Subjects Archives: Political Economy

  • James Galbraith on Bank Stress Tests

    Al Jazeera: Earlier, I spoke with progressive American economist James Galbraith, and I asked him to explain why some banks still need more capital after receiving billions in government bailouts. James Galbraith: I think this is expected.  If the test did not show that they needed capital, nobody would believe them.  At the same time, […]

  • A Question With No Answer

    Our world is not only threatened by the cyclical economic crises which are ever more serious and frequent. Unemployment, bankruptcy, and the huge losses in goods and wealth are inseparable companions of the blind market laws which govern the world economy today. Neo-liberalism proscribes any interference by the State, considering it a disturbing element for the economy, as if the domestic order, the army, health, education, culture, science, the courts, the judges, and many other activities could exist without the State and its laws.

  • Antonio Giustozzi, Researcher, London School of Economics and Political Science: “The New Afghan Taliban Are Waging a Real Guerrilla War”

    Antonio Giustozzi, a researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is one of the internationally recognized specialists on the Taliban.  Author of Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (Columbia University Press, 2008) among other books, this academic divides his time between London and Afghanistan.  Talking to Le Monde in […]

  • Doctors, Single Payer Activists Arrested, Make History at Senate Finance Roundtable

      5 May 2009 — It has finally happened right here in the United States.  Citizens who believe healthcare is a human right have been arrested and are being processed like criminals through the Southeast District of Columbia police station.  Their crime? Asking for single payer healthcare reform — publicly funded, privately delivered healthcare — […]

  • The State and Local Drag on the Stimulus

    Introduction The stimulus bill that President Obama pushed through Congress in the first month of his presidency was an important first step in counteracting the economic downturn.  However, as many analysts have noted, it is not likely to be sufficient to turn around the economy.  Economic and fiscal data only available after the passage of […]

  • The Day for the Poor of the World

    Tomorrow is International Workers’ Day.

    Karl Marx called to unity: “Workers of the world unite”, although many of the poor were not workers. Lenin, who was even more far-reaching, made a call to the peasants and the colonized peoples for them to struggle together under the leadership of the proletariat.

  • The Return of the Shadow

    A talk given at a Left Forum panel, April 2009. It’s spring and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about reincarnation.  If I’m a good adjunct can I come back as a tenured professor?  If I stay a loyal Cub fan, can I come back as a Yankee fan?  Actually, it’s political reincarnation that I’ve […]

  • Horses, Stocks, and Booze: Calculating the Losses of the Financial Crisis

    Kate’s is a local bar in a far northeast corner of the Bronx.  During the day, elderly patrons wash away their remaining years in a sea of booze-inspired camaraderie.  I peek in sometimes as much from curiosity as to remind myself of a future I hope to avoid.  A few years back someone changed the […]

  • Has Change Come to Post-Katrina New Orleans? Bush, Obama, and the First 100 Days

      As people in the U.S. and around the world evaluate President Barack Obama’s first one-hundred days, many — that is, those who truly wanted a break from the racist, militarist, anti-working class policies of the Bush regime — are coming to the conclusion that the ‘change’ his campaign promised seems to have turned into […]

  • Let’s Hope This Gift Keeps on Giving

      Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, 25th anniversary edition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997). As Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press, I was delighted to learn that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins […]

  • Government Pressure to Cut Wages Will Increase the Risk of Deflation

    A group of economists from across Canada are concerned about the federal government’s response to the auto crisis that blames the CAW for a crisis it didn’t create.  They’ve signed the following open letter outlining their concern that government pressure to cut wages will increase the risk of deflation and calling for new and focused […]

  • The Summit and the Lie

    Some of the things Daniel [Ortega, President of Nicaragua] told me would be difficult to believe if they weren’t being told by him and if they weren’t happening at a Summit of the Americas.

  • The Global Financial Community

    Lenin in Imperialism had talked about a financial oligarchy presiding over vast amounts of money capital through its control over banks and using this capital for diverse purposes, such as industry; speculation; real estate business; and buying bonds, including of foreign governments.  The finance capital that Lenin was talking about belonged to particular powerful nations; […]

  • Excessive Liquidity Preference

    Any recession by definition is associated with an excessive liquidity preference.  An ex ante excess supply of goods and services, i.e. the demand for goods and services falling short of the base output at the base prices corresponding to that output, which is what a recession is, must be associated with an ex ante excess […]

  • The Secret Summit

    While neither represented at nor excommunicated from the Port of Spain Summit we were able to find out what has been discussed there up until today. We were led to fully expect that the meeting would not be private, but the stage managers deprived us of that highly interesting intellectual exercise. We would be informed of the essence, but not the tone of voice, nor the eyes, nor the faces which so much reflect people’s ideas, ethics and characters. A Secret Summit is worse than the silent movies. To Obama’s left was a man whom I could not identify very well when he placed his hand on Obama’s shoulder, like an eight-year-old school student to a compañero in the first row. Beside him, standing, another member of the retinue who interrupted him to talk with the president of the United States; I could see in those persons importuning him the stamp of an oligarchy that has never experienced hunger and which, in the powerful nation of Obama, expect to have the shield to protect the system from the feared social changes.

  • Default: the Student Loan Documentary

      Default: The Student Loan Documentary is a feature-length documentary chronicling the stories of borrowers from different backgrounds affected by the student lending industry and their struggles to change the system. No matter when their loans were taken, many borrowers now find themselves in a paralyzing predicament of repaying two, three, or multiple times the […]

  • The Making of a Marxist in Capitalist Crisis

      Four Lectures on Marxism (Monthly Review Press, 1981).  Reprinted by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur, West Bengal.  ISBN 978-81-88401-17-8.  Rs 55. pp 97 Back in the dog days of the Great Depression, “a very bourgeois American first-year graduate student” (as he would describe himself in a letter to a friend decades later) from Harvard landed in […]

  • China and the Latin America Commodities Boom: A Critical Assessment

      The text below is composed of short excerpts from Kevin P. Gallagher and Roberto Porzecanski’s “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom: A Critical Assessment” (Political Economy Research Institute, 10 February 2009).  The full text of “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom” is available (in PDF) at <www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/ working_papers_151-200/WP192.pdf>. — Ed. INTRODUCTION: China […]

  • Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization

      Industrial production fell 1.5 percent in March after a similar decrease in February.  For the first quarter as a whole, output dropped at an annual rate of 20.0 percent, the largest quarterly decrease of the current contraction.  At 97.4 percent of its 2002 average, output in March fell to its lowest level since December […]

  • Behind the “Tax Day Tea Parties”

    As all working people know, April 15 is Tax Day, when we have to pay our annual financial tribute to the Powers That Be.  Naturally, we resent this, because we know that the rich and powerful hire expensive tax attorneys to make sure they get out of paying taxes, leaving us to foot most of […]