A starlet in a strapless dress smiles on the cover of the February 17, 1941, issue of Life. Then, there are ten pages of ads: Oldsmobile, Knox Gelatine, Bendix automatic home laundry, Birds Eye Frosted Foods. Further in, between one photo essay on iceboating and another on a woman racecar driver, there is an editorial, […]
Subjects Archives: Political Economy
$tudent$ Make Banks Rich (Only If the Loans Are Repaid)
These are original poster designs by EDUdebtorsunion.org. They are all formatted for print on standard 8 1/2″ x 11″ letter paper. Please print and display anywhere you think this information would be relevant, provocative, or necessary! Some ideas of placement: Within Universities: Financial Aid Office, Bursar’s Office, Cashiers’ Windows, Student Unions Within the City: […]
A Debtors Union: Main Street’s Solution to the Financial Crisis
The economic crisis is in essence a debt crisis. For all the economic complexity involved in the details it is basically easy to understand. There are way too many pieces of paper that supposedly entitle their holders to social wealth and there is not enough of that wealth to meet all those claims. Debt […]
Be Like the Rich: Why Keep Paying for What Doesn’t Pay Off?
9 July 2010 Today’s most e-mailed article on the New York Times website is “Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich” — in a nutshell, homeowners with loans over $1 million are more likely to have stopped paying their mortgages than those with more modest homes. As law professor Brent White states, the wealthy […]
The Dollar Question: Where Are We?
The global crisis has led some to question the dollar’s place as the dominant currency. This column discusses three camps in the literature: those advocating a new synthetic global currency, those arguing that a new reserve currency will emerge, and those suggesting a return to sharing the role. It concludes that talk of the […]
End Times with Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2010. Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in […]
Exploiting “Crisis” to Crush Labor
One thing should be made clear about the situation in the Eurozone economies that is not clear at all if we rely on most of the news reports. This is not a situation where countries face a “dilemma” because they have overspent and piled up too much public debt. They do not face “tough choices” […]
Revolution and Public Debt: Britain and France
David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688-1789. xii + 210 pp. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Tables, figures, notes, appendix, bibliography, and index. $60.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 0-521-80967-3. In 1989, Douglass North and Barry Weingast published an article in the Journal of […]
The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation
Shir Hever and Paul Jay
Paul Jay: So, in talking to people in Israel, one thing I hear constantly is the fight here is about national identity, it’s about the defense of the Jewish state. I don’t hear very much about economics of Israel or the economics of occupation. So how does national identity relate to the economics here? […]
The Crises of Capitalism
“The thesis . . . is that in many ways the form of the current crisis is dictated very much by the way we came out of the last one.” — David Harvey, 26 April 2010 David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, Director of the Center for Place, […]
Persian Gulf History and Politics: Manama since the First Era of “Global” Capitalism
Nelida Fuccaro. Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi + 257 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-51435-4. In many ways, the city of Manama (now the capital of Bahrain) shares affinities with other Gulf city-states. Like Dubai, Kuwait, and Muscat, the port city drew […]
G20: Where No Side Wins
There is only one message that comes out of Toronto, where the G20 summit has come to an end. The formation, ostensibly created to reflect changing power equations in the world economy, serves no purpose. It has turned out to be one more talking shop in which agreement to disagree is presented as a consensus. […]
Capitalism’s Self-Destructive Spontaneity
Under the Gold Standard the values of different currencies were fixed in terms of gold, which meant that the exchange rates between those currencies were fixed. Exchange rate movements therefore could not be used to enlarge net exports and hence domestic employment. At the same time governments were committed to the principle of “sound finance”, […]
United against Us, Divided among Themselves: Toronto and European Assault on Living Standards
Martin Wolf described it as “a bloodbath.” The Financial Times editorial called it a “chilling read.” Britain’s budget is one of austerity, the likes of which has not been seen in generations. A 25 per cent cut in public spending; a quarter of a million or more public sector jobs to be slashed. It […]
You Can’t Care for Patients with Bayonets: Lessons from History
As the contract impasse between the Twin Cities Hospitals (TCH) and the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) has heated up, journalists, commentators, and interested bystanders have looked increasingly to history for insights and lessons. The participation of more than 12,000 nurses in the one-day strike of June 10 was widely described as the “largest” nurses’ strike […]
Climate Crisis: A Symptom of the Development Model of the World Capitalist System
Speech to the Panel on Structural Causes of Climate Change, World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 20, 2010 Good afternoon, compañero presidente Evo Morales, thank you for this initiative, for this invitation, and for your hospitality. Thanks to the people of Bolivia and the people […]
Unions Representing Workers in Canada, Mexico, and U.S. Explore Merger
The merger would create an international union of one million metal workers and miners. The United Steelworkers (USW), which represents 850,000 workers in Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, and the National Union of Miners and Metal Workers (SNTMMSRM), known as the Mineros, which represents 180,000 workers in Mexico, have announced plans to explore […]
Robert Samuelson: Economics Is Hard
That seems to be the main point of Robert Samuelson’s column today. It might be a bit easier with a bit more careful thought. For example, Samuelson tells readers that the debt burdens of major countries are rapidly approaching “financial and psychological limits” that prevent further fiscal stimulus. He then cites the 92 percent debt […]
Excerpt from “The Prophet and the Proletariat”
What the group around Khomeini succeeded in doing was to unite behind it a wide section of the middle class — both the traditional petty bourgeoisie based in the bazaar and many of the first generation of the new middle class — in a struggle to control the hierarchies of power. The secret of […]
The Great China Currency Debate: For Workers or Speculators?
Everyone is talking about China’s currency, it seems. Amidst months of building tension, there is an apparent consensus among most economists, the financial press, and leading economic policy makers in the West that the renminbi is hugely undervalued, making China’s exports unfairly competitive. The global imbalances created by such ‘mercantilist’ and ‘protectionist’ exchange rate strategies, […]
