Mr Engler, I must respectfully take issue with your article, ‘Capital Must Be Taxed’ (Dissident Voice, February 12th 2015) which repeats the old Keynesian myth that capitalist depressions are caused by “a fall in demand caused by declining wages and rising unemployment”. These phenomena are the effects but not the cause.
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.
Conservatives in Congress have once again proven they are un-American and unpatriotic. This time, it’s because of their fierce approval for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
The pipeline, being built and run by TransCanada, will bring tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. All the oil will be exported. Major beneficiaries, including House Speaker John Boehner, are those who invest in a Canadian company.
In May of 2014, financial firm Credit Suisse AG pled guilty to serious criminal charges. The giant bank aided and assisted approximately 22,000 wealthy U.S. taxpayers (whose names Credit Suisse AG escaped having to send to the Justice Department for law enforcement) for over a decade in filing false income tax returns and other documents with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Nothing is more central to the American Dream than equality of opportunity. In today’s world, that usually means a college education—and, for most families, the challenge of paying for it. Congress could help meet that challenge. It could pass a financial transaction tax (FTT), and dedicate the proceeds to providing equal opportunity for college.
Oh say can you see by the star spangled machine, with modern weapons in hand it conquers foreign lands. If uninhabited, these lands would be up for the taking. And while the U.S. Declaration of Independence says “all men are created equal” with “inalienable rights”, the U.S. has a history of internal conflicts arising from violating those principles domestically and through foreign policy. Since the event of 9/11 the U.S.
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.
— Winston Churchill
On July 4, the Washington Post headlined, “With Democrats split on inequality issues, Obama shifts talk away from income gap,” and Zachary Goldfarb summed up by saying that “Obama’s public statements suggest he is skeptical that members of either party would embrace some of the policies aimed squarely at reducing income inequality, such as taxing wealthier Americans in order to give more benefits to p
It is a fair statement that no American has influenced the modern world as much as Milton Friedman (American economist, 1912-2006).
Freidman, as one of the founders of neoliberal thought, and theory, in the late 1940s, became synonymous with “monetarism” and eventually with “neoliberalism,” and as follows, significantly, very significantly, his theory spread all across the earth from the shores of Melbourne to Sri Lanka to Cape Town to Cape Horn to Tokyo; it’s a neoliberal world.
Socialism and collectivism are dead.
In 1867, Karl Marx observed that wealth “presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’” specifically in societies where the capitalist means of production reigns. More than two centuries have passed since Marx treated industrializing Continental economies in his writing, and commodities still reveal a great deal about capitalist societies, their politics, their economies and their wealth today. This philosophy very much encompasses the highly commodifiable petroleum reserves in Latin America, and the countries that house them.
