In his February 18 essay appearing in the Guardian, “How I Became an Erratic Marxist,” Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis cites his intermittent mentor, Karl Marx:
If the whole class of the wage-labourer were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labour, ceases to be capital!
The U.S. Olympic Committee’s decision last month to make Boston its candidate for the right to host the 2024 Summer Games has generated much excitement within the city and its environs. It has also engendered considerable opposition.
TEXAS—At their annual meeting in Big Bucks Bay, Bahamas, airline executives promised that cheaper jet fuel would not lead to lower prices. Instead, they vowed to follow a long airline tradition and raise prices while lowering their services.
After years of poor-mouthing, airlines merged, drove out competition and are now able to set prices with little thought to competition or regulation.
“We rule the skies,” said Joe Butspark, CEO of Gouge Airlines. “We have no competition. What are people going to do, take the bus?”
In the 1940s, following decades of booms, busts, unemployment, disorder, wars and destruction, rigid free market policies were abandoned. Governments began to deliberately act to maintain employment and market demand. This shift was identified with J.M. Keynes, a prominent British economist and government adviser who had made the case that classical economics was wrong. Depressions, he wrote, were not caused by a decline in the supply of capital but by a fall in demand caused by declining wages and rising unemployment.
In this sedition we look at the economic clusterfuck enveloping the globe, the mega drop in oil prices and the Greek political party that has the left screaming like Justin Bieber fans, plus some uplifting hip hop to help you pull through from your shitty situation.
To the first: the end of the anti-colonial era was followed immediately by the not so rosy dawn of neoliberalism. Quickly, Arab nationalism gave way to Gulf capitalism; the always bourgeois PLO gave way to the neoliberal Palestine Authority. Simultaneously, the Arab working-class suffered a set of quintessential neoliberal losses compounded by what might be called the economic shock doctrine brought on by the likes of World Bank and IMF that came with the end of colonialism and the beginning of the neoliberal era.
A video collaboration with CrimethInc.
If you could change anything, what would you change? Would you go on vacation for the rest of your life? Make fossil fuels stop causing climate change? Ask for ethical banks and politicians? Surely nothing could be more unrealistic than to keep everything the way it is and expect different results.
Question One. In 1990, twenty percent of all children in the US lived in poverty. What percent of the children in the US live in poverty today?
A: Ten percent
B: Fifteen percent
C: Twenty percent
Question Two. The median wealth of black households in the US is $11,000. What is the median wealth of white households?
A: $22,000
B: $62,000
C: $141,000
Some time ago, Al Jazeera America carried an item by David Cay Johnston with the jaw-dropping revelation that “Americans fared better after the Great Depression than today.” I should mention that Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize winning former investigative reporter for the New York Times who now teaches business, tax and property law of the ancient world at Syracuse University’s Law School, so that’s all you need to know right there.
For example, when we say that the Chilean state should become a true guarantor of material rights, that is certainly antithetical to the neoliberal capitalist vision which turns rights into a business to be regulated by the market.
— Camila Vallejo (former Chilean student protest leader)1
