Subjects Archives: Global Economic Crisis

Can we ever get equal care for all?  We can’t — at least, not by going down dead-end roads. A year ago hope was alive for equal health care for all.  Bush was defeated, and the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress.  Throughout 2009, though, every week brought a slap across the face […]

How is it that we could be facing a crisis of empire, of imperialism, of war, of conflict internationally, we could be facing an environmental crisis on a scale that threatens the whole planet as we know it, and we could be facing at the same time being in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression? And how do we deal with all these problems simultaneously?

Labor productivity soared in the United States in 2009.  According to the Transport Times of December 3, 2009, productivity increased by 6.4% in the second quarter and leaped by 8.1% in the third quarter. Labor costs fell at a 2.5% rate in the third quarter of 2009, capping the biggest 12-month drop in seven years. […]

The signs of recession are more noticeable to those who live here — restaurants and coffee shops have lost most of their customers, and construction has practically ground to a halt.  Emigration has soared. Latvia has set a world-historical record by losing more than 24 percent of its economy in just two years.  The International […]

Well before the financial crisis broke out so violently in the US and caused ripple effects all over the world, most people in developing countries were already reeling under the effects of dramatic volatility in global food and fuel markets.  In 2007 and 2008 prices of most primary commodities first increased very rapidly, to a […]

  I fear that Tom Walkom of the Toronto Star is bang on when he argues that the next victims of the recession will be public sector workers.  As he writes: The federal government has already signalled plans to get tough with its workers.  In Ontario, Premier Dalton McGuinty gave notice this week that the […]

In the months following the outbreak of the financial crisis in late 2007, the general climate among economists and economic commentators was kind of a stupor.  Mainstream economists and conservative politicians — who had clamored for decades for the government to keep its hands off the economy, for balanced budgets, and for taxes as low […]

Paper delivered at the plenary session of the 2009 National Conference of the Philippine Sociological Society held at the PSSC Building on 16 October 2009 Why does the ideology of neoliberalism still exercise such influence in the Philippines despite the challenges it has faced from both the Asian and now global financial crisis? This paper […]

  Lecture delivered at the Economic and Black Labor Forum, the Philadelphia Community Institute for Africana Studies, 22 October 22 2009 The present Great Recession is the latest and largest crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  During the Great Depression over half of all African-American men were unemployed.  The present Great […]

Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates.  The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know.   Monthly Review Press, 2009. Books that start out with quotes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth make me nervous.  Like many of my fellow workers, I have attended far more rock concerts — or pro wrestling matches — than […]

The USA: Prisonhouse of Nations The United States deserves the title, the Prisonhouse of Nations:1 The US imprisons more of its citizens than any nation in the world.  As of midyear 2008, over 2.3 million US citizens were behind bars and the prison population continues to expand as a result of the growing inequality and […]

The following report on the 2009 AFL-CIO Convention in Pittsburgh is posted by Jerry Tucker, special correspondent to the Monthly Review and MRZine.  Tucker is a former International Executive Board Member of the UAW and a founder of the New Directions Movement within that union.  He is also a co-founder of the Center for Labor […]

It started with a Single Payer caucus at 8 in the morning where Mark Dudzic, Rose Ann DeMoro, and others brought us up to date on how they saw the day unfolding. The two-resolution agreement was holding up.  The resolutions would be discussed after the Obama speech.  The general sentiment of the meeting was that […]

Exactly one year ago, the Wall Street investment bank Lehmann Brothers was allowed to go bust, in a move that is generally seen to have brought on the global financial crisis.  Shock waves hit the financial markets; stock markets collapsed in waves of contagion across the world; credit seized up in most developed and many […]

BMR:What is the likely impact of the present financial crisis on geopolitics, especially if the crisis is considered in the context of the energy crisis including the peak oil issue, the food crisis, The Great Hunger, the environmental crisis, and the declining dollar?  Will the world experience war(s) as an effort to survive?  Will monopoly-finance […]

When I first met Michael Moore more than 20 years ago he was showing a half-finished documentary to a few dozen people in a classroom in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was funny and poignant and had a powerful message. He had taken a second mortgage on his house — equipment for filmmaking was a lot […]

The unemployment rate hit 9.7 percent in August, up from 9.4 percent in July. According to the establishment survey, the economy shed 216,000 jobs in August. In addition, the job loss numbers for June and July were revised up by 49,000. This puts the average rate of job loss over the last three months at […]

John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (Monthly Review Press, 2009). One of the few boom industries in times of slump, it seems — aside from private security firms, debt collection agencies and porn — is the publication of books about slumps. Everyone from Vince Cable to Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason […]

The Great Recession is allowing some widely held beliefs about the U.S. economy — which were the source of much evangelism over the last few decades — to run up against a reality check.  This is to be expected, since the United States has been the epicenter of the storm of policy blunders that caused […]

This year’s Postal Press Association Editors Conference was abuzz with discussion of the Postal Service’s threats to close hundreds of’ stations.  Virtually every editor present knew of one or more stations at risk in her or his own jurisdiction.  The wolf which has loomed at the APWU‘s door for years — plant closings, job losses, […]