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Capitalism

Revolutionary Strategy In A Warming World

March 22, 2018 Andreas Malm, Climateandcapitalism.com , ,
It doesn’t take much imagination to associate climate change with revolution. If the planetary order upon which all societies are built starts breaking down, how can they possibly remain stable? Various more or less horrifying scenarios of upheaval have long been extrapolated from soaring temperatures. In his novel The Drowned World from 1962, today often considered the first prophetic work of climate fiction, J. G. Ballard conjured up melting icecaps, an English capital submerged under tropical marshes and populations fleeing the unbearable heat towards polar redoubts. The UN directorate seeking to manage the migration flows assumed that ‘within the new perimeters described by the Arctic and Antarctic Circles life would continue much as before, with the same social and domestic relationships, by and large the same ambitions and satisfactions’...

Business Leaders Agree: Inequality Hurts The Bottom Line

March 15, 2018 By Chuck Collins, Otherwords.org , , ,
A growing number of corporate leaders say it's time for them to start sharing the wealth. For decades, big business leaders have warned that redistributing wealth is bad for business. Taxing the rich to pay for infrastructure and education, they say, will kill the goose that lays the golden egg. But what if it’s the opposite? What if decades of stagnant wages and growing inequality are scrambling the golden egg and stifling the economy? A growing body of research suggests that’s exactly what’s happening. And a growing number of business leaders now agree. Jim Sinegal, the retired CEO of Costco, famously fended off Wall Street pressure to cut wages and made an eloquent case for a higher federal minimum wage. “The more people make, the better lives they’re going to have and the better consumers they’re going to be,” Sinegal told the Washington Post years ago.

Cracks In Wall Of Capitalism: Zapatistas And Struggle To Decolonize Science

March 2, 2018 David Meek, Towardfreedom.com , , , ,
Below images of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and a many-headed hydra consuming humanity, sit two groups. To the right, facing a stage, are approximately 200 delegates of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), seated as a homogenous block. Wearing black ski masks, they furiously take notes. To the left, 300 scientists and observers from throughout the world are seated. With a tiny pink ribbon pinned to her mask, Julía, a Zapatista delegate from Oventic, Chiapas, takes the microphone: “The rivers are drying up. We know that the people before had a way of planting their crops, but now it doesn’t rain like it’s expected to. Now, there are epidemics that weren’t common before, like cancer and diabetes…” Julía is unequivocal about the linkages between science and capitalism in perpetuating this crisis.

Globalization’s Deadly Footprint

February 27, 2018 By Alex Jensen, Localfutures.org , ,
That pollution is bad for our health will come as a surprise to no one. That pollution kills at least 9 million people every year might. This is 16 percent of all deaths worldwide – 3 times more than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and 15 times more than all wars and other forms of violence. Air pollution alone is responsible for 6.5 million of these 9 million deaths. Nearly 92 percent of pollution-related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. All this is according to the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, a recent report by dozens of public health and medical experts from around the world. This important report is sounding the alarm about a too-often neglected and ignored ‘silent emergency’ – or as author Rob Nixon calls it, ‘slow violence.’

Global Capitalism Is New Colonialism For Workers, And They Are Resisting

February 27, 2018 Mark Karlin, Truth-out.org , , ,
The ravages of neoliberalism have not been subtle. And they have been truly global. Essential services have been privatized. Since the dawn of the 21st century, free public schools and health care, safe, drinkable water [and] publicly controlled power grids have disappeared around the world -- especially in poorer nations. And those who have fought for restoration have often been met with violence. We in the US have also seen public schools starved of funds and replaced by corporate-run charters, community clinics replaced by corporate for-profit medical facilities and natural water sources privatized for the commercial use of corporations. It is no longer so simple as to say that the worst labor abuses -- the worst predations of neoliberalism -- take place abroad while American workers have it better. We may have it better, but US workplaces are more dangerous than they have been in more than 70 years.

Capitalism As Obstacle To Equality And Democracy: The US Story

February 26, 2018 Richard D. Wolff, Counterpunch.org , ,
The Cold War displaced the legacies of the New Deal. Time and Trump are now displacing Cold War legacies. Where capitalism was questioned and challenged in the 1930s and into the 1940s, doing that became taboo after 1948. Yet in the wake of the 2008 crash, critical thought about capitalism resumed. In particular one argument is gaining traction: capitalism is not the means to realize economic equality and democracy, it is rather the great obstacle to their realization. The New Deal, forced on the FDR regime from below by a coalition of unionists (CIO) and the political left (two socialist parties and one communist party), reversed the traditional direction (to greater inequality) of income and wealth distributions in the US. They shifted toward greater equality.

Do Financial Markets Still Exist?

February 20, 2018 Paul Craig Roberts, Dave Kranzler, and Michael Hudson, Informationclearinghouse.info , ,
No one should find this a surprising suggestion.  The Bank of Japan has a long tradition of propping up the Japanese equity market with large purchases of equities. The European Central Bank purchases corporate as well as government bonds.  In 1989 Fed governor Robert Heller said that as the Fed already rigs the bond market with purchases, the Fed can also rig the stock market to stop price declines. That is the reason the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) was created in 1987. Looking at the chart of futures activity on the E-mini S&P 500, we see an uptick in activity on February 2 when the market dropped, with higher increases in future activity last Monday and Tuesday placing Tuesday’s futures activity at about four times the daily average of the previous month.  Futures activity last Wednesday and Thursday remained above the average daily activity of the previous month...

Not A Matter Of If, But When

February 18, 2018 Shawn Hattingh, MR Online. , , ,
In early January 2018, capitalists across the globe were celebrating the fact that the Dow Jones had rallied by 45% since the election of Donald Trump. Likewise, brokers were beaming in Sandton when the Johannesburg Stock Exchange hit a high of 61,475 points (up a staggering 300% compared to early 2009 when at one point it sat at 18,465 points). Yet beneath all the exuberance, danger signs abound—including signs that stock, bond and debt markets are experiencing bubbles, which will burst at some point.

Rumors Grow That U.S. Fed Is Propping Up Stock Market

February 15, 2018 Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wallstreetonparade.com , , , ,
It’s not every day that three well-credentialed men are willing to put their names and reputations behind the allegation that the U.S. Federal Reserve is rigging the stock market. But that’s exactly what happened yesterday. Paul Craig Roberts, a former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal and Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under President Ronald Reagan joined with Economist Michael Hudson and Wall Street veteran Dave Kranzler to write that “it appears that in May 2010, August 2015, January/February 2016, and currently in February 2018 the Fed is rigging the stock market by purchasing S&P equity index futures in order to arrest stock market declines.” This is not the first time the Fed has come under such suspicion.

China Seeks To Become A ‘Socialist Country’ By 2050

February 11, 2018 By Jose A. Díaz and Tania Romero, Equal Times , , ,
China is reaching a crucial moment in its long development. The world’s most populated country, now the second largest economy on the planet, with an urban population enjoying living standards of the kind never seen by their ancestors, is also burdened with huge social and environmental problems, and inequalities so wide that they could end up undermining the very legitimacy of the CPC, which has been ruling the People’s Republic since 1949 and relies on economic progress to justify remaining in power. Conscious that it needs to tackle these deep-seated problems if it wants the country’s development to be balanced and sustainable, Beijing has set a date, 2050, and has established a work programme to become the "socialist society" that the party promised when it was founded in 1921.

Amazon Is A 21st-Century Digital Chain Gang

February 9, 2018 By Marshall Auerback / AlterNet.org , ,
When Amazon announced plans to locate a $5 billion, 50,000-employee complex as its second headquarters somewhere in North America, state governments and municipalities fell over themselves offering billions of dollars in tax abatements and corporate subsidies to secure the prize. It might behoove the remaining 20 cities that have made the final cut to heed the warning from Virgil’s Aeneid: “I fear the Greeks, even when they are bearing gifts.” Especially when the gifts come in the form of a modern-day digital chain gang. Amazon likes to see itself as a cutting-edge, 21st-century growth company, always working to expedite delivery to its customers, whether by means of a drone, or eliminating queueing and bagging at its newly acquired Whole Foods stores with a new smartphone app.

Amazon Is A 21st-Century Digital Chain Gang

January 29, 2018 By Marshall Auerback, AlterNet.org , ,
When Amazon announced plans to locate a $5 billion, 50,000-employee complex as its second headquarters somewhere in North America, state governments and municipalities fell over themselves offering billions of dollars in tax abatements and corporate subsidies to secure the prize. It might behoove the remaining 20 cities that have made the final cut to heed the warning from Virgil’s Aeneid: “I fear the Greeks, even when they are bearing gifts.” Especially when the gifts come in the form of a modern-day digital chain gang. Amazon likes to see itself as a cutting-edge, 21st-century growth company, always working to expedite delivery to its customers, whether by means of a drone, or eliminating queueing and bagging at its newly acquired Whole Foods stores with a new smartphone app.

Capitalist Fluctuation & Partisan Presidential Praise & Blame Game

January 29, 2018 Paul Street, Counterpunch.org   ,
Capitalism moves through long waves and shorter-term cycles of growth and stagnation, boom and bust, rising and falling asset values, mounting and dropping profit rates, job creation and job elimination, increasing and declining investment. It always has, and it always will for as long as it exists. The operative forces behind these fluctuations are numerous and intertwined: the supply and price of raw materials, energy, food, and labor power; changes in technology; shifting supplies and costs of capital; currency developments; managerial practices; changing forms of business organization; investment strategies; climate and other environmental factors; trade patterns, changes in global geography and state systems; shifting patterns of domestic, regional, and international conflict and cooperation.

Janet Yellen Was Great Fed Chair. So Why Is Economy Still Broken?

January 29, 2018 Zach Carter, Huffingtonpost.com , , ,
When President Barack Obama reluctantly nominated Janet Yellen to the most powerful economic post on the planet in October 2013, Republican Party leaders, backed by much of the economics establishment, warned of looming economic ruin. As Federal Reserve chair, Yellen would lead the country into a hyperinflation calamity on par with Weimar Germany or, at least, a return to the misery and malaise of the Jimmy Carter years. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he had “serious concerns” about Yellen’s interest in “maintaining the purchasing power of the dollar.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) declared Yellen “thought that the best way to handle to our nation’s fiscal challenges is to throw more money at them.” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) envisioned“massive price increases on every single product that Americans buy.”

US Capitalism Lets Children And Mothers Die

January 26, 2018 W. T. Whitney, Counterpunch.org , , , , ,
One of the authors of a recent study of U.S. children’s deaths told an interviewer that, “The U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy, democratic countries in the world for children … Across all ages and in both sexes, children have been dying more often in the U.S. than in similar countries since the 1980s.” The report was published online January 8 in Health Affairs. Ninety percent of the deaths analyzed there were of infants and older adolescents. According to the authors, “we examined mortality trends for [20] nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for children ages 0–19 from 1961 to 2010 using publicly available data.” They discovered that, “Over the fifty-year study period, the lagging US performance amounted to over 600,000 excess deaths.”
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