Monday, Feb 6th 2012
Davos dilemma | Michael Roberts
The majority of those at Davos think that Capitalism isn’t working, but don’t feel there is a need to change anything because its working rather well for them. It’s up to those not in the 1% then to change it.
The strategists of capital are attending their annual jamboree in the [...]
Representation Without Taxation: Fortune 500 Companies that Spend Big on Lobbying and Avoid Taxes
A new report identifies thirty Fortune 500 corporations that pay less in federal income taxes than they spend on federal lobbying.
We identify the “Dirty Thirty” companies that were especially aggressive at dodging taxes and lobbying Congress. These companies so deftly exploited carve [...]
Another global wave of critique and resistance would come, I told myself and anyone who asked. For many years I watched and waited. Not passively, but actively, keeping alive the social memory of movements past, analysing the ever shifting shape of the global system and going into the streets to protest against many forms of [...]
Bob Dylan could have been writing about these times when he composed the lyrics ‘the times they are a changing’. This was never so apparent than on a recent trip to the US to meet with social and economic justice organisations.
Most striking was the shift in the parameters of the public debate about wealth, income [...]
Michael Roberts, the self-described Marxist economist, has a great post on the Capitalism in Crisis series which was run in the Financial Times recently. Capitalism doesn’t seem to be working as it should, the FT thinks now, given all the protests and the tendency of the ‘Great Global Financial Crisis” (three years and counting so [...]
At a time when the most vulnerable in society desperately need a challenge to the neoliberal, capitalist hegemony it seems that the only criticism of the system that penetrates the public consciousness is spoken in the language of capitalism. The first step to a new political dialogue might come from reframing that language.
The phrase “survival [...]
Book Review: End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity, Wang Hui (Verso 2011)
Apologists for Beijing sometimes like to say that nobody died on Tiananmen Square in 1989. This is the kind of statement whose technical accuracy is meant to be deceptive. It’s long been documented, if not fully embedded in public understanding, that [...]
Michael Perelman | Occupy Chico State
Good interview with Michael Perleman for his local NPR station which he would have given to a Occupied Chico State teach-in broadcast if the location for the talk hadn’t been locked down due to a ‘bomb scare’. Perelman, who’s the author of the highly recommended Invisible Handcuffs talks about [...]
Words of a Euro Doomsayer Have New Resonance | Betting on Bernard Connolly
Good god….
Bernard Connolly was “a European Union economist in the early 1990s, where he helped design the common currency’s framework, but then he was dismissed after he expressed turncoat views. In 1998, just months before the euro’s introduction, he predicted that at least one [...]
This blog post was originally published today in David’s blog An Arab Spring in My Step, which he has set up while in Cairo reporting on post-Mubarak Egypt and the Arab Spring.
Eid al-Adha in Cairo, is a time for family, communal praying, and in 2011- some serious electioneering.
The streets of Cairo run with blood on [...]
