Alan Nasser: Putting People to Work

Alan Nasser: Putting People to Work

"Looking at the business cycle over the last forty years, a striking and ominous trend emerges: in each business-cyclical expansion, the long-term unemployment rate remains either at or above the level of the previous expansion."

Terry Eagleton, In Praise of Marx

 Terry Eagleton, "In Praise of Marx," The Chronicle Review
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Marx/127027/

The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition.

Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor at Lancaster University, in England; the National University of Ireland; and the University of Notre Dame. His latest book, Why Marx Was Right, was just published by Yale University Press.

Capitalism's Dismal Future

Paul Mattick, "Capitalism's Dismal Future,"  The Chronicle Review
http://chronicle.com/article/Capitalisms-Dismal-Future/126659/

From Paul Mattick, Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2011):

"In fact, the crisis looming before us is likely to be, if anything, more terrible than the Great Depressions of 1873-93 and 1929-39. The continuing industrialization of agriculture and urbanization of population—by 2010, it is estimated, more than half the earth's inhabitants lived in cities—has made more and more people dependent upon the market to supply them with food and other necessities of life. The existence on or over the edge of survival experienced today by the urban masses of Cairo, Dhaka, São Paulo, and Mexico City will be echoed in the capitalistically advanced nations, as unemployment and government-dictated austerity afflict more and more people, not just in the developed world's Rust Belts but in New York, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, and Prague."

...

"While at present they are still awaiting the promised return of prosperity, at some point the newly homeless millions, like many of their predecessors in the 1930s, may well look at newly foreclosed, empty houses, unsaleable consumer goods, and stockpiled government foodstuffs and see the materials they need to sustain life. The simple taking and using of housing, food, and other goods, however, by breaking the rules of an economic system based on the exchange of goods for money, in itself implies a radically new mode of social existence.

The social relation between employers and wage earners, one that joins mutual dependence to inherent conflict, has become basic to all the world's nations. It will decisively shape the ways the future is experienced and responded to. No doubt, as in the past, workers will demand that industry or governments provide them with jobs, but if the former could profitably employ more people, they would already be doing so, while the latter are even now coming up against the limits of sovereign debt. As unemployment continues to expand, perhaps it will occur to workers with and without jobs that factories, offices, farms, schools, and other workplaces will still exist, even if they cannot be run profitably, and can be set into motion to produce goods and services that people need. Even if there are not enough jobs—paid employment, working for business or the state—there is plenty of work to be done if people organize production and distribution for themselves, outside the constraints of the business economy. This would mean, of course, constructing a new form of society.

Capitalism has been around for so many generations now, proving its vitality by displacing or absorbing all other social systems around the globe, that it seems a part of nature, irreplaceable. But its historical limits are visible in its inability to meet the ecological challenges it has produced; to generate enough growth to profitably employ the billions of people accumulating in slums in Africa, South America, and Asia, along with growing numbers in Europe, Japan, and the United States; and to escape the dilemma of dependence on a degree of state participation in economic life that drains money from the private enterprise system. Just as the Great Recession has demonstrated the limits of the means set in place during the last 40 years to contain capitalism's tendency to periodic disaster, it suggests the need finally to take seriously the idea, as the saying goes, that another world is possible."

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Obama Still Hammering Away | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Obama Still Hammering Away | TomDispatch

"Perhaps Barack Obama found his political soul mate in Samantha Power, making her determination to alleviate evil around the world his own. Or perhaps he is just another calculating politician who speaks the language of ideals while pursuing less exalted purposes. In either case, the immediate relevance of the question is limited. The how rather than the why is determinant.

Whatever his motives, by conforming to a pre-existing American penchant for using force in the Greater Middle East, this president has chosen the wrong tool. In doing so, he condemns himself and the country to persisting in the folly of his predecessors. The failure is one of imagination, but also of courage. He promised, and we deserve something better. "

Jean-Pierre Séréni: Why the Oil Companies Decided Qaddafi Has to Go

Jean-Pierre Séréni: Why the Oil Companies Decided Qaddafi Has to Go

William Blum: Libya and the Holy Triumvirate

William Blum: Libya and the Holy Triumvirate

The problem, I'm increasingly afraid, is that the man doesn't really believe strongly in anything, certainly not in controversial areas. He learned a long time ago how to take positions that avoid controversy, how to express opinions without clearly taking sides, how to talk eloquently without actually saying anything, how to leave his listeners' heads filled with stirring clichés, platitudes, and slogans. And it worked. Oh how it worked! What could happen now, having reached the presidency of the United States, to induce him to change his style?

Remember that in his own book, "The Audacity of Hope", Obama wrote: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."

Obama is a product of marketing. He is the prime example of the product "As seen on TV".

Writer Sam Smith recently wrote that Obama is the most conservative Democratic president we've ever had. "In an earlier time, there would have been a name for him: Republican."

Indeed, if John McCain had won the 2008 election, and then done everything that Obama has done in exactly the same way, liberals would be raging about such awful policies.

I believe that Barack Obama is one of the worst things that has ever happened to the American left. The millions of young people who jubilantly supported him in 2008, and numerous older supporters, will need a long recovery period before they're ready to once again offer their idealism and their passion on the altar of political activism.

If you don't like how things have turned out, next time find out exactly what your candidate means when he talks of "change".