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A Tale of Two Austerities
Economic CrisisTheresa May’s recent claim that austerity is over is exposed as a lie as communities in the UK experience the horrible effects of the roll out of Universal Credit. In Ontario, austerity is a work in progress. What must be understood is that this attack doesn’t only impact the poorest people. It is a careful and ruthless strategy to increase the supply of super exploited workers and, in doing so, depress wages generally. The broad working-class movement has a stake in resisting this attack and defeating the austerity driven war on the poor.
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Exploitation and Expropriation, or Why Capitalism Must be Attacked with Equal Force on Every Front
Economic CrisisIf we want a social system that is not alienating—one in which production is more decentralized, controlled by workers and communities, with meaningful labor, with smaller-scale agriculture, with human-centered technology, with equality in all spheres of life, with true, substantive democracy, with poisons removed for our soil, air, and water—then we must look at what we have now as a whole, as an interconnected set or processes and institutions that are utterly alienating. They must be rejected root and branch, attacked all at once and all the time.
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The Deep Roots of the Meth Crisis
Economic CrisisWe are still in the midst of what is now a 40 year revolution, driven in large part by dramatic technological change and accompanied also by deep and disruptive socio-economic transformation. Many are reeling from its effects. Among the most dramatic of these is the shift away from manufacturing, with its full-time, well-paid, unionized jobs with benefits and security, to the new, precarious labour market with poorly-paid, often part-time jobs that have no benefits and no security or union protection.
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Neoliberalism’s Dark Path to Fascism
Economic CrisisNeoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. It had as much validity as past ruling ideologies such as the divine right of kings and fascism’s belief in the Übermensch. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy.
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Conjuring Up the Next Depression
Economic CrisisThis manufactured financial tsunami will transform the United States, already a failed democracy, into an authoritarian police state. Life will become very cheap, especially for the vulnerable—undocumented workers, Muslims, poor people of color, girls and women, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critics branded as agents of foreign powers—who will be demonized and persecuted for the collapse. The elites, in a desperate bid to cling to their unchecked power and obscene wealth, will disembowel what is left of the United States.
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If You Read Between The Lines, Global Economic Leaders Are Telling Us Exactly What Is Coming
Economic CrisisSometimes, a strongly-worded denial is the most damning evidence of all that something is seriously wrong. And when things start to really get crazy, “the spin” is often the exact opposite of the truth. In recent days we have seen a lot of troubling headlines and a lot of chaos in the global financial marketplace, but authorities continue to assure us that everything is going to be just fine. Of course we witnessed precisely the same thing just prior to the great financial crisis of 2008.
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Capitalism, Changed By Its Contradictions
Economic CrisisThis week on Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff delivers updates on the growing poverty rate in California, the epidemic of childhood obesity in the U.S. and the economic fallout of Trump’s steel tariff. The second half of the show features Professor Wolff’s explanation of how politics in the United States has sustained capitalism and what the politics of change will require. Richard Wolff is an American Marxian economist, well known for his work on Marxian economics.
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Energy economics
Economic CrisisEntire cities are now running out of water, while others are violently flooded with far too much of it. Wildfires, droughts, pestilence, famines: climate change is already making these disasters bigger, stronger and more frequent. And we’ve seen nothing yet. By the end of the century, there could be two billion climate refugees. Two billion. We are facing simply unprecedented levels of death, misery and collapse in already Dickensian living standards. Unless, of course, we take truly radical action.
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Europe’s biggest bank retreats from the oilsands
Economic CrisisEurope’s largest bank has joined the list of global investors retreating from new financial commitments in the fossil fuel industry, including investments in oil-rich Alberta. HSBC, whose global assets total more than $2 trillion, announced Friday that as the climate change crisis deepens, it will no longer finance new coal-fired power plants (with a few targeted exceptions), Arctic drilling or new oilsands projects, including pipelines.
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Nearly Half of Canadians are Left with $200 or Less After Paying their Monthly Bills and Debt
Economic CrisisNearly half of Canadians are $200 or less away from financial insolvency each month after paying their bills and debt obligations. This is down 12 points from September 2016, when 56% of Canadians were facing the same challenge. The current 44% who are $200 or less away from financial insolvency includes those who are left with $1-$200 (17%), and the more than one in four (27%) who are left with nothing and already consider themselves insolvent at the end of the month.
