Subjects Archives: Financialization

With what author and activist Naomi Klein calls “galloping momentum,” the “Green New Deal” promoted by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., appears to be forging a political pathway for solving all of the ills of society and the planet in one fell swoop.

Whatever you may think of the multi-billionaire founders of Amazon and Alphabet-Google,⁽¹⁾ there would seem to be one undeniable fact about their companies: they have massively improved productivity. Amazon has an e-commerce system that delivers very efficiently; Google has revolutionised Internet search.

One of the central and most concrete themes that the break should cover concerns the way public indebtedness is used to justify austerity policies.

After fifteen years in the cold, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) returned to Argentina this May. President Mauricio Macri promised to attract foreign direct investment and to make his country the ‘supermarket of the world’. Instead, Argentina’s economy went into a tailspin. The IMF entered with its shop-worn prescriptions, a recipe that it has effectively sold for the past four decades: structural adjustment.

For six months, Argentina has been confronted with a new economic and social crisis on a massive scale. In the context the devaluation of local currency, rising inflation, and a deep recession, Mauricio Macri’s administration struck an agreement with the IMF, marking a major shift in the country’s future. The agreements slash public spending and prioritize the repayment of debt, among other measures. This dossier examines the different dimensions of the crisis, the open disputes, and the possibilities for the immediate future.

The rise of Donald Trump has brought talk of fascism to the forefront. While comparing U.S. Presidents to Hitler is certainly nothing new–both Obama and W. Bush were regularly characterized as such by their haters–Trump’s emergence on the national political scene comes at a very peculiar moment in U.S. history.

Organizing a union is no easy task in the United States. Although organizing a union is supposed to be a protected right, businesses regularly fire union supporters knowing that they face minimal punishment even if found guilty for their actions. In fact, the rights of all workers, regardless of their interest in unionization, are being whittled down. Simply put, U.S. law doesn’t work for workers.

Those aren’t my words. The quotation that forms the title of this post is from a recent Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis blog post.

Dominant corporations have dramatically increased their market power in the U.S. over the last decades, allowing them to boost their profits and, by extension, political power. And, although rarely acknowledged by the media, this trend owes much to the way public policy has promoted corporate intellectual property rights at the public expense.

If you look at headlines from the last year, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other major fossil fuel companies have seemingly turned a new page on climate change.

Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United States).

The health-care industry overtook the retail sector as the nation’s largest employer in December, giving local economies and their workers a stake in the industry’s growth. Health jobs surpassed manufacturing jobs in 2008.

The Democratic Labor Party, which got 12.5 percent of the vote, confirmed its support for Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad.

GOVERNOR of Puerto Rico Ricardo Rossello has called for the “elimination” of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and announced that a summit of opposition leaders will be held on the occupied U.S. island later this month.

Leon Lederman had to auction his Nobel medal for physics to meet sky-high healthcare costs.

Grace Blakeley dissects the failure of finance capital and calls for radical measures to take it back under democratic control.

The Social Wealth Fund plan is insidious in the sense that it has the capacity to redirect vast amounts of energy and resources toward a goal presented as “socialist” when in reality it is fundamentally incompatible with socialism. We must bring the discussion out into the open to prevent such seductive ideas from compromising the basic vision and integrity of socialism.

Strikes continue to be an effective way for teachers to improve their living and working (and by extension student learning) conditions. And, polls show that a strong majority of parents continue to support them. Popular support for teacher strikes remains strong The education pollster PDK recently asked adults what they thought about teacher salaries and […]

This lack of distinction explains the decline in women’s workforce participation rates. The decline reflects a shift from paid to unpaid work.

The 21st Century has not been a good one for most working people in the United States. In fact, for most of this century, real median household income has been below its starting value in January 2000.