Americans today face a dual crisis: rising rents and increasingly unaffordable housing markets. The housing crisis, far from being over, has metastasized. This new set of problems is confounding economists, who are left to view the situation through the narrow lens of mainstream orthodoxy—one (...)
WALL STREET is still out of control. Seven years ago, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department bailed out the largest financial institutions in this country because they were considered too big to fail. But almost every one is bigger today than it was before the bailout. If any were to (...)
DETROIT — WHERE 85% of the working class once owned homes — has been suffering a waterless hurricane. Predatory mortgage practices that disproportionately targeted African-American homeowners and inflated mortgages resulted in foreclosure on 25% of all residential buildings in the city between (...)
DESPITE HAPPY TALK of Detroit “rebounding” from bankruptcy, the basic problems remain: lack of jobs, deep poverty, the state takeover of the public schools and a 28% decrease in state revenue sharing over the last decade.
If one statistic could sum up the problem, the median Detroit family (...)
INEQUALITY HAS BECOME a heated political issue with the eruption of the Occupy movement, followed by the spread of minimum wage struggles — including the election of socialist candidate Kshama Sawant to Seattle city council — and union organizing efforts and strikes in the fast food industry and (...)
LIKE MOST OF president Obama’s pronouncements, the State of the Union reflected a signature basketball move as well as his governing method: quick head-fake left, then drive to the right. The rhetoric soars, while the poverty of its substance is obscured by the rapturous applause of the (...)
SOME SERIOUS RULING class intervention finally presented John Boehner an instruction he couldn’t refuse: Get the Harry Reid-Mitch McConnell Senate deal to the House floor for a straight vote to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling. Tell the Tea Party that you know where they’re coming (...)
Over the last week, President Obama has kicked off a series of speeches on the subject of the economy. The deeper purpose of his speaking tour is to stake out his position for the upcoming budget and deficit cutting battle that will likely occur within the next few months, as both the new (...)
The following article was written prior to the resolution of the so-called “fiscal cliff:” a term used to describe the across the board tax increases and would have forced spending cuts on midnight of the new year. The House of Representatives passed a Senate bill on January 1st, 2013 which (...)
This document was prepared by the Solidarity Political Committee for a discussion of the National Committee.
In view of the 2008-9 economic meltdown, some on the left felt that the global and neoliberal agenda dominant since the 1979-81 economic crisis would be jettisoned in order to stabilize (...)
THE TALK PUBLISHED below was given in Spring 2012, and unfortunately its analysis stands the test of time. The bi-partisan austerity offensive — corresponding to the logical of capitalist profitability and accumulation — continues. We should not be confused by Obama’s refusal to lower federal (...)
Originally published in 2010, this article provides a clear account of the differences between Marxism and mainstream economics, and their explanations of the current crisis. —PG [Socialist Worker — USA]
Abstract
Like most capitalist crises, today’s challenges economists, journalists, and (...)
THERE ARE TWO realities to grasp about the current plight of Detroit.
Reality one: Detroit is caught in a set of interlocking crises, from the level of the world economy and national political gridlock down to the viciously reactionary Michigan state government and the yawning divide between (...)
The world’s eighth-largest economy is ’fast becoming a post-industrial hell’ for many.
It is less than 30 km from the pristine surfing beaches of the Californian coast to a scene of Third World deprivation.
In Skid Row, a grimy pocket of downtown Los Angeles, homeless people lie strewn across (...)
Three “free trade” agreements (FTAs) were due to be signed into law before the summer congressional recess; now they are scheduled to sail through Congress within the next month. All are harmful to the people who live in the countries involved—whether the United States, Colombia, Panama or South (...)
With the announcement of the candidacy of Barack Obama for President of the United States in 2012, the campaign trail has officially started. Contrary to what one might have expected two years ago, Obama faces a tough re-election challenge. Furthermore, a victory does not seem guaranteed. (...)
IS THERE ANY ruling class in history that would sit by as its country went bankrupt, not by necessity but to serve the ideological agenda of a political fringe? It seems incredible, yet at face value it seems that this perspective is looming on August 2 – and not to just any country but to the (...)
My June 13 New York Times carries the sad and confusing tale of the trouble that the Obama campaign is encountering in pumping Wall Street for 2012 cash. Apparently, the president “enraged many financial industry executives a year and a half ago by labeling them ‘fat cats’ and criticizing their (...)
THE GOOD TIMES are flowing again for Wall Street and bank executives, and U.S. corporate profits have rarely if ever looked so lush. But it’s a brutal moment for working people, with much worse possibly to come. These twin realities set the economic and political agenda heading into 2011-12. (...)
WHEN THE MUSLIM community in Murfreesboro, Tennessee sought a permit to build an expanded Islamic Center, local bigots saw an opportunity to exploit the same “moral panic,” invented by the Tea Party, the Christian Right and much of the corporate media, that would also emerge in New York around (...)
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