Congress could vote any day now to strike a new blow against already-battered U.S. workers and the unemployed. Committees in the House and Senate recently marked up the Colombia, Panama, and South Korea Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The Obama administration is urging passage of all three relics of the Bush administration before the summer recess. The full-court press [...]

Los problemas ambientales se derivan de nuestra relación con el medio que nos rodea (natural y no natural) y existen desde que el ser humano es ser humano. El ser humano transforma su medio para hacer de la tierra un hogar, es decir, necesita alterar la naturaleza para poder vivir. Por lo tanto, toda acción [...]

Son muchos los protagonistas de la historia del pensamiento económico que han sido revividos durante la llamada “Gran Recesión” socioeconómica que ha sacudido al mundo y que para muchos significa el fin del régimen neoliberal. Ideas como las de John Maynard Keynes sobre el papel intervencionista del gobierno en la economía, Hyman Minsky y su [...]

–Dedicated to the peaceful protestors in Wisconsin, February 19, 2011. The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy. The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women’s rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal [...]

La nota periodística dice que la mujer fue encerrada en una bodega por los vigilantes del supermercado, quienes la acusaban de hurtar mercadería, y que murió electrocutada al tratar de escapar. Naturalmente, el hecho ha generado indignación, aun cuando hay quien trata de minimizarlo diciendo que es un “caso aislado”. Pero sucede que el supermercado [...]

Algunas reflexiones para que cunda el ejemplo francés “und nur bei Karl Marx und Lenin stand, wie wir Arbeiter eine Zukunft haben.” (y sólo -en las obras de- Karl Marx y Lenin se decía que nosotros los obreros tenemos un futuro) Hans Eisler/Brecht 1. El capitalismo nunca se ha presentado a sí mismo como un régimen socioeconómico más entre los que ha [...]

It has been a summer of record temperatures – Japan had its hottest summer on record. Same with South Florida and New York. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Niger are flooded, and the Eastern US is mopping up after Hurricane Earl. None of these individual events can definitively be attributed to global warming, as any climatologist will tell you. But to see how climate change will play out in the twenty-first century, you needn’t look to the Met Office. Look instead to the deaths and burning tyres in Mozambique’s ‘food riots’ to see what happens when extreme natural phenomena interact with our unjust social and economic systems.

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

Markets can be rigged with computers using high-frequency trading programs (HFT), which now compose 70% of market trading; and Goldman Sachs is the undisputed leader in this new gaming technique. Matt Taibbi maintains that Goldman Sachs has been “engineering every market manipulation since the Great Depression.” When Goldman does not get its way, it is in a position to throw a tantrum and crash the market.

Traducción en español abajo Article published in Amauta with permission from the author by Dean Baker Progressives have wailed against “market fundamentalism” for the last quarter-century. They complain that conservatives want to eliminate the government and leave everything to the market. This is nonsense. The Right has every bit as much interest in government involvement in the economy as [...]