Subjects Archives: Stagnation

COVID-19 has exposed major long-term economic vulnerabilities. This malaise–including declining productivity growth–can be traced to the greater influence of finance in the real economy.

The Bolivarian Revolution represented a break from neoliberal governments. Is the tide turning? Tatuy TV examine that in this episode of “Chávez the Radical.”

The pandemic alas is not yet over, but there are no economic disruptions in the current fiscal year in the form of lockdowns or workers’ absence. The economy’s performance therefore can no longer be attributed to the prevalence of the pandemic; whatever it is, it is caused by economic factors.

Intellectual property, industrial organization, and economic growth.

U.S. billionaires have recouped all of their wealth—and more—during the Pandemic Depression. Meanwhile, since May, the number of poor Americans has grown by about 8 million.

For 52 years—from 1936 to 1988—the Democratic Party pledged support for the achievement of full or maximum employment.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed, more than anything, the deep interconnectedness and mutual dependence of different sectors, areas of life, and countries and regions within the global capitalist system.

In particular, the existence of a reserve army serves to discipline labor, keeping its wage demands in check, since employed workers are forced to compete with unemployed and underemployed workers for the available jobs.

Like nursing homes, the U.S. meatpacking industry has become one of the hotspots of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Bumping elbows at the United Nations.

In this episode, we talk with Nathan Tankus, Research Director of the Modern Money Network, and Research Fellow at the Clarke Business Law Institute at Cornell Law School. We ask Nathan to expand upon and deepen his engagement with the inflation question in all its historical, political, and rhetorical complexity.

The U.S. economy has been stuck in stagnation for a decade. The GDP growth rate has been only 2.2% per year since the recovery from the Financial Crisis and Great Recession of 2008-09 began. That is far below the growth rate in past post-recession recoveries since the end of World War II.

Jane Shallice examines the history of radical research at the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science.

In our inaugural episode, we consider the recent resurgence of full employment politics in the United States from both a political and historical perspective with historian David Stein (@davidpstein).

In addition to subsumption of teaching and research, the third mission of neoliberal marketisation has been termed, “knowledge exchange.” The introduction of this mission represents not only a fundamental attack on the academic profession, but also a desperate attempt to marshal the knowledge-producing powers of universities to kick-start a stagnating post-crisis global economy.

WHAT is happening in the U.S. economy provides an object lesson on the functioning of neo-liberal capitalism. Pre-first world war capitalism which had witnessed the long Victorian and Edwardian boom had relied on the colonial arrangement for the system’s dynamics.

There are strong reasons to expect a recession within the next year or so. And it will likely hit an increasingly vulnerable working class hard.

The fundamental changes I would advocate are those that would: dramatically boost worker power; secure a progressive and growing funding base for a needed expansion of public housing and infrastructure and public spending on health care, education, and transportation; and end the production and use of fossil fuels and significantly reduce greenhouse emissions.

In this presentation Mexie begins to elaborate the theory of monopoly capitalism developed by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, incorporating recent theoretical development by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney. Mexie has produced a number of other videos on the topic as well.

The Trump White House is neofascist in terms of its political base, its ideology, and the policies it is advocating. The rest of the U.S. state, the Congress, the judiciary… are not at present neofascist. So we are in a period which is analogous to what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung (bringing into line), which means a fight within the state.