Martin V. Melosi, Joseph A. Pratt, eds. Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. vii + 344 pp. $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8229-5963-2; $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8229-4335-8. Much of the American past is connected to the growth of cities. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth […]
Subjects Archives: Political Economy
Swazi Queens’ $6m Shopping Spree
There is growing anger in Swaziland as it emerges that the media have been forced to censor news that a group of King Mswati III‘s wives have been on another international shopping trip squandering up to E50 million (6 million US dollars) that should belong to ordinary Swazis. When the wives went on a […]
Back to the Natural State of Stagnation
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 […]
No American Money for Israeli Settlements
For many years, various American governments have called on Israel to stop the expansion of settlements, but Israel has consistently ignored this demand. The Obama administration has been the most vocal administration so far in articulation of this demand. Yet unfortunately a number of American individuals and institutions have provided large quantities of material […]
Myths about the U.S. Economic Model
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 […]
Every Crisis Is an Opportunity
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, […]
Media Capitalism, the State, and 21st Century Media Democracy Struggles: An Interview with Robert McChesney
The Media, the Left, and Power Tanner Mirrlees: Why do you think it is important for progressives to understand the media and participate in media democracy struggles? Robert McChesney: The media is one of the key areas in society where power is exercised, reinforced, and contested. It is hard to imagine a successful left […]
Imperialism and Struggles for Democracy in West Asia
The history of the West Asia for over a century is one long history of how colonial and imperialist powers, both old and new, have arrogantly plundered, looted, dismembered, manipulated and raped a region for their unbridled self interests. It is a history of total disregard and callous disrespect for the peoples of this […]
Market Delusions
Birgit Müller. The Disenchantment with Market Economics: East Germans and Western Capitalism. Translated by John Bellamy, Jennie Challender, and Kathleen Repper. European Anthropology in Translation. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. ix + 244 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84545-217-9; $27.50 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84545-506-4. “Disenchantment with market economics” is the type of phrase that comes […]
Capitalism in Crisis, Government Impotent
The media, academics, and politicians often speak and act as if government economic policies can or will “solve” or “end” or “overcome” capitalism’s crises. They don’t. They never have. The often-cited counter-example, FDR’s New Deal program in the 1930s, failed to get the US out of the Great Depression. World War 2 finally did that. […]
Education and Its Cold War Discontents
Andrew Hartman. Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. x + 251 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-60010-2. Although world affairs are inherently distant from the local activity of running a school, international events can often heighten a sense of threat from abroad and a related […]
Adam’s Fallacy and the Great Recession
It is now a commonplace that we are experiencing the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The downward trajectory on a global level is similar to the 1930s, though in the United States — the epicenter of the crisis — there are indications that the rate of decline may be slowing.1 […]
Goodwin or Kalecki in Demand? Functional Income Distribution and Aggregate Demand in the Short Run
Abstract In a seminal paper on Marxian business cycle theory Goodwin (1967) presented a model, which assumed that a higher wage share leads to lower investment and thus a general economic slowdown. In contrast Kalecki (1971) was arguing that a higher wage share would have an expansionary effect because the consumption propensity out of […]
Not Your Grandfather’s Labor History
Robert Cassanello, Melanie Shell-Weiss, eds. Florida’s Working-Class Past: Current Perspectives on Labor, Race, and Gender from Spanish Florida to the New Immigration. Working in the Americas Series. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. 320 pp. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8130-3283-2. Once upon a time, but within this reviewer’s scholarly lifetime, the primary focus of labor […]
Interview with Argentine Economist Claudio Katz: “The Solution to the Crisis of Capitalism Has to Be Political”
The exit from the systemic crisis of capitalism needs to be political, and “a socialist project can mature in this turbulence.” So says the Argentine economist, philosopher, and sociologist Claudio Katz, who also warns that the “global economic situation is very serious and is going to have to hit bottom, and now we are […]
Crises in versus of Capitalism
Capitalism has generated recurring “crises” everywhere and throughout its history. It alternates bursts of growth and prosperity with crisis periods when many workers lose jobs and homes, bankruptcies close enterprises, production shrinks, and governments reduce public services. Growth periods almost always promote speculation, overproduction, inflation, and excess debts that crises then erase or even reverse. […]
Iran: The Game of Nations
There is a difference between the outlook of a secular generation of Iranian youth, yearning for a life in which religion (in the form of a clergy directing a theological state) refrains from meddling in their personal lives and individual fates as citizens, and the foreign and domestic policy considerations of the reformist trend. A […]
Inflation Fears and Commodity Prices
The global recession is still very much with us, despite the recent attempts by media and some policy makers especially in the North to dismiss it as almost over, and to find some indications of the “green shoots” of recovery in almost each item of economic and financial news. But even as the downturn continues […]
Workers Blast Wells Fargo as a Roadblock to Recovery
Chicago What are the banks doing with the bailout billions taxpayers gave them, to help us on the road to economic recovery? In the case of Wells Fargo and the Quad City Die Casting (QCDC) factory in Moline, Illinois, nothing good. In fact the bank is a huge roadblock to recovery. That’s why on […]
Jeff Madrick’s Case for Big Government
Jeff Madrick. The Case for Big Government. Princeton University Press, 2009. 205 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-12331-8 (Hardcover). In The Political Economy of Growth, Paul Baran argued that the increased role of the US government in post-New Deal America did not solve the contradictions of monopoly capitalism but merely “removed the onus for the malfunctioning of […]
