. Attac is a global justice network committed to shriveling the financial markets.
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.
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.
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.
Capitalism's Crisis and our Response (tags)
Walden Bello delivered this speech at the Conference on the Global Criusis in Berlin, Marc h 20-21, 2009.
The New Feasibility and the G20 (tags)
These fictional articles point to a future after the world turned upside down by financial speculation. They were published in a fictional issue of "DIE ZEIT," the famous Hamburg weekly.
With Our Opponent On The Ropes, It’s Time To Go On the Offensive (tags)
The pages of the capitalist press reveal the level of concern they have over the survival of their system
Albert Einstein was a socialist (tags)
Famous physicist Albert Einstein wrote the essay entitled "Why Socialism?" for the first issue of left-wing magazine "Monthly Review" (May 1949).
The Neoliberal Revolution Devours Its Children (tags)
"Where is the child who uncovers the nakedness of the money economy?..The financial geniuses pretend to be the new gods of globalization. The builders of the Tower of Babel were modest compared to the new financial rulers of the world.
You don’t want to pay for the crisis of capital? Then just don’t do it. (tags)
A critique of the calls for demonstrations against the G20 in Berlin, Frankfurt and London under the slogan “We won't pay for your crisis! – For a solidarity society”
Global Day of Action: We Will Not Pay for Your Crisis March 28 Berlin (tags)
Dominance of the profit logic and economization of all areas of life must be ended. Capitalism cannot solve global problems like poverty, insecurity, climate change, destruction of the environment, wars and dismantling democracy-it causes them!
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 Global Collapse: a Non-orthodox View by Walden Bello (tags)
"Orthodox economics has long ceased to be of any help in understanding the crisis. Non-orthodox economics, on the other hand, provides extraordinarily powerful insights into the causes and dynamics of the current crisis.."
23 Theses on the Capitalist Crisis (tags)
Since the middle of the 1990s, the real economy only grew on account of the expansion of credit. After the dot.com crisis, the floodgates were opened. In the next four years, the Fed brought more dollars in circulation than in the whole 200-year US history.
CAPITALIST CATASTROPHE AND PROLETARIAN STRUGGLES (tags)
Hi fellows, here is the very first draft translation in English of the first pages of our last review in French "Communisme" N°60. Sorry for the language but improvements will come later. Meanwhile, have a good reading and we are waiting for your comments and critics...
Facing the Economic Crisis (tags)
Stanley Aronowitz teaches at the City University of New York and is the author of Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006). More important articles and videos are available at www.socialistproject.ca.
COMMUNISM No.14 (January 2009) (tags)
Central review in English of the Internationalist Communist Group (ICG)
An Umbrella for Workers (tags)
The economic crisis is a structural crisis where productivity has soured and wages have stagnated. The fraud in public regional banks must end. Unemployment benefits must increase. Michael Schlecht is a union spokesperson for the German Left party (Die Linke).
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.
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.
Social capital has dangerously disappeared in the last years and decades. In the whole economy, there should be more cooperation and less competition, more sustainability and less monetary striving for gain. One cannot solve problems with the same thinking that caused the problems,
Financial Crisis: Bending and Breaking (tags)
The governments still strike the pose of successful crisis management. The points are set for a state-sanctioned survival of neoliberlaism through bending and breaking, Instead of raising mass income, the state finances capital investments to liven up the domestic economy.
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.
Some thoughts on the current economic crisis and capitalism
The global crisis is a crisis of capitalism (tags)
It is time for the workers and the poor in the Philippines to prepare for the worse the moment its government keeps on repeating the mantra that the economic fundamentals remain good and thus there is little to worry about effects of the global recessionary trend. The world found itself in the present mess precisely because of such blind faith in neoliberal fundamentalism.
Rich of the World, Enrich Yourselves! (tags)
Financial jugglers speculating with food, oil and other raw materials caused double-digit inflation and made staple foods like rice and wheat into luxury items for millions. Neoliberalism with one blow managed to drive nation states to the defensive.
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.
Not "Fascism or Obama": Fascism and Obama (tags)
It is all too obvious that anti-fascism renounces revolution. But anti-fascism fails exactly where its realism claims to be effective: in preventing a possible dictatorial mutation of society. The fight for a democratic state is inevitably a fight to consolidate the state, and far from crippling totalitarianism, such a fight increases totalitarianism's stranglehold on society.
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.
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.
Part 2- World Capitalist Crisis (tags)
We expect more of the use of cheap labour in the less developed countries like China and India in order to produce cheap raw materials and semi-manufactured consumer products for the imperialist countries and thereby maximize imperialist profits. In fact the US capitalist are hell bent on transferring high paying industries to the third world and even already cheap service industries like call centers and car assemblies and other production lines in a vain attempt to cut jobs, paying insurances and other workers benefits that the people are demanding in the face of the capitalist made crisis.
The problem is that a large part of US real estate financing, the "subprime" market for real estate credits to poor borrowers, functioned according to the model of a chain letter. Radical redistribution, nationally and internationally, is the command of the hour.
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.
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.
NO MORE BAILOUTS....we have done too much already (tags)
It is FEAR MONGERING, by exaggerations and catastrophic depictions.. propaganda...selling us the 2% incomers version of how bad it will be for us if they lose any of their profits, capital gains, benefits, compensations, and lobbist powers, and government chummists [the revolving door club]
Political Economy of the Financial Markets (tags)
Financial markets are not described here as anonymous zones of self-regulation but as instruments of private actors enforcing their own business interests on state institutions. Structural deficits cause the crises, e.g.massive liquidity.
Foreign countries will not finance US wars and US consumption for ever. The US must accept the new reality that countries want to diversity, not accumulate dollars. What becomes of a country that refuses systemic criticism and sets missions and agendas above facts and realities?
Why Socialism? (by Albert Einstein) (tags)
This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).
Cannon fodder for the market (tags)
The government of Georgia would never have launched its armed forces against the capital of the Autonomous Republic of South Ossetia in the dawn of August 8, engaged in what it called the re-establishing of constitutional order, without previous coordination with Bush
Coalition Demands Commitment to Quality Child Care at Bright Horizons (tags)
Los Angeles (CA) – Against a bright blue backdrop stating, “Bain Capital: Put Kids First ... Not Profits,” local coalitions of concerned parents, labor union members, community leaders and child care advocates will rally this Thursday, July 31, at 12 p.m. (noon) in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The agenda includes an original song, street theater, comments by parents, religious leaders, elected officials and child care advocates and the issuance of three demands to the buyout giant Bain Capital. For every demand there is one key principle: improve the quality of child care.
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.
Full Speed Against the Brick Wall (tags)
Massive capital has streamed into the raw material sector and crude oil. When we leave the market to speculators, panic rules. The economy falls into a double crisis-out of scarce raw materials and energy and falling profit rates and mass demand.
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.
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.
The problem is that a large part of US real estate financing, the so-called subprime market for real estate credits to poor borrowers, functioned according to the model of a chain letter. Radical redistribution, nationally and internationally, is the command of the hour.
The Time is Ripe: Democratic Controls of the Financial Markets! (tags)
Like the melting of the dollar, the energy, food and housing crises have systemic roots, the logic and dynamic of maximum profit.. The US is experiencing a "margin call." The world wants its money back. The economy and the financial markets should serve people, not vice versa.
How Much Democracy is Left? (tags)
Politics no longer determines the econmy; the mammoth econmy defines politics. The US has long been a plutocracy instead of a democracy and has prescribed this system of capital rule for the whole world. Capital rule is always central rule
Announcing a new open course.
Deregulated Markets and Alternative Economics (tags)
In the last ten years there was more speculationthan ever, more than before the 1930 worldwide economic crisis. A policy of deregulated financial markets made this possible. That real investment profits turn out relatively small encourages the speculation tendency.
world petroleum congress: non grato (tags)
Summer is coming and, besides the nice sunny days and good weather, this year threatens us with the occupation of the capital city of the Spanish State by a gloomy lobby.
“Hunger riots”, it's the struggle of the proletariat! (tags)
http://www.geocities.com/icgcikg/leaflets/hungerriots.htm
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.
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.
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.
The Asian Crisis of 1997-1998: Deregulation (tags)
Enormous capital streamed in short-term monetary investments that could dissolve at any time, not in lasting direct investments. Higher stock prices and home prices fueled the credit boom. Deregulated finance markets are everything but efficient.
Attac Germany on the Subprime Crisis (tags)
The crisis can't be solved with a few surveillance cameras in the global casino. The party was quickily over when the real estate prices stopped soaring. Investors are often guided by a herd behavior. Sustainable economy should have a prioirity over short-term profits.
The Crisis of Speculative Capitalism (tags)
Since the end of July 2007, the world economy was shocked by a new severe crisis of the financial markets. The courage to regulate the financial markets to prevent a future uncoupling from the productive economy is still obviously absent. The hour of truth will inevitably come.
US Crisis Sends Europe's Housing Market into Free Fall (tags)
Investor George Soros sees the worst economic crisis since the Second World War as the aftermath of heavy debts and the credit crunch. Speculative greed for profits and contempt for whistle-blowers led to the crisis. Will there be system correction or only cosmetics?
Dislocations and Crises (tags)
Liberalization of the finance markets started a mechanism where the broad mass of the world's population lost. Only a few conglomerates and wealthy persons are winners.
After the crisis of 1997, not one important fianncial reform was carried out in the world. Liberalizationof capital markets causes instability and not necessarily growth. In South Korea, the IMF recommended the sale of state banks to US investors.
Interview with Kurt Richebacher (tags)
"The dangers that loom on the currency front are immense. The US trade deficit and the accumulated foreign indebtedness have reached a scale that defies any possible action by central banks." Dr. Richebacher is a former economist of the Dresden Bank.
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.
Soaring Capital Profits and the Mountain of Corpses (tags)
For the first time in the historyof humanity, a surplus of goods could satisfy the basic needs of all earthlings. The moral imperative lives in all of us. Capital rule, the rule of finance capital over the economic events of the world, is nearly total.
Reviewing James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer's "Multinationals on Trial" (tags)
How corporate giants plunder developing nations.
Global Capital Flows to the Rich (tags)
The global imbalance seems more dangerous for all other countries than for the US. A fundamental reform of the international monetary system is overdue. The US dollar is no longer the stable anchor of the world monetary system.
INSURGENTES against Venezuela´s constitutional reform (tags)
* Various organizations and individuals within Venezuela, each with a history of social struggle and each bringing with them diverse proposals from the anti-authoritarian and critical left, have assembled in the space of INSURGENTES (INSURGENTS) to forge a position against the proposed constitutional “reform” offered by the republic’s President, Hugo Chavez Frias.
Who's Afraid of the Falling Dollar? (tags)
An overvalued dollar makes imports artificially cheap and prices US exports out of markets. Mending our pockets and setting productive capital over speculative capital are vital in reconfiguring the economy toward sharing and simplicity.
Reforms and the System Question (tags)
According to Marxist perspectives, capitalism develops with crises and ruptures. Possibilities of revolutionary social upheavals open up in these crises. The old wisdom of the Fordist age that cars cannot buy cars has lost all value to the elites.
The academic world changes fundamentally when universities are understood as businesses. Rectors become CEOs and researchers and teachers become point chasers through conditioning.
Venezuela: Insurgentes frente a la reforma constitucional (tags)
* Diferentes organizaciones y personas del país, con trayectorias en las luchas sociales, vinculadas a diversos planteamientos de izquierda crítica y anti-autoritaria, que hemos confluido en el espacio INSURGENTES, fijamos posición ante la “reforma” propuesta inicialmente por el Presidente de la República.
Attacks in Argentina and Belgium in solidarity with Gabriel and Jose (tags)
Fire to the state, to capital and its prisons.
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?
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.
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.
Tranforming Capitalist Schooling (tags)
School is back. So are liberals and conservatives, bickering over how to preserve capitalist schooling. At issue is how to get beyond capital, its promises of perpetual war and meaningless jobs. How shall we keep our ideas, yet teach?
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.
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.-
Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization (tags)
Refusing to work out historical sins like colonialism, fascism and apartheid repeats the historical model of conquest, domination and exclusion. Kairos Europe is directed against a system and its structures. Its positive goal sets life and people in first place.
Postscript: the insurrectional perspective (tags)
More than a year has passed since we finished the second issue of our journal Dissident, which introduced insurrectional anarchism in Sweden. We chose to introduce the insurrectional perspective because we think it brings us valuable insights and experiences. These include the critique of organisational fetischism and activism, the shift of perspective from the mass to the active minority, and the importance of projectuality. Some critics, mostly syndicalists, unfortunately interpreted the insurrectional perspective in absolute terms. This text aims to answer those concerns and move the discussion forward.
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,
“Green” capitalism: German Greens adopt new economic programme (tags)
Germany’s Green Party recently agreed to a new economic programme, published under the title “The Green free-market economy.” The programme paper was developed by prominent party figures under the auspices of the party’s parliamentary faction leader Fritz Kuhn, heralding the free market as the guardian angel of the environment—and their own wallets. Every line of this document reflects the class outlook of the upper middle class—those owning medium-sized businesses and the better-off self-employed—by glorifying the market and private property, while simultaneously expressing the authors’ fear of mounting social inequalities. The entire document is characterised by a continuous “on the one hand...and on the other hand” type of argument.
Brazil/Curitiba: Eighty a thousand families without dignified home. (tags)
Cities that do not have public policy of popular habitation do push devoid populations for non buiding areas as fertile valleys of the rivers. The result is periodic flooding, with all the ominous and known consequences for local inhabitants, other populations and for the environment.
Presidential Candidate Will Ban Death Penalty (tags)
As president of the United States Stewart Alexander will fight for a constitutional ban on the death penalty; he will also direct his attorney general to investigate the cover-up in the Mumia case by the state officials in Pennsylvania, potentially charging these officials with obstruction of justice for covering up the frame-up.
Mexico's 911 Waiting for the Perfect Storm (tags)
"Mexico City is at risk of flooding of the kind that devastated New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina if authorities don´t take steps to unclog the canals, reservoirs and lagoons that make up the municipal sewer system, experts warn."
Where do the moneylenders get their money? (tags)
Accepting that labor creates all wealth alone will not open the road to our emancipation. Understanding how it creates it is paramount.
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.
Workers Know All About Capital Accumulation, Don't We? (tags)
It is within the pages of the main Bourgeois journals that we find the strongest confirmation of Marx's economic writings.
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.
Chinese entrepreneurship, politics and globalization (tags)
Learn about China and globalization
Photos - Tens of thousands of troops deployed ahead of Bangladesh polls (tags)
Bangladeshi police beat leaders and activists of the 14-party opposition alliance during clashes in Dhaka
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: CRUELTY AND COST (tags)
The recent execution of Angel Nieves Diaz in Jacksonville, Florida has outraged opponents of capital punishment nationwide due to the unusual length of time of the procedure and the apparent pain and suffering Angel Diaz appeared to experience. Stewart Alexander, with the Peace and Freedom Party, says, “The whole process of capital punishment is flawed and the PFP wants federal legislation to band capital punishment in all 50 states; too many mistakes have been made, it’s cruel and inhumane.”
Direct solidarity with the oppressed and exploited in Oaxaca (tags)
When we read the communiqués sent out by APPO [Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca / Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca] and by all the organizations, collectives and individuals that are today a part of it, including some anarchist companions that innocently follow these shitpile bourgeoisie and authoritarians, we honestly ask ourselves if we are talking about the same thing, or worse yet, if we even co-exist in the same country or if they are narrating to us what occurs in a distant galaxy.
Exploitation and Precarity (tags)
The exclusion processes are actually the result of radicalized capital exploitation strategies.. In the last two decades capital has learned that low-wage zones can be enforced when the collapse zones are intimidatingly present.
The Amerikan Empire making Iraq a better place to live. (tags)
Look at how things have improved after the American Empire over threw Saddam and installed our own "democratic" puppet government. Isn't freedom and democracy American style great????
THE SHAME OF THE NATION: A COLLECTIVE PERVERSION (tags)
THE COLLECTIVE PERVERSION OF THOSE IN HIGH PLACES IN THE US
Time to plan for the protest when the body count hits 3,000 (tags)
I guess we won't have to wait that long to get to the 3,000 body mark for the big anti-war protest. If this keeps up we could hit the 3,000 mark in a little over a month.
...
Protest Bush in Holmby Hills this Tuesday 4pm - 8pm (tags)
This Tuesday Bush will be Los Angeles from 4pm to 8pm to attend a republican fundraiser in Holmby Hills at the home Elliott Broidy, chairman of a venture capital firm funding projects in Israel.
Creditor instead of Citizen (tags)
Do the capital markets undermine democracy?
Ecoanarchists help reclaim southcentral farm (tags)
The destructive bulldozer raid by real estate developer Ralph HorowitzCo. & LA Sheriffs' on LA's southcentral community farm only resulted in strengthening the resistance and improved networking between sc campesino farmers, ecoanarchists and permaculture communities..
If this is what democracy is all about I can understand why the Iraqis don’t like it. (tags)
The Health Ministry planns to construct two new branch morgues in Baghdad and raise capacity to as many as 250 corpses a day.
Occupation, not democracy! (tags)
This leaflet was distributed during the second week of the occupations and in the 10000 people demonstration in Thessaloniki. Its content was determined by what we saw then as the major weaknesses of the movement, i.e. the adherence to democratic procedures and generally to a democratist ideology along with the absence of any critique of schoolwork and of the media’s mediating role.
The Planetary War of the United States of America (Dec2001) (tags)
Sooner or later the competing bourgeoisies will attempt to free themselves, to unite, to escape from America’s more and more choking dominance.
Alexander: Death Row, Many Challenges (tags)
The U.S. Supreme Court made two important decisions on the death penalty that will impact the fate of hundreds of men and women that are on death rows nationwide. Stewart Alexander, Candidate for California Lieutenant Governor, says, “I respect the decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court, however the entire process of capital punishment in America is flawed.
Re-Regulation of the Economy (tags)
"Finance markets become judges over the economy punishing mistakes with (threaten-ed) capital flight." Resisting re-regulation represses blind spots and confuses the goat and the gardener, the market and the fire dept and the problem and the solution.
In payback time in the culture of fear, important trade, budget and cable access bills are passed in the dead of night. The dominant elite consciusness is frozen, refuses alternatives and stylizes bankruptcy as normal business practice.
Mass rioting reveals depth of Afghan opposition to US occupation (tags)
The mass rioting that broke out in the Afghan capital of Kabul Monday has exposed the intensity and breadth of popular opposition to the four-and-a-half-year US-led occupation of Afghanistan and the fragility of the hold on the country by Washington and the puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai. According to official and press reports, at least 20 people died Monday in clashes between demonstrators, US troops and Afghan security forces, while more than 140 were wounded. A doctor at the Khair Hana Hospital in northern Kabul told the New York Times that a seven-year-old child was among the dead, while several other school children were severely wounded.
Death Penalty, $250 Million Tax Burden (tags)
California taxpayers will spend an average of $200 to over $275 million for each prisoner on death row; and most of that cost is related to the high cost of capital trials, housing the death row inmate, the high cost for defense counsel and the tens of millions required to appeal convictions.
The Utopias of Capitalism (tags)
:Government and freedom exclude one another" Max Barry in "Jennifer Government." In the negative utopia, the dystopia, the fear is over capital interests. Workers are no longer paid because their work is divine service.
Chinese development strategies (tags)
Vast business opportunites from China
"AQUI ESTAMOS Y NO NOS VAMOS!": THE STRUGGLE FOR IMMIGRANT RIGHTS (tags)
By William I. Robinson
MESSAGE OF SOLIDARITY TO THE IMMIGRANT WORKERS ON THE DAY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN BOYCOTT 20 (tags)
We, the International League of Peoples' Struggle, hereby express our solidarity with and support for the millions of immigrant workers on the day of the Great American Boycott 2006 when they and their supporters do not go to work, to school or to any shop but hold protest marches and rallies against institutions and symbols of anti-immigrant discrimination, exploitation and oppression in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle and 100 cities all over the US.
The Democrats' Daddy Warbucks (tags)
Feinstein Family War Profits:
Unions and the Growth Mania (tags)
The more productivity advances, the less labor is needed to realize a certain growth rate.. A de-acceleration can reduce the increase of labor productivity and lead to more employment.. A strategy beyond growth should be developed.
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.
US Hispanic Direct Response Marketing Returning Big Rewards (tags)
There’s been a shift in the DRTV responses over the last few years – what used to be strictly an English speaking audience has changed considerably. Half-hour paid program purchases in the U.S. are coming from both English and Spanish speaking consumers reaping generous rewards.
Death Penalty Issue Still Alive (tags)
The California death penalty has a temporary moratorium resulting from medical professionals refusing to participate in the execution of Michael Morales. Now is the time to examine the failures of capital punishment and how the criminal justice system is completely out of control in California and America.
Life is More than Capital (tags)
Ulrich Duchrow and Franz Hinkelammert focus on the mis-developments in the third world where privatization of the water supply led to higher prices. international conglomer-ates made profits and paid no local taxes.
The South is Bled White (tags)
Since the Asian crisis and the 1980s, we have had massive net capital flows from the South to the North. The South is systematically bled white under the present conditions of the world economy.
Are All Unemployed Persons Idlers? (tags)
According to the neoliberal myth, higher profits lead to increased investments and more jobs. In reality corporations repress the worsening domestic economy through take-overs. Are the unemployed, seniors, students and the disabld made invisible?
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.
Instead of overcapacities and selling houses to each other, America is called to radical economic change and sustainability. The economy should servie humanity. Progress and work should be redefined for the post-fossil age.
Green Party Window Dressing Undermines Working Class Power (tags)
Electoral politics for socialists has always been tricky. Eugene Debbs, the firebrand organizer and SP candidate for President fought a huge uphill battle based on his forward facing confrontation with capital, while always clearly identifying class lines. Of course, I expect nothing less from Todd Chretien, the Green Party US candidate for Senate.
Got this idea while thinking about the ambush the CIA is playing on the neocons.
The Coming Great Global Re-Balancing (tags)
On the economic horizon is an event that will exceed the Thirties.
Help Save Stanley Tookie Williams from execution (tags)
ON DEC. 13 at 12:01 a.m., Stanley "Tookie" Williams, who helped found the Crips gang in Los Angeles at the age of 17, is scheduled to die in the execution chamber at San Quentin Prison. His only chance to escape death by lethal injection is a grant of clemency from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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.
Global Capitalism: the Scourge of Democracy (tags)
global capitalism is an economic Colt 45 for the times
CUCKOO ECONOMICS (Abridged Ed.) (tags)
By deliberately confusing assets that can be *produced* with assets that can only be *acquired*, modern economics laid the ideological foundation for unemployment, poverty, inequality, and the looming global depression.
This is the judgement
Car bomb injures Lebanese journalist May Chidiac (tags)
A prominent journalist for an anti-Syrian television station was severely injured yesterday after a bomb rigged to her car exploded, the latest in a string of targeted blasts in Lebanon's capital
W's political capital nosedived in Katrina speech (tags)
Boy George claimed political capital (with a mere 2% margin even after the disputed 2004 election) & vowed to use it. But after his debacle of a 'speech' on his handling of Katrina, W should commit suicide.
"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.."
BTL:Opponents of Prison Industrial Complex Rally for Policy Change in... (tags)
...Nation's Capital ~ Interview with Barbara Fair, of People Against Injustice, conducted by Between the Lines' Melinda Tuhus
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.."
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.."
Tigris dam damns AssurTigris dam damns AssurTigris dam dams Assur (tags)
The Iraqi government is building a dam which will obliterate the capital of the ancient Assyrian empire
July 4th is Flag Burning Day (tags)
For the fifth time politicians have succeeded in pushing an amendment to outlaw burning the United States flag through the House of Representatives. This time they have the best chance of using the conservative control of capital hill to ratify it.
Capital and Labor: Deeds Must Follow Criticism (tags)
A new balance between capital- and labor income is necessary. Unfortunately the opposite is happening. The constant lowering of capital taxation in Germany fans the European tax lowering competition. The public infrastructure deteriorates.
The New Inequality Machine (tags)
From the middle of the seventies, the interest rates exceeded the real growth rates. This made it even more attractive for owners of capital to invest their money in the financial markets rather than the real economy.
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.
ABRAMOFF USED DELAY TO FUND ANTI-INTIFADA MILITIA (tags)
"Native Americans were, unknowingly donating tens of thousands of dollars to Israeli settlers."
The economy is in a kind of balance with massive underemployment..Growth in purchasing power of upper income persons cannot balance the loss in purchasing power of normal, low-income and unempoyed persons..Unemployment is a capitalist law.
Other causes contribte to the economic misery besides the distribution problems. There are two developmental problems. There is the shift of profit from labor to capital. There is the worldwide opening of markets causing wage pressure.
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.
Short List of "Practical Necessities" (tags)
When interests rise, fewer and fewer investments occur in production and employ-ment, unemployment increases and the economy goes flat. This analysis of the Austrian economy could help the US battle deregulation and corporate enrichment.
The Future of the Movement Against Global Capital: An in-Person Report on the World Socia (tags)
A lecture and conversation with Peter Hudis
Free los rios from corporate agribusiness (tags)
Restoring los rios de california involves changing agriculture from corporate controlled 2 smaller scale permaculture and increasing use of drought tolerant native plants..
USA & Ltd. or USA Ltd.? (tags)
What to do, when a state becomes a threat to private business and starts to compete with them? Should we start collecting taxes to our business so we could support our R&D better, or should we fake us to do the subcontracts to the government? Please compare.
Unprofitable of the World, Unite! (tags)
Capaitalism is a threat to humanity, not a chance.. The logic underlying this system is simple and brutal. Only what is profitable is entitled to live.. Capital is insatiably greedy for human labor to transform labor into more and more capital..
BTL:Campaign Launched to Stop Connecticut's First Execution in 40 Years (tags)
Interview with Robert Nave, director of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty, conducted by Between the Lines' Melinda Tuhus
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.
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..
The Demon and its Conjuring Trick: Money (tags)
"The light in which the glboal financial markets operate is very dim.. Unveiling the money fetish is a task of economic literacy. The monetary sphere seems uncoupled from the real economy, the world of work.."
Inflationary Deflation or the Dominance of the Global Financial Markets (tags)
"When real interests are above real growth rates of the GDP, debtors are structurally overstrained. The debt crisis of the 1980s and the financial crises of the past decade suggest that a kind of post-modern `plundering capitalism' is arising.."
"Rainer Roth in The House of Cards puts the mechanisms of the capitalist economy on trial.. To counter the long-term descent of profit rates, the tax burden for businesses, a constant 21% from 1960 to 1980, has spiraled down to only 8% today.."
The Weather Map of Globalization (tags)
"Globalization is a real process rooted in the crisis of worldwide capitalist exploitation and describing a new quality of capital export. Outsourcing particular economic areas in the global repression competition replaces the export of complete industrial products.."
Over 6 million jobs would be created in Germany if the 33 million employees worked 20 percent less. 100 billion Euro would be restored to state treasuries. All that is needed is political will, not neoliberal indifference.
Sweden: Poorer Than You Think (tags)
Annulling Debts as a Great Step (tags)
"The goal must be redefined beyond goods production and abstract labor, beyond the market and the state.. The great step of debt cancellation occurs when the burden can no longer be endured. The new finance capita-lism is a bubble and debt capitalism.."
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.."
March 20: Planetwide Demos Against U.S. Occupation of Iraq (tags)
One year ago, Iraq was being pounded by the "shock and awe" of U.S. attack. Iraq's people have now lived a year under brutal occupation--as U.S. invaders seek to impose a new pro-U.S. government at the point of a gun. On March 20, 2004, hundreds of thousands of people around the world took to the streets, in over 300 actions in dozens of countries. Powerful outpourings of protest and resistance denounced the U.S. occupation of Iraq and demanded an end to U.S. attempts to dominate the world through threats and war
US Latin American strategy focuses on Colombia (tags)
Colombia today is more strategic to Washington's hegemonic plan in the region than ever before. It is no coincidence that the military component of the Free Trade Area of the Americas is called Plan Colombia.
Anti-Capitalist/Anti-Authoritarian Call for the "March in March" Sacto (tags)
10,000 march in Haiti. Demand return of President/End to U.S. occupation (tags)
Over 10,000 people marched in the capital of Haiti, demanding the returne of kidnapped President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and an end to the U.S. occupation. In the photos, demonstrators shout slogans at American occupation troops guarding the U.S. consulate in Port-au-Prince, Haiti Friday March 5, 2004. A brave Haitian boy hits a U.S. Marine Humvee during an occupation army patrol in the capital. Photos from REUTERS news agency.
Capitalism is Killing Free Trade (tags)
Are libertarians going to allow their ideology to do their thinking? What good does it do for libertarians to go into denial and to call me, patronizingly, names?
World Social Forum challenges inequality (tags)
MUMBAI, India – On the sidewalk of a busy Mumbai street, two tiny children and their baby brother, clad only in a shirt, sit in a patch of dirt, directly in front of a cell phone store.
The US as a Rogue State (tags)
Is the US a system of finance capital without genuine freedom? "Now and then Chomsky speaks of the US as the freest country in existence.. He seeks to inform, not convert. He looks skeptically at the media and sees in the media instruments of capital.."
Yes, indeed — the Bush boom has begun at last. (tags)
This week's report of a barnburner 7.2 percent rise in gross domestic product is very significant. It informs us of the likelihood of a true recovery boom — call it the Bush boom — in the months and quarters ahead.
Bolivia: The Uprising of Miners and Peasants (tags)
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Free Market shorts on Nanotech--Government to the Rescue (tags)
The U.S. government is easily the nation's largest investor in nanotechnology, with The House of Representatives passing a bill to invest $2.4 billion in the next three years. "Private equity sources can't bridge the gap from the lab to products"
"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
"Globalization is daily terror. Every seven seconds a child under 10 dies of starvation. Every four minutes a person loses eyesight on account of Vitamin A deficiency. Over 100,000 die every die of hunger..(while) world agriculture could feed twelve billion."
"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.
"GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!... er, I mean IRAQ!" (tags)
(Photo - A U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter patrols above the site where a U.S. Humvee vehicle was destroyed, in an explosion on Baghdad's airport road, July 8, 2003. Two soldiers were wounded in the attack. REUTERS/Faleh Kheiber)
Immigration control- atool of the bosses (tags)
Immigration
Fidel's trip to Argentina (tags)
analysis of the new context in Latin America
Are the Democrats covering up Senator Feinstein's link to war profiteering? (tags)
Why are Congressional Democrats silent about the Perini Corporation?
Did US Allow Saddam To Flee? (tags)
BAGHDAD -- Did US intentionally allow Saddam Hussein to flee from Iraq to Syria for a final destination in Russia after a last minute bargain with Moscow to capture the capital of Iraq without fighting?
Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld give Ahmed Chalabi Iraq (tags)
OUTSIDE NASIRIYAH, Iraq. April 13 -- The Pentagon has ordered U.S. forces here to quickly deploy a U.S.-sponsored opposition militia to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, American and Iraqi exile sources said today.
U.S. Troops Get Drinks, Warm Welcome in Iraq Town (tags)
AZIZIYAH, Iraq (Reuters) - Cheering Iraqis handed out soft drinks and offered cigarettes to U.S. Marines on Saturday, warmly welcoming the troops and making throat-slitting gestures at pictures of President Saddam Hussein.
Gallup Poll:Plurality of Americans Say DP Not Imposed Frequently Enough (tags)
Plurality of Americans Believe Death Penalty Not Imposed Often Enough Basic support for death penalty at 70%
The Privatization of the World (tags)
"State tax receipts rapidly decline through the globalization of capital. Heavily indebted states, provinces and communes have become economic crisis factors instead of being active as masters of crisis. They sell off cheaply the state table silver."
The United States' interventionist course of action: War and not peace. (tags)
The execution of this strategy of world domination, one of the priorities of the White House is the strengthening of its hegemonic presence in Latin America.
Democratic Socialism: A Transformational Project (tags)
Democratic socialism as a transformational process could remedy the social coldness and ecological blindness of neoliberalism and its total absolute market. This article is translated from the German in: Utopie kreativ 2000.
BTL:Mass Commutation of Illinois Death Row Inmates Reframes National Debate on... (tags)
...Capital Punishment. Interview with Bruce Shapiro,co-author of the book "Legal Lynching," conducted by Scott Harris
NO POWER AT ALL - WE ARE READY FOR THE REVOLUTION (tags)
blow up a social relation by changing it
Towards Abolition of the Death Penalty (tags)
Professor Michael Radelet from the University of Colorado-Boulder presented the keynote address at the IADP event. Professor Radelet is co author of In Spite of Innocence and has been a consultant to the Illinois Governor's Commission on Death Penalty Moratorium, among many other contributions to the movement to abolish the death penalty.
RAISE THE CONSCIOUS
RAISE THE CONSCIOUS
RAISE THE CONSCIOUS
CITY HEAT -URBAN FOOTLOOSE- (tags)
Helsinki, the capital city of Finland has made a strategic decision on city environment improvement; some city centre streets are being heated underground on winter frost, freeze and snow.
The Flexible Person: Critical Psychology and Fitness Training (tags)
With athletic and medical metaphors, persons even in nursery school are urged to fitness training. Under globalization, societies find themsevles in positional competition. National chances are set against the global threat. Trans.from German
The Wilderness Lives: The End of Prehistory as a Beginning (tags)
"The status quo is limited and not lasting from eternity to eternity as the quasi-religious worship of capital asserts. This worship of capital handed over to its own destructive dynamic is still dominant but not unchallenged." H. Thielen lives in Brazil.
On the subject of so-called "Trust Fund Kids" (tags)
I've noticed that some of the right-wingers and Bush lovers who post on IMC -- most notably those with nothing of substance to say -- are fond of using the term "Trust Fund Kids" as a pejorative to somehow diminish the contributions of those whose financial circumstances are anywhere above the poverty level. Let's dispel some of the "popular" misconceptions.
Maoist General Strike in Nepal (tags)
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L@VE
Medical Marijuana Protest in Sacramento on Monday (tags)
Thousands of patients, caregivers, students and concerned citizens will march to the state capital this Monday, Sept 23 to decry the Ashcroft Justice Department’s accelerated war on state approved and licensed medical marijuana dispensaries in California which serve mostly terminally ill patients suffering from cancer, AIDS, and other ailments.
Bush Daddy Communications (tags)
It's spin control to an extreme!
ERROR RATES IN CAPITAL CASES (tags)
A BROKEN SYSTEM: ERROR RATES IN CAPITAL CASES 1973-1995
NERVOUS FRENCH DON GASMASKS (tags)
New fashion trend sweeps Paris.
4 U.N. Workers Killed in Initial Strike (tags)
Perhaps the Chinese Embassy should consider evacuating as well?
Global Capital and Technology: America's New War (tags)
Global capital, technology, and America's new war
State Worker Solidarity (tags)
SUPPORT California State Workers In Their Struggle For A Contract
Mexican farmers protest in capital (tags)
Farmers say free trade is destroying their livelihoods
Guatemala Tax Protests Turn Violent, 83 Arrested (tags)
Guatemalan business men march during a national one-day work stoppage in Guatemala City August 1, 2001. Thousands of banner-waving students, workers and business leaders marched throughout Guatemala (Jorge Silva/Reuters)
CC on the Net: becoming "masters of the situation" (tags)
New challenges of the civic society and how you can participate.
A New Declaration of Independence by Emma Goldman (tags)
The history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people.
Free DC: A Tax Day call to action (tags)
A Tax Day Call to Action: Free DC! No Taxtation Without Representation! We are citizens of Washington DC. We have no vote. Every decision our city council makes is subject to congressional "review". We invite you to join us this tax day as we declare "No Taxtation Without Representation" and take action for DC: your Capital Colony. Please post this call to action on every listserv and share it with every friend.