Archive for the 'Financial Crisis' Category

‘Obama’s a Cool President, But…’

by Editors @ Tuesday, October 11th, 2011. Filed under Financial Crisis, Organizing, Unemployment, Wall Street, Youth

Occupy Wall Street Protesters

Are Fed Up With Both Parties

SolidarityEconomy.net via AP

NEW YORK, Oct 6 2011 -- Their chief target is Wall Street, but many of the demonstrators in New York and across the U.S. also are thoroughly disgusted with Washington, blaming politicians of both major parties for policies they say protect corporate America at the expense of the middle class.

"At this point I don't see any difference between George Bush and Obama. The middle class is a lot worse than when Obama was elected," said John Penley, an unemployed legal worker from Brooklyn.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, which began last month with a small number of young people pitching a tent in front of the New York Stock Exchange, has expanded nationally and drawn a wide variety of activists, including union members and laid-off workers. Demonstrators marched Thursday in Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and Anchorage, Alaska, carrying signs with slogans such as "Get money out of politics" and "I can't afford a lobbyist."

The protests are in some ways the liberal flip side of the tea party movement, which was launched in 2009 in a populist reaction against the bank and auto bailouts and the $787 billion economic stimulus plan.

But while tea party activists eventually became a crucial part of the Republican coalition, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are cutting President Barack Obama little slack. They say Obama failed to crack down on the banks after the 2008 mortgage meltdown and financial crisis.

(more...)

email2friend

Street Heat Against Finance Capital

by Editors @ Tuesday, September 20th, 2011. Filed under Economic Democracy, Financial Crisis, Organizing, Unemployment

The Wall Street Occupation:

A Sleep-In Protest in the Shadow of Power

By Manny Jalonschi
SolidarityEconomy.net via NYC Indypendent

Sept 19, 2011 - Surrounded by the headquarters of some of the world’s most powerful financial players, over two thousand protesters converged on Wall Street this Saturday. By the end of the second day, those occupying Liberty Park, formerly known as Zuccotti Park on Broadway and Liberty St., had settled in, partially helped by pizza, hot chocolate and blankets paid for and delivered by their supporters in New York City and across the country.

The Wall Street occupation began on Sept. 17 after months of planning and encouragement by Adbusters, who originally called for the occupation in response to a corporate-controlled political system that is no longer serving the needs of the majority of its people. They were soon joined by the hacktivist organization Anonymous in calling for a general people’s assembly. While the meetings leading up to the protest focused on dozens of smaller goals, Saturday morning, in the dozen or so people’s assemblies that broke down in Zuccotti Park now renamed Liberty Square, the protesters identified their key goals as liberating America from the death-grip of finance and creating a sustainable, just future for every member of the country. Specifics ranged from a progressive tax system, ending the wars and creating universal healthcare to more localized solutions like supporting and participating in a variety of worker owned cooperatives.

The protest began around noon in Bowling Green Park with approximately 3,000 people filing in from various ad hoc rallies across the Financial District — including a crowd that swarmed around the Wall Street Bull earlier in the day. The crowd then began marching towards 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza. While the group’s original goal had been to occupy the sidewalk in front of the building, the area was cordoned off and surrounded by more than 40 police cars and 80 police officers. Instead, the crowd, which had decreased to less than 2,000 by 3 p.m., marched to Zuccotti Park on the Corner of Liberty St. and Broadway.

(more...)

email2friend

Unmask the Banksters, Build the Power of Workers

by Editors @ Saturday, March 5th, 2011. Filed under Financial Crisis, Marxism, Organizing

Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?

By DAVID HARVEY
SolidarityEconomy.Net via Counterpunch

Does this crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? My answer is that it depends what you mean by neo-liberalism. My interpretation is that it’s a class project, masked by a lot of neo-liberal rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, privatisation and the free market. These were means, however, towards the restoration and consolidation of class power, and that neo-liberal project has been fairly successful.

One of the basic principles that was set up in the 1970s was that state power should protect financial institutions at all costs. This is the principle that was worked out in New York City crisis in the mid-1970s, and was first defined internationally when Mexico threatened to go bankrupt in 1982. This would have destroyed the New York investment banks, so the US Treasury and the IMF combined to bail Mexico out. But in so doing they mandated austerity for the Mexican population. In other words they protected the banks and destroyed the people, and this has been the standard practice in the IMF ever since. The current bailout is the same old story, one more time, except bigger.

What happened in the US was that 8 men gave us a 3 page document which pointed a gun at everybody and said ‘give us $700 billion or else’. This to me was like a financial coup, against the government and the population of the US. Which means you’re not going to come out of this crisis with a crisis of the capitalist class; you’re going to come out of this with a far greater consolidation of the capitalist class than there has been in the past. We’re going to end up with four or five major banking institutions in the United States and nothing else.

(more...)

email2friend

The Mosaic Left: Making Alliances With and Beyond the Unions

by Editors @ Wednesday, May 26th, 2010. Filed under Financial Crisis, Labor Movement, Organizing

Contradictions of the Mosaic Left:

Perspectives for Protests within the Crisis

 

25. Mai 2010

By Florian Becker & Christina Kaindl
http://www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/

 

'There is no question that immediate economic crises can in themselves not bring about fundamental changes; they can only prepare more favorable ground for the diffusion of certain approaches for thinking through, posing and solving, the questions that are decisive for the whole further development of the life of the state. ' – Antonio Gramsci, Analysis of the Situation: Relations of Force. Prison Notebooks, 13th Notebook, § 17

 

When the public became aware of the economic crisis through the collapse of some of the big banks in the Fall of 2008, it took a while before the left and social movements took up the challenge of posing fundamental questions, of shifting “the further development of the life of the state” (Gramsci). Neoliberalism’s legitimation was undermined; still, the question of whether capitalism itself was in crisis was more typically discussed in bourgeois Sunday supplements than in influential groundbreaking strategy papers of the left and social movements.

The left was caught by surprise by the scale of the crisis, and its initial silence shows that analyses, policies and politics were hardly conceived in such a way that its own concepts could become practicable [=wirklich] (or even germane).

Left critique was strong where it addressed the manifestations of the crisis of the neoliberal model of politics and socialization, and stood on the side of the excluded and the surplus population [der Überflüssigen]. There was a lively and forceful critique of the social costs of neoliberalism. In 2003, a (fragile) anti-neoliberal bloc could be organized, in which left wings of trade-unions, anti-Hartz IV protests, the global-justice movement, critical intellectuals and the party Die LINKE formulated – despite all the differences between them – a critique of neoliberalism with a common direction.

(more...)

email2friend

Targeting the Main Enemy: Low-Road Finance Capital

by Editors @ Tuesday, October 13th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Economy, Financial Crisis

 The Dominance of the Financial

Sector has Become a Mortal Danger

to our Economic Security

 

 

By Robert Creamer
Huffington Post

Over the last several decades, the financial sector has grown relentlessly. It has doubled in size over the last 14 years. During the period 1973 to 1985 the financial sector never earned more than 16% of domestic profits. This decade, it has averaged 41% of all the profits earned by businesses in the U.S. In 1947 the financial sector represented only 2.5% of our gross domestic product. In 2006 it had risen to 8%. In other words, of every 12.5 dollars earned in the United States, one goes to the financial sector, much of which, let us recall, produces nothing.

That growth has not been among community or regional banks -- or credit unions. I'm talking about Wall Street.

Wall Street's growth is one big reason that most of America's economic growth during the last decade has flowed into the hands of investment bankers, stock traders and partners in firms like Goldman Sachs. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that fully two-thirds of all income gains during the last economic expansion (2002 to 2007) flowed to the top 1% of the population. And that, in turn, is one of the chief reasons why the median income for ordinary Americans actually dropped by $2,197 per year since 2000.

(more...)

email2friend

A Better Plan: Forget Wall St, Fund Local Credit Unions Directly

by Editors @ Sunday, May 17th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Financial Crisis, High Road Economics

 

Graphic: Ptolemy, the Earth Centric

 

Team Obama's Flawed Cosmology:

A Universe Revolving Around Banks

By Arianna Huffington
Huffington Post

A series of recent meetings with members of Barack Obama's economic team (including running into Larry Summers on my way to an appointment in the West Wing, leading to a spirited back-and-forth that made me feel like I was back at Cambridge, debating the smartest kid in the class), left me with a pair of indelible impressions:

1) These are all good people, many of them brilliant, working incredibly hard with the best of intentions to solve the country's financial crisis.

2) They are operating on the basis of an outdated cosmology that places banks at the center of the economic universe.

Talking about our financial crisis with them is like beaming back to the 2nd century and discussing astronomy with Ptolemy. Just as Ptolemy was convinced we live in a geocentric universe -- and made the math work to "prove" his flawed theories -- Obama's senior economic team is convinced we live in a bank-centric universe, and keeps offering its versions of "epicycles" and "eccentric circles" to rationalize their approach to the bailout. And because, like Ptolemy, they are really smart, they are really good at rationalizing.

(more...)

email2friend

Exposing the Crisis: Richard Wolf’s DVD

by Editors @ Monday, May 4th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Economy, Financial Crisis, Socialism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DVD promo image above: Still of title from Richard Wolfe video. Use link below to view the entire one hour lecture in a Preview Mode. 

Capitalism Hits the Fan

 



email2friend

Message to Obama: What To Do When a Flawed Bailout Fails

by Editors @ Saturday, May 2nd, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Financial Crisis, Socialism

 

What To Do When

the Bailout Fails

By David Schweickart

Tikkun Magazine


May 1, 2009

Dear President Obama,

We have never met, although we are neighbors of sorts. I live a couple of blocks from your Hyde Park home. We vote at the same polling place, Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School.

My daughter Karen has met you. She took two classes from you when she was in law school at the University of Chicago. My granddaughter Lauryn has met you, too-although she doesn't remember the occasion. Karen brought her to class one day, shortly after her birth. Karen and Lauryn both attended your inauguration, ticketless but with much enthusiasm. I wasn't there, but I share their enthusiasm.

Which is why I am writing you this letter. You have somehow, against all odds, become president. You are in position to do things that few others on this planet are in position to do. (more...)



email2friend

‘Buy Out, Not Bail Out’ – Coops as a Working Class Solution

by Editors @ Saturday, April 25th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Financial Crisis, Labor Movement

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: Ontario's Algoma Steel, a 5000 worker cooperative

Coops and the global financial crisis

Cooperatives have been more resilient to the deepening global economic and jobs crisis than other sectors. ILO Online spoke with Hagen Henry, chief of the ILO’s Cooperatives Branch.

The ILO is the International Labor Organization, created in 1919, as part of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, to reflect the belief that universal and lasting peace can be accomplished only if it is based on social justice. The ILO brings together governments, workers and employers, as the world's only tripartite multilateral agency. It is dedicated to bringing decent work and livelihoods, job-related security and better living standards to the people of both poor and rich countries.

ILO Online: Why does the ILO promote cooperatives?

Hagen Henry: The ILO views cooperatives as important in improving the living and working conditions of women and men globally as well as making essential infrastructure and services available even in areas neglected by the state and investor-driven enterprises. Moreover, values that are at the heart of the cooperative movement are central to creating decent jobs. Cooperatives are close to a democratic, people-centred economy which cares for the environment, while promoting economic growth, social justice and fair globalization. Cooperatives play an increasingly important role in balancing economic, social and environmental concerns as well as in contributing to poverty prevention and reduction.

(more...)

email2friend

Finance Capital’s ‘Whole Series of Ponzi Schemes’

by Editors @ Tuesday, April 14th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Financial Crisis, Marxism, Socialism

 

 David Harvey

Explores the

Logic of Capital

 

A Socialist Review Interview by Joseph Choonara, April 2009

Joseph Choonara spoke to acclaimed Marxist theoretician David Harvey about capitalism's current crisis and his online reading group of Karl Marx's Capital which shows the revival of interest in this work.

Some commentators view the current crisis as arising from problems in finance that then impinged on the wider economy; others see it as a result of issues that arose in production and then led to financial problems. How do you view it?

It's a false dichotomy that's being posed. There is a more dialectical relationship between what you might call the "real" and "financial" sides of the economy. There is no question that there has been an underlying problem of what I would call "over-accumulation" for a considerable time now. And in part the movement into investing in asset values rather than production is a consequence of that. But as the search for new forms of asset value developed you also saw financial innovation that created the possibility of investment in hedge funds and those sorts of things. (more...)



email2friend

[SolidarityEconomy.net is proudly powered by WordPress.]