.This blog is for my various interests, such as bicycling, karaoke, clean living, internet memes, video games, roleplaying games, progressive politics, humor, and futurism.
(that’s the coolest fucking picture ever)
Roubini, whose predictions of the financial crash of 2008 earned him thenickname “Dr. Doom,”has referred his patients to a specialist in capitalist crisis: Dr. Karl Marx.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Roubini said:
Karl Marx had it right. At some point, capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That’s what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They’re not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else’s income and consumption. That’s why it’s a self-destructive process.
For several hours on August 12, theJournalwebsite ran the video of the interview as a top story, under the headline, “Roubini: Marx was Right.”
Considering that the first edition of Marx’s three-volume masterwork Capital appeared in 1867, Roubini’s revelation isn’t exactly news to socialist opponents of capitalism. But given the intractable nature of the current crisis—a deep global recession, a weak recovery in the traditional core of the system in the U.S. and Europe, and now the possibility of a lurch into a second recession—mainstream, or bourgeois, economics has been exposed as ideologically driven and incapable of offering solutions.
Damn straight.
(Americans Against the Tea Party; h/t to @CEs_Mustache)
Simple and easy to understand. Well done.*
*(minus the “insanity” part, nitpicking but it’s technically ableism)
(via stfuconservatives)
This clears things right up!
Buy out the fed. Poof, outstanding balance is deleted. Love it.
This is good stuff here, makes the numbers easy to interpret. We need to get rid of every corrupt politician and get some people in office that want what’s best for the country, short-term and long-term, not just their next election.
- positive According to a hypothetical posed by the Congressional Budget Office, if Congress’ deadlock worsened and nothing got done this year, the deficit would shrink heavily as the Bush tax cuts would expire and other spending initiatives would end. Huh.
- negative However … this comes with a…
“Societies with more income inequality have higher infant death rates than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have higher rates of mental illness than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have a higher incidence of drug use than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have a higher high school drop out rate than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality imprison a larger proportion of their population than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have a higher rate of obesity than other societies:
Individuals in societies with more income inequality are less likely to be in a different class of than their parents compared to other societies:
Individuals in societies trust others less than people in other societies:
Societies with more income inequality have higher rates of homicide than other societies:
Societies with more income inequality give less in foreign aid than other societies:
Children in societies with more income inequality do less well than children in other societies:
The authors sum it up pretty simply: : “Th[e] dissatisfaction [measured in this data is] a cost which the rich impose on the rest of society.”
Fantastic info - this is why we should focus on income inequity.
(via stfuconservatives)
- the world: hey man we've got some really serious problems like global warming and mass economic failure and riots and genocide and aids and cancer and your healthcare system is shit so maybe we should get to work
- US government: sit down I have to stop people from sharing things online
- US government: also pizza is vegetables
Chris Dodd’s statements about the blackout yesterday got me thinking.
These huge media distributes got so big making money from us. Money we paid for the entertainment they distribute. Money they in turn are trying…
(via stfuconservatives)
The British Cycling Economy. Infographic that accompanied Sky and British Cycling’s report into the contribution cycling makes to the country’s economy. Thanks to the Headset Press for the heads up.
(via fabbricadellabici)
The interconnectedness of the world economy means that US economic woes will have severe effects on others.
The official US unemployment rate is 9.1 per cent, but the “real unemployment” rate is 22.6 per cent
During the Tajik Civil War of the late 1990s, soldiers loyal to the central government found an ingeniously simple way to conserve bullets while massacring members of the Taliban-trained opposition movement. They tied their victims together with rope and chucked them into the Pyanj, the river that marks the border with Afghanistan. “As long as one of them couldn’t swim,” explained a survivor of that forgotten hangover of the Soviet collapse as he walked me to one of the promontories used for this act of genocide, “they all died”.
Such is the state of today’s integrated global economy.
Interdependence, liberal economists believe, furthers peace - a sort of economic mutual assured destruction. If China or the United States were to attack the other, the attacker would suffer grave consequences. But as the US economy deteriorates from the Lost Decade of the 2000s through the post-2008 meltdown into what is increasingly looking like Marx’s classic crisis of late-stage capitalism, internationalisation looks more like a suicide pact.
Like those Tajiks whose fates were linked by tightly-tied lengths of cheap rope, Europe, China and most of the rest of the world are bound to the United States, a nation that seems both unable to swim and unwilling to learn.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, a process that began in the 1970s and culminated with dissolution in 1991, had wide-ranging international implications. Russia became a mafia-run narco-state; millions perished of famine. Weakened Russian control of Central Asia, especially Afghanistan, set the stage for an emboldened and highly organised radical Islamist movement. Not least, it left the United States as the world’s last remaining superpower.
From an economic perspective, however, the effects were basically neutral. Coupled with its reliance on state-owned manufacturing industries to minimise dependence on foreign trade, the USSR’s use of a closed currency ensured that other countries were not significantly affected when the ruble went into a tailspin.
Partly due to its wild deficit spending on the gigantic military infrastructure it claimed was necessary to fight the Cold War - and then, after brief talk of a “peace dividend” during the 1990s, even more profligacy on the Global War on Terror - now the United States is, like the Soviet Union before it, staring down the barrel of economic apocalypse…
The United States is in a depression
No question about it.
Unlike the Great Depression of 1929-1943, however, Americans are not only suffering from lower wages, but burdened with skyrocketing “real inflation” of over 10 per cent per annum. Again, the official inflation rate does not adequately consider the rising costs of housing, food or energy.
The Obama Administration pretends there’s no problem. It has been in office for two and half years, yet the president has never bothered to submit a jobs-creation bill to Congress. Faced with falling poll numbers and a reelection campaign next year, Obama’s “jobs offensive” entails calls for “extending the Social Security payroll tax break, investing in infrastructure and extending unemployment insurance”, according to The Associated Press. Those measures stand no chance of passage by the Republican-dominated Congress - which is fine, since they would fall woefully short of the trillions in direct stimulus needed to jumpstart the stalled economy anyway.
Where could economic growth come from?
Not from the US government.
In 2009 the Obama Administration might have pushed for a radical reorientation of the federal government’s priorities, shrinking the military, ending its foreign wars, and redirecting investment funds domestically. They instead chose to grease their banker buddies. Now the political landscape has worsened for the Democrats. “There is no political constituency fighting for direct job creation by government, either through federal aid to prevent layoffs in local government or through public works projects,” notes Stephen Foley of the UK Independent. “These ideas represent the fastest way to lower unemployment, but government is now out of the business of job creation. It is cuts, cuts, cuts all the way from here.”
Nor will the next boom come from corporations.
Companies aren’t hiring because there’s no demand. There’s no demand because companies aren’t hiring. So much for the magic of the marketplace.
Corporations are hoarding so much cash - cash that could drive recovery if it were invested in expanded and new lines of business - that even banks don’t want it anymore. Bank of New York Mellon Corp. took the extraordinary step of charging a fee on deposits of amounts over $50m. “Since the beginning of the year, US bank holdings of cash are up 83 per cent, or $890bn, to $1.98tn,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Banks have more money than they know what to do with. “Consumer loans, by contrast, have grown 0.2 per cent, or $1.7bn.” …
Read Whole: aljazeera.net
