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Currently viewing articles tagged with Capitalism.
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US-Latin American Relations
One of the most striking aspect of contemporary US-Latin American relations is the profound divergence between the hopes, expectations and positive image of the Obama regime and the policies, strategies and practices which are being pursued. Many so-called progressive North American commentators and not a few Latin American writers have ignored the most elementary features of US foreign policy, and focused exclusively on the highly deceptive rhetoric of “change” and “new beginnings.” A serious understanding of US foreign policy toward Latin America requires a discussion of the main objectives of the Obama regime, the global priorities of imperial policy in times of multiple wars and world depression.
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Unions and the crisis
The political and economic setting facing the union movement today is the most difficult since the Great Depression. Unions have already confronted two decades of unrelenting assault from neoliberal policies of labour-market flexibility, austerity and political conservatism. Then, the global financial crisis ripped across the entire world market. Many forecasts for 2009 are projecting negative growth for the world economy as a whole for the first time since the 1930s.
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Actually, it’s the system, President Obama
Global capitalism’s deterioration is fast outrunning the disorganized, uncoordinated patchwork of too-little-too-late government “programs.” Nothing illustrates this sorry spectacle better than the twists and turns of U.S. monetary policy to be executed by the Federal Reserve, and Congress’s just-passed “stimulus” program, about to be enacted by the Obama administration.
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The Labour Report
One might think that a prolonged and deep recession would provide the inspiration for socialist renewal. The contradictions of capital, combined with the insatiable greed of many capitalists, have once again revealed how this system doesn’t work for people who depend on selling their labour. But failures of capitalism don’t automatically lead to thoughts of socialism. If history can teach us, we should look beyond the labour movement for sources of new inspiration and leadership.
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The Return of Mr. Keynes
John Maynard Keynes has returned from the graveyard of discarded and abandoned theorists. Blamed for the strange brew known as stagflation, Keynes’ economics had been unceremoniously dumped there in the mid-seventies. His economics was replaced by that rediscovered nineteenth-century concoction of deregulation, privatization and free trade that, under the rubric of neoliberalism, ruled economic policy making for the past quarter century. And so, the cycle turns.
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The Great Recession
Capitalism is currently enmeshed in its most calamitous economic crisis since the Great Depression. And, just as in that earlier historic conjuncture, while visiting enormous trauma and privation upon working people, this crisis pried open the seams of the system in a way that opened up possibilities — too soon foreclosed — for a different tomorrow. So, the current crisis is a watershed, heralding both pain and the prospect of change.
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Tinkering While Canada Burns
In the midst of the greatest economic crisis this country has seen since the Great Depression, and an accelerating climate-change crisis whose damages will be massive and permanent, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, chose to suspend Parliament to avoid facing the elected representatives of the people and being defeated in a motion of non-confidence.
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Sewing the Seeds of a New World Agriculture
Tony Weis is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Western Ontario, and he’s really stepped back to look at the big picture. His book, The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming is a lively, detailed, very readable survey of the global food economy. Ranging from the rich world to the majority world, his book is a scathing indictment of the “problems and iniquities of the world food system.”
Kuyek’s short history (just 125 pages) covers one hundred years of Canadian agriculture centred on seeds. Seeds are profoundly social, he writes: “they reflect and reproduce the cultural values and social interests of those who develop them.”
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Better and Better Reasons for War
In his timely and keenly argued polemic, Humanitarian Imperialism, Jean Bricmont subjects left-liberal humanitarian rationale for war to the same kind of unsparing scrutiny as he and his co-author Alan Sokal did to the intellectual pretenses of postmodernists in Intellectual Impostures. But while the influence of the postmodernists rarely reaches beyond the confines of academia, the conceits of humanitarian imperialists have global implications and, with the saber-rattling against Iran, may yet lead to catastrophe.
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Power to the Students!
Bertell Ollman is a professor of political science at New York University, and is well known for books like Alienation and Dialectical Investigations, and for well over fifty articles and commentaries on a variety of left-wing subjects. In this book, directed to American university students, Ollman makes a deal with his readers.
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