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The Whole World Is Still Crisis-Ridden (Economically-Speaking)
Corporate debt is a very dangerous thing just like individual debt and government debt. Quantitative easing has not done much to shore up the economy. Stock value is up but that is mostly hyped up by lunatics in the corporate-bureaucracy.
Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.
---- Mark Twain
You know the left's in pretty bad shape when the goal of a revolution is to restore a New Deal-era regulation on banking.
An injury to one is an injury to all -Industrial Workers of the World
The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all -Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free -Eugene V. Debs
I like Richard Wolff and he makes some good points about china, but he falls short on answering why china is different, why did they react differently to the 2008 collapse than the USA or even western Europe. the colonialist imperialist racist mindset that exists in those cultures not just against other countries but against their own population. 2008 was when this buzzword "austerity" in europe started getting bounced around alot but really thats just code for cutting taxes for the wealthy and cutting various programs for public welfare, even programs that have been proven to increase the strength of their currency or improve GDP are cut under that banner of austerity.
Which is how they describe it in europe but in america its much more direct its called trickle down. Both policies are basically the same and are saying we should give all the money to rich white people and let the brown people starve. That's how we "improve the economy". That makes sense to the people in America in Western Europe because thats basically theyre entire modern economic history. But professor Wolff falls short of calling this racism or colonialism, or imperialism, instead he says "We allow a commitment to an abstract belief in private enterprise to sweep away all questions" well I would like to hear his answer as to why the USA has such a commitment but countries like China do not
Racism and austerity politics are certainly linked in the US and much of Europe. However the way I see it is that racism has been on of the main ways to sell austerity and a shift from a post-war "welfare state" model to a "security" (really just repressive) role for the capitalist state.
But hasn't China also used a form of austerity to lure migrants to industrial centers? Not at the same time as Europe or the US (who also have made cuts at different times and different paces) but in the effort to build their economy in the neoliberal era.
I only bring this up because I think that this is an important aspect and commonality among these policies in capitalism: to force wages down and push more flexibility for workers (speed-ups, precarious employment, etc). I think that's why these policies have been pushed even when it might not make short-term sense for the economy or might not make sense for some sections of industry or whatnot: international competition in the neoliberal era spurs a race to the bottom and cutting social welfare has made workers more mailable. On top of that the repressive laws fill in the gaps... ensuring a permanent reserve of labor in the US via prisons, ensuring an unorganized casual work pool via repression of immigrants, restricting social welfare access to internal migrants in China.
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Taking this at face-value, I think it's meant more as a *critique*, that he's saying *people in the U.S.* tend to have this 'commitment to an abstract belief in private enterprise' -- if this wasn't your interpretation already.
I *agree* with this observation, if that's his meaning -- those of the Five Eyes countries probably feel like their own existence inside of the world's Anglophone empires entitles them to personal success through private enterprise.
This is the default 'hands-off' attitude towards the functioning of a social material-economics -- since the market can supposedly 'do it better' -- and is exactly the show-stopper regarding any collective 'hands-on' approach to a society's material-economics (political economy), because taking the economy off of the market mechanism would supposedly be 'too messy'.
