Updates on top bankers’ pay, bad auto corps’ decisions, deflation, and socialist economics. Interview with Dr Harriet Fraad on capitalism and personal life.
BARRY LANDO – Perilous Unknowns: the Mental Health of Presidential Candidates
It’s become normal for Americans to demand—and receive-a professional assessment of the physical health of the candidates for president—just as they expect updates on the medical state of the president himself. After all, there have been many infamous cases of presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Jack Kennedy, who secretly endured serious debilitating illnesses. Thus, the current crop of presidential hopefuls …
Economic Update – Choosing Your Struggles – 03.20.16
Updates on FED decision, struggles over China trade and Brexit, and fascism. Major discussions: (1) critique of capitalists’ “job creation” and (2) why state support of worker coops is what capitalism got from states for centuries.
Leonardo Boff – The Earth Will Defeat Capitalism
There is an indisputable and sad fact: capitalism as a mode of production and its political ideology, neoliberalism, are so thoroughly established globally that it seems to make any real alternative impossible. It has in fact occupied every space and aligned almost every country to its global interests. Since society has been commercialized and turned everything, even the most sacred things, such as human organs, water and the capacity of flowers to be …
Henry A. Giroux – The National Insecurity State
I think it is fair to say, following Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, that each country ravaged by neoliberalism and its attack on the social state will develop its own form of authoritarianism rooted in the historical, pedagogical, and cultural traditions that enable it to reproduce itself. In the United States, a “soft war” is being waged on the cultural …
Economic Update – Capitalism is the Problem – 02.21.16
Updates on Bloomberg’s money, negative interest rates, the oil market, Puerto Rico’s cruel sales tax, Fed Reserve governor supports breaking up banks ‘too big to fail,’ and Apple borrows despite its huge cash hoard. Response to listeners: converting capitalist into worker coop type enterprises. Major discussion: three alternative responses to the huge problems of capitalism today.
ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH & ANTHONY A. GABB – Financial Oligarchy vs. Feudal Aristocracy
Under the feudal mode of production, peasants were often allowed to cultivate plots of land for themselves on a rental basis. However, those tenant farmers rarely succeeded in becoming landowners in their own rights because a major share of what they harvested was taken away by landlords as rent, often leaving them with a bare subsistence amount of what they …
Norman Pollack – Privatization: National Descent into Hell
One does not have to be a Marxist to say that property in our times, i.e., in a system of modern capitalism, is a curse on human intelligence and the endeavor to lead a meaningful life when it has been set against the concept, practice, and reality of the PUBLIC realm as such, whether the moral obligation of government to …
Economic Update – What Capitalism Is – 01.10.16
Updates on Obamacare scandal, bank errors threaten depositors, public pension looting, subsidizing religion. Major discussion of old vs new meanings of capitalism as an economic system.
Valerie Brown – Why Financial Markets Won’t Solve the Climate Crisis
t may not be polite to mention Karl Marx in America, but leading thinkers on the left think that capitalism may be the cause of climate change and that to save the planet the system needs fundamental reform. According to a new book, the profit motive drives capitalism above all other considerations. It forces us to extract everything from the planet that will …