Spiral downward and No exit! (tags)
The austerity dictates imposed on the Eurozone are only exacerbating the crisis they are supposed to be fighting. The austerity measures are leading to a collapse in domestic demand.
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...
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.
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.
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.
US Economy: False Diagnoses and False Solutions (tags)
Hillary Clinton's and Donald Trump's economic plans are too simplistic. Innovations and ideas are lacking. Many people despair. Washington did not always ignore the middle. FDR's New Deal built 165K public buildings.
Planned Crises or Alan Greenspan's "Tsunami" (tags)
Greenspan knew his policy would create a financial bubble that ultimately had to burst. The subsequent crisis was consciously accepted since it speeded up the process of creative destruction. Lessons from the 2008 financial meltdown include shrinking the financial sector and expanding the public sector.
For 40 years, the Bremen study group has published memorandums. The council of experts promoted the profits of businesses, not aggregate economic demand. Mass unemployment surpassed the 5 million mark because of neoliberal structural reforms.
"Crisis children" can't find a job despite study, four foreign languages and four hundred applications. They earn one-thousandth what a top manager rakes in. Youth unemployment has reached unbearable levels in Greece and Spain.
"Too Smart to Fail" by Thomas Frank (tags)
The “sound” banker, alas! is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows so that no one can really blame him. –John Maynard Keynes
TheInheritance of Inequality and Rethinking Growth (tags)
The economy exists for people, not vice versa. Economics should be pluralist, not a monolith. The economy should be embedded in society; society should not be embedded in the economy. Thomas Piketty and alternative economics emphasize inequality and mass unemployment.
New Economy and New Prosperity (tags)
Economic structures that form the basis for social prosperity have become dysfunctional. The financial markets have expanded their original function and are now self-financed markets in which protection from risks has become a highly speculative business.
The exodus from the casino capitalism producing ever faster and ever deeper crises cannot succeed without a broad and powerful democratic base. Parliamentary democracy is urged to finally take up the struggle around the primacy of politics
Cooked or Accurate US Employment Numbers? (tags)
class war
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..
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.
In the Towrope of the Financial Markets (tags)
"High growth has a well-known hook. Surpluses are only possible when natural resources from clear water to rare earth are available, when the energy supply is guaranteed and when the pollutant sinks are sufficient.. The debtors are now those states that had to become indebted.."
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.
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
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
The Crisis of Speculative Capitalism (tags)
The bubble bursts when debtors cannot pay and a bankruptcy crisis develops at the end.. The illusion of the stock exchange as a roulette with guaranteed permanent profits burst with the New Economy bubble..Only the worldwide regulation of the financial markets can avert their collapse.
John Kenneth Galbraith: Relentless Fighter Against the Powerful (tags)
In the 1960s John Kenneth Galbraith decried the coexistence of private affluence and public squalor and denounced trickle-down economics, feeding the horse so the sparrow can live. System- and structural criticism are vital today as the myth of the self-healing market lies shattered
Risk Development and Dollar Inflation (tags)
Two articles by emeritus professor Elmar Altvater reveal the contradictions of credit or bubble prosperity in the counter-revolution of capital. As work cannot define us, competitiveness and profit maximization do not define the human experience Speculation could bring a new feudalism..
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.
Disarm the Markets! New Attac Basis Text (tags)
The therapy depends on the diagnosis. Mechanisms, instruments and actors can be identified whose action and teamwork led to the crash. The age of a unipolar world was very short. An historical chance is opening against finance capitalism.
VIDEO: Agenda for a New Economy - David Korten (tags)
The Casino is Closed: Reasons for the Crash (tags)
Ulrich Schafer discusses the greed for fast money, a world without rules and why the market alone cannot regulate everything. The crisis has a pre-history. The state simply abandoned control over many economic areas. The financial world in particular was left to itself.
GABNET LA'S 6TH ANNUAL POLITICAL FASHION SHOW (tags)
OVER 300 PEOPLE ATTEND GABNET LA'S 6TH ANNUAL POLITICAL FASHION SHOW AND COMMIT TO DEFENDING WOMEN'S RIGHTS!
Systemic Failure: Capitalism "Lays an Egg" (tags)
deepening economic 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.
BTL:Replace Wall Street's Phantom Wealth with Main Street's Real Wealth (tags)
BETWEEN THE LINES Syndicated Radio Newsmagazine --Weekly Summary
VIDEO: Agenda for a New Economy - David Korten (tags)
Let us be honest. We don't need to fix the old economy - We need to create a new economy. David Korten's new book, "Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth", has been in bookstores less than 10 days and I implore you to get this book and read it immediately. We have a unique opportunity to change this system and create a sustainable, life-affirming economy.
GABNET LOS ANGELES AND PESANTE USA COMMEMORATE MENDIOLA MASSACRE; (tags)
Gabnet of the Mariposa Alliance and PESANTE-USA held a commemorative and educational forum on the 22nd anniversary of the Mendiola Massacre. Activists and community members gathered at Historic Filipinotown to hear about the 1987 event and discuss the ongoing struggle for peasant and human rights in the Philippines. The event was opened by Al Garcia of PESANTE-USA who described the January 22,1987 Mendiola Massacre, where 15,000 peasants peacefully rallying for genuine land reform were ruthlessly fired upon by the police and the Philippine Mari
Filipino hotel workers, among Long Beach’s poorest (tags)
Filipino couple Rogelio and Wilhemina de Vera, both 72 years old, who live in the “Cambodian projects” on Cherry Street, belong to the approximately 90,000 or almost 20 percent, of Long Beach residents who live under the federal poverty line. Half a million Filipinos make Long Beach or LA County—which ranks sixth in the nation for concentration of poverty—their home. “I am living paycheck to paycheck which is very hard because I still support some of my relatives back home,” Rogelio, a service van driver at a five-star Long Beach hotel, told Philippine News. “So I really appreciate that some organizations are helping me and my family
PETITION FOR THE US CONGRESS (tags)
e: www.myspace.com/jfavla PETITION FOR THE US CONGRESS TO IMMEDIATELY CALL A JOINT CONFERENCE COMMITTEE AND RECONCILE FILIPINO VETERANS BILLS NOW! Restore Section 4 of SB 1315 for the Filipino Veterans and junk HR 6897—the quit claim bill. We call on the US Congress to immediately call a joint conference committee and reconcile SB 1315 and HR 6897, which were both passed at the House of Representatives last September 22, 2008.
JFAV PETITION TO US CONGRESS (tags)
Restore Section 4 of SB 1315 for the Filipino Veterans and junk HR 6897—the quit claim bill. We call on the US Congress to immediately call a joint conference committee and reconcile SB 1315 and HR 6897, which were both passed at the House of Representatives last September 22, 2008. We demand that the joint US Congress conference committee restore the provision in SB 1315 on the Filipino Veterans, the full recognition and benefits for the last surviving veterans, for the widows and relatives of the Filipino World War II Veterans.
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.
The Age of Austerity Dawns (tags)
The burst bubble of the New Economy should have been understood as a warning. Then as today, wishful thinking and greed blocked the view to reality. Recessions offer a period of welcome recovery. Losing the hectic turbo-capitalism is not really a great loss.
Vote Green! Piera-Avila for Council (tags)
For 3 decades, LINDA PIERA-AVILA has been a passionate environmental, social justice, electoral reform and peace activist. Now she is putting herself on the line and running for Santa Monica City Council to put the public back into public service!
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.
Alert: FDA OKs Irradiated Spinach, EPA Sued 4 B Collapse Cover-up (tags)
Latest issue of OCA newsletter "Organic Bytes" alerts consumers about FDA approval of irradiated spinach, and features the lawsuit against the EPA for covering up the bee colony collapse. Other articles include victory gardens to support food independence.
AN OPEN LETTER TO SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI (tags)
Dear Ms. Speaker, We are writing to you on the matter of the pending House version of SB 1315 pending at the House of Representatives. We hold you, as the Speaker and the leader of the Democratic Party, responsible for not passing the bill in the house You have the responsibility to answer why the bill has not been discussed or have not been put into vote despite several promises. Time is of the essence for these American veterans who were victims of the unjust Recession Act that was passed on February 18th, 1946. Of the 250,000 Filipino soldiers who served under the American Flag during World War II, only 18,000 are still alive with more veterans dying everyday.
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.
Corruption has become a cancerous disease of US society. No end or even weakening of the lies and deception is in sight. In the politics of the nation, corruption scandals have long reached the center of power.
LA County Federation Endorsements Missing Westside Incumbent (tags)
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.
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.
Community Centers: Learning from O Canada! (tags)
The mosaic works in Vancouver, B. C. Community centers provide a buffer and cushion from the brutal and commodifying market. In happier days before Reagan and market fundamentalism, the Carnegie Center was bursting with activity, counseling, classes and circles.
Questions to the Maestro Alan Greenspan (tags)
Listen to Thom Hartmann interview Alan Greenspan on Air America Monday Sept 24. Greenspan was responsible tor the credit problems that now shake the world finance markets. Did the maestro drastically lower interest rates to help the Bush administration?
The Future of Work-driven Society (tags)
When less and less time needs to be spent working for a living in Western industrialised countries, this partial freedom of gainful occupation is increasingly becoming a problem for those dismissed. The vision of working less and living longer is a utopia that is also realistic.
Real Estate Crisis in the US (tags)
Credit failures in the real estate business threaten the whole payment system between banks, private businesses and households handled through short-term credits..The US real estate crisis affects other economic sectors and countries and cal also lead to a shift in class relations.
judas durazo hands elvira arellano over to bush's ice (tags)
mayday defense committee
Judas Durazo hands over Elvira Arellano Bush’s ICE (tags)
Mayday Defense Committee
'Old Europe' Bails Out Idiot-run Free-Market US Government - Again (tags)
Right now, the entire world's banking system is being pressed to the limit of what it can do to prevent a worldwide crash of the capitalist system due to what one European banker called "a complete evaporation of liquidity" [Source: "ECB reportedly weighs dollar swap with Fed", MarketWatch.com, 13 August, 2007]. In layman's terms, that means that the world's banking system is running out of the funds needed to keep the capitalist credit system running.
HAPPINESS IS AN INSIDE JOB (tags)
Don't be a fool: Question 9/11 THE TOP 40 REASONS TO DOUBT THE OFFICIAL STORY OF SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001
Losses as Profits: Review of Enron; The Smartest Guys in the Room (tags)
The firm's business idea consisted in showing future profits on the books as real profits.. In this "Darwinian tragedy," the Enron cadres ennobled their corrupt business practices by referring to "The Selfish Gene."
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.
LA Greens support City Council vote on living wage (tags)
Los Angeles Greens support City Council vote on living wage for LAX area hotels, urge expansion of living wage ordinance and further support for unions
Self-Redemption Through Work (tags)
"A strange mania rules the working class of all lands where capitalist civilization prevails - the love of work, the work mania. Instead of fighting this spiritual confusion, priests, eco-nomists and moralists canonize work."
Black & Brown Unity Summit (tags)
An estimated 100 people gathered for an ethnic unity event entitled: ‘Black and Brown Unity: Towards a Common Agenda’. The event included a panel discussion involving church clergy, college professors, labor organizers, community workers,, and a Santa Monica High School student.
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.
No Work instead of Precarious Work (tags)
After the fall of the New Economy, flexibility, individualization and outsourcing are obviously threats not promises and mean nothing but poverty and precarious working conditions.
The Work Society and the Work Religion (tags)
Work is only a part or fragment of life. Where it becomes everything as a steamroller or religion, it leads to idiotism where social questions and reproduction are ignored.
The 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.
10,000 marchers back Yale strikers (tags)
New Haven police arrest 100 NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Downtown New Haven came to a standstill Sept. 13 as the nation’s labor movement turned out more than 10,000 union members from the Northeast and as far away as Nevada and Florida in support of striking university and hospital workers at Yale University.
On the Human Right to Laziness (tags)
"Paul Lafargue spoke satirically about the first sinister acceleration thrusts of early industry: "All individual and social misery comes from a passion for work. O laziness, be merciful with your endless misery!: O laziness, you are the balm for the pains!"
Global Power Elites and the New Wars (tags)
"A representative republic was transformed into a plutocracy. Privatizing public property was a continuous tendency during the whole modern age." The average net worth of the 400 richest Americans rose tenfold by 1999..The Bush administration has martial plans, not a Marshall plan." From the German
Eliminating the right to overtime pay! (tags)
More Bushit Plans to Screw Us All!
A proposed new policy to put knowledge in the hands of communities and improve Los Angeles’ economic development process.
A Coalition of the Elites (tags)
The extent of this admiistration's deceiving of the public is rather spectacular. I sometimes have the feeling that I don't live in one of the oldest democracies but in the Philippines under a new Marcos. This interview is translated from the German in Der Spiegel
"Violently shattering the cartel of OPEC is discussed openly in the US..This calculation is irrational and can only accelerate the crash Less peace will be brought to Iraq..The US creates a qualitatively new state of emergency through its attack as defense."
NICKEL AND DIMED at the Mark Taper Forum (tags)
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GENTRIFY THIS! Accepting submissions for the BULLDOZED film fest (tags)
Media Alliance, Global Exchange, and the Video Activist Network invite you to submit your video and/or film to the Bulldozed Film & Video Festival to be held in San Francisco, CA on March 29th and 30th, 2001 at Cell Space and Artists Television Access. The festival is a unique opportunity to present your work to the general public, other independent media producers, and community organizers fighting to save vital working class neighborhoods.
UnConventional Coverage - August 16, 2000 - Part two (tags)
Jessica Goodheart, research director for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. Stephanie Monroe, director of a Santa Monica Living Wage Campaign. Cyrstal Pati, field director of Voters for Choice and Gilliam Russom, a UCLA student discuss whats happened to reproductive rights during eight years of a Democratic presidency.
UnConventional Coverage - Day Three, August 16, 2000 - Part one (tags)
Jessica Goodheart, research director for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. Stephanie Monroe, director of Santa Monica Living Wage Campaign. Crystal Plati, director of Voters for choice and Gilliam Russom, a UCLA student discuss whats happened to reproductive rights during eight years of a democratic presidency. Also featuring taped segments on immigration, Iraq and the continuing US bombing of that nation.