Capitalism

Lawsuit: Alabama Is Denying Prisoners Parole To Lease Their Labor

April 19, 2024 Kim Kelly, In These Times. Resist! Alabama, Capitalism, Criminal Justice and Prisons, McDonald's, Prison Labor

Working in the freezer at Southeastern Meats, a meatpacking facility based in Birmingham, Ala., “was the worst job I’ve ever had in my entire life,” Lakiera Walker tells In These Times. Her 12-hour shifts were spent inside a refrigerated building as cold as 30 or 40 degrees, and she had to beg or borrow warm clothes from her friends and family because the employer didn’t provide any. She couldn’t even take solace in the idea that she was saving up money for her future, because the prison where she spent the rest of her waking hours was taking a 40% cut on top of various fees.

Repair Cafes:The Beating Heart Of The Right To Repair Movement

March 26, 2024 Darren Cotton, Next City. Create! Capitalism, Repair Cafe, Right to Repair, Sustainability, Tool Library

In the age of two-day shipping and planned obsolescence, we’ve come to look at the things we own as largely disposable, with devastating consequences for our environment, our communities and ourselves. Recent EPA estimates put the total generation of municipal solid waste at roughly 292.4 million tons each year. In a little over a generation, we’ve transformed from a society of “Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make it Do, or Do Without” to a society of “Dig, Burn, Dump.” Gone are the days of family heirlooms and the passing down of gifts from generation to generation.

Synergies Among Fair Trade And Cooperative Economic Principles

March 26, 2024 Gizem Bülbüller, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Capitalism, Cooperatives, Fair Trade, New Economy

Cooperatives have become increasingly prominent as organizational models amid the crisis conditions facing the world. Rather than advocating for the replacement of the capitalism-based economy with an entirely new model, there’s a growing trend of critiquing and adapting capitalism. Governments, international organizations, and the private sector are now including cooperatives in their agendas, recognizing their potential to blend traditional cooperative goals with newer social entrepreneurship objectives.

Corporations That Pay Their Executives More Than Uncle Sam

March 16, 2024 Sarah Anderson, William Rice and Zachary Tashman, Inequality.org. Educate! Capitalism, Corporatism, Finance and the Economy, Tax Cuts, Tax Evasion, Taxes

Corporate tax dodging and CEO pay have both gotten so far out of control that a significant number of major U.S. companies are paying their top executives more than they’re paying Uncle Sam. Tesla is perhaps the most dramatic example. Over the period 2018-2022, the electric car maker raked in $4.4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk became one of the world’s richest men. When it comes to fleecing taxpayers while overpaying executives, Tesla is hardly alone. A new report we co-authored for the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness analyzes executive pay data for some of the country’s most notorious corporate tax dodgers.

What Is Anti-Racism? And Why It Means Anti-Capitalism

March 10, 2024 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Anti-capitalism, Anti-Racism, Book Review, Capitalism, Racism

In 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer arrested George Floyd, threw him to the ground, and pressed a knee into his neck, murdering him by asphyxiation. In response, “Black Lives Matter” protests erupted across the US, and it briefly appeared as if a racial reckoning might be taking place. However, its meaning was soon appropriated by Amazon, Walmart, and other prominent corporations declaring that Black lives mattered and dedicating funds to diversity training and other efforts that amounted to no more than what Black Agenda Report has long criticized as putting “Black faces in high places.”

It’s Important To Focus On Companies Using Inflation To Jack Up Prices

February 16, 2024 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Educate! Capitalism, Corporations, Inflation, Price Gouging

If you buy groceries, you know that prices are high. And if you read the paper, you’ve probably heard that prices are high because of, well, “inflation,” and “shocks to the supply chain,” and other language you understand, but don’t quite understand. One article told me that economists see pandemic-related spending meant to stabilize the economy as a factor, along with war-impacted supply chains and steps taken by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates —all of which may be true, but still doesn’t really help me see why four sticks of butter now cost $8. Not to mention that the same piece talks matter of factly about “upward pressure on wages,” which sounds like people who need to buy butter are getting paid more, but I’m pretty sure the language is telling me I’m supposed to be against it.

Defusing The Derivatives Time Bomb: Some Proposed Solutions

February 15, 2024 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Create! Big Banks, Capitalism, Derivatives, Dodd Frank Act

This is a sequel to a Jan. 15 article titled “Casino Capitalism and the Derivatives Market: Time for Another ‘Lehman Moment’?”, discussing the threat of a 2024 “black swan” event that could pop the derivatives bubble. That bubble is now over ten times the GDP of the world and is so interconnected and fragile that an unanticipated crisis could trigger the collapse not just of the bubble but of the economy. To avoid that result, in the event of the bankruptcy of a major financial institution, derivative claimants are put first in line to grab the assets — not just the deposits of customers but their stocks and bonds. This is made possible by the Uniform Commercial Code, under which all assets held by brokers, banks and “central clearing parties” have been “dematerialized” into fungible pools and are held in “street name.”

This Valentine’s Day, Look To Marxists To Reimagine Love, Romance And Sex

February 14, 2024 Sarah Jaffe, In These Times. Educate! Capitalism, culture, Marxism, Transgender Rights, Valentines Day

Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci has been quoted quite a lot in recent years amid our various political catastrophes from Trump to Covid-19 to climate collapse and the political center’s seeming inability to resist any of the above. The most famous line from his Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935 while a political prisoner of the Mussolini regime, is probably: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This is sometimes more loosely translated as “The old world is dying and the new cannot be born; now is the time of monsters.”

Casualties Of A Failed Health Care System

February 6, 2024 Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect. Educate! Capitalism, Failed State, Health Care, Hospitals, Massachusetts

A couple of weeks ago, a good friend found herself in the emergency room at one of our world-class hospitals, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. After emergency surgery, the medical team decided to admit her for at least another day to monitor her recovery. What she encountered next was something out of a makeshift battlefield hospital, as rendered by Hieronymus Bosch. There were no beds available in the patient rooms, so “admitted” patients were being stashed in beds laid end to end in the emergency area. A bit of delay getting a bed is not unusual. But in this case, there were seriously ill admitted patients in 73 beds crammed into the emergency area.

French Farmers Give Macron A Headache

February 5, 2024 John Mullen, Green Left. Resist! Capitalism, Direct Action, Emmanuel Macron, Farmers, France, Profiteers

As French President Emmanuel Macron’s government, under new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, moves ever further to the right, a radical mass movement is again shaking the country. Last year, the biggest workers’ movement for decades mobilised millions across the country in an attempt to defend retirement pensions. This year it is the turn of the farmers to revolt. Six thousand tractors were present at 120 blockades, and at least 16 motorways were brought to a standstill on January 30. Regional government headquarters have been covered with manure, and hypermarket distribution centres — as well as Toulouse airport — paralysed.

Capitalist Disagreements Over Immigration Erupt In Eagle Pass, Texas

January 28, 2024 Samuel Karlin, Left Voice. Strategize! Border Wall, Capitalism, Immigration, Texas

“Civil War” has been trending on Twitter, and while the term is hyperbolic, it comes from a very real crisis of legitimacy for the federal government. Texas’ far-right governor, Greg Abbott, has openly declared he will defy a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, and 25 other governors have declared their support for Abbott. This is an escalation in an ongoing dispute between the federal government and Texas over razor wire that the Texas National Guard constructed in Eagle Pass along the U.S.-Mexico border as part of Abbott’s anti-migrant Operation Lone Star. For weeks, Texas National Guard soldiers had been blocking federal agents from accessing Eagle Pass to take down the wire.

How Can Workers Organize Against Capital Today?

January 26, 2024 Benjamin Y. Fong, Catalyst. Strategize! Book Review, Capitalism, Labor Movement, Worker Rights and Jobs

Labor Power and Strategy, the new book edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek, officially aims to provide “rational, radical, experience-based perspectives that help target and run smart, strategic, effective campaigns in the working class.” But by the end of it, it is difficult to avoid the sneaking suspicion that Olney and Perušek have a different goal: to make clear just how far organized labor is from having a strategic conversation about its present impasse. The book is organized around an interview with economist and historian John Womack about the twin needs for an analysis of the weak points (or “choke points”) in contemporary industrial technologies and for the labor movement to exploit that analysis to cause disruption and gain leverage.

President Petro Condemns Capitalism: ‘Building Walls And Dropping Bombs’

January 21, 2024 Orinoco Tribune. Educate! Capitalism, Colombia, Environment, Essequibo, Gustavo Petro, Palestine, World Economic Forum

The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, made a statement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he would like to see “the power of international law” restored, and the global financial system changed. During his speech this Wednesday, January 17, at the “Addressing the North-South Schism” panel, the Colombian president referred to the need to reestablish “the power of international law,” which he noted “has practically fallen to pieces.” On Tuesday, President Petro referred to his proposal to change public debt for environmental protection, especially in the Amazon, a region that he reiterated requires urgent climate action.

The Real Artificial Intelligence Fight Is About Who Gets The Gains

January 20, 2024 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Educate! Artificial Intelligence, Capitalism, Class Struggle, Worker Rights

AI is a labor issue. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it will prove to be a marginal labor issue. Or maybe it will prove to be an existential, epochal labor issue on par with industrialization or globalization, each of which revolutionized their own eras of work. Before we get completely immersed in the battle over how AI will affect workers, though, it is important to frame the playing field correctly. This is not a fight between a backwards-looking labor movement on one side, and technological progress on the other. Rather, this is a question of where the wealth and efficiency gains created by AI will flow. Want to change the world? Share.

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