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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.
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The Next Financial Crisis Will Be Worse Than the Last One
Economic CrisisWe’ve made it through 2017. The first-season installment of presidential Tweetville is ending where it began, on the Palm Beach, Fla., golf course of Mar-a-Lago. Though we are no longer privy to all the footage behind the big white truck, we do know that, given the doubling of its membership fees, others on the course will have higher stakes in the 2018 influence game.
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For Whom the Wall Fell? A Balance Sheet of the Transition to Capitalism
Economic CrisisMost people’s expectations on November 9, 1989, were that the newly established capitalism in Eastern Europe will result in economic convergence with the rest of Europe, moderate increase in inequality and consolidated democracy. These hopes and expectations are fulfilled most likely in only one country (Poland) and, at the very most, in another two rather small countries (Estonia and Albania).
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Monetary Imperialism
Economic CrisisThe most destructive fiction of international finance is that all debts can be paid, and indeed should be paid, even when this tears economies apart by forcing them into austerity. Yet European countries, and especially Germany, have shied from pressing for a more balanced global economy that would foster growth for all countries and avoid the current economic slowdown and debt deflation.
