Sucking Up to the Bankers
July 30, 2008
Robert Scheer on ‘A Bipartisan Lovefest‘ with the bankers.
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| AP photo / Jae C. Hong |
| Sen. Barack Obama meets with his economic advisers Monday in Washington. From left: former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Obama, Service Employees International Union Chair Anna Burger, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine. |
This is a time to condemn the bankers, not to embrace them. They are the scoundrels who got us into the biggest economic mess since the Great Depression, lining their own pockets while destroying the life savings of those who trusted them. Yet both of our leading presidential candidates are scrambling to enlist not only the big-dollar contributions but, more frighteningly, the “expertise” of the very folks who advocated the financial industry deregulations at the heart of this meltdown.
Republican candidate John McCain even appointed as his campaign co-chairman Phil Gramm, who went from being chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, where he sponsored disastrous legislation that empowered the banking bandits, to becoming one of them at UBS Warburg. Gramm was forced to resign from McCain’s campaign only after he went public with his contempt for the financial concerns of ordinary Americans, calling them “whiners” and perpetrators of a “mental recession.”
Who’s to Blame for Price of Oil?
June 24, 2008
As mentioned previously by Freeborn, the increase in oil prices may not be linked directly to peak oil.
US Deficits, Cause for War
June 7, 2008
Today’s guest editorial by toni solo is the latest in his Globalization and terror series.
The US Congressional Joint Economic Committee’s monthly memorandum for June 2005 stated, “Without an increase in national saving, any reduction in the current account deficit would be accompanied by reduced national investment that would harm future growth.” Among the committee’s recommendations was the suggestion of reducing the US budget deficit. Instead, US budget deficits, inflated by military spending, have got worse.
For the moment, with their massive holdings of US government debt, China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and European countries continue to help the US government operate large budget deficits without high interest rates. Since United States savings have been so low for so long, the US authorities rely on foreign savings for investment to sustain growth. Currently, sustaining any level of US economic growth depends on the country’s huge current account deficit.
New Labour’s Tax Cut Mania
June 5, 2008
‘A mania for tax cuts at any cost defies public opinion’, writes Seumas Milne. ‘The political class wants a smaller state and clings to a free-market model that is falling apart. Who is listening to the voters?’
As Gordon Brown lurches from self-inflicted crisis to crisis, the consequences of his failure to carve out an agenda of his own are becoming painfully clear. Not only is he tying himself in knots over discredited and unpopular New Labour policies – from the extension to pre-charge detention to his business secretary John Hutton’s edict against any more legal protection for workers, to yesterday’s plans to hand over entire NHS hospitals to private companies – even more alarmingly, the political vacuum he has created is being eagerly filled by others who want to push the government yet further to the right.
The past week has seen a veritable Blairite insurgency in response to Labour’s month of electoral misery. One former acolyte of the lost leader after another has lined up to kick down the last pillar of the social democratic-Tory political divide, demanding tax and spending cuts and a smaller state.
Fomenting Inflation to Pay for War
June 1, 2008
Today’s guest editorial from toni solo, the latest in the Globalization and terror series, looks at the manipulation of oil prices to foment inflation by the US establishment.
Western Bloc central banks and financial and investment corporations are locked into an inflationary dynamic in order to sustain their system’s militarist imperialism. The Bloc’s European and Pacific components offer supportive economic collaboration. In exchange, the US serves as the Bloc’s global enforcer.
The US Treasury, Federal Reserve and corporate financial houses work together boosting dollar zone money supply, devaluing the dollar. Their partners take compensatory steps, intervening in G7 financial markets. They seek to keep their currencies in some kind of sustainable relationship for purposes of mutual trade and finance equilibrium so as to support US budget and current account deficits.
Labour’s Time is Up
May 27, 2008
‘From the start New Labour was pledged to consolidate the Thatcherite paradigm rather than offer anything different,’ writes Tariq Ali.
Power can shape “truth”, but not for ever. That is one lesson that could be learned from the series of electoral defeats that mark the end of New Labour’s weightless hegemony. There is something grotesque about the daily denunciations of Brown by hardcore Blairites in parliament and their media acolytes, who barely uttered a word of criticism as the country was dragged into two wars and New Labour prettified the Thatcherite social and economic agenda, now calling for the removal of Brown. As if his removal and replacement by a robotic Blairite (Miliband senior, Purnell and, amusingly enough, even Milburn is mentioned in this regard) would do the trick.
The litany of own goals scored by Gordon Brown is endless and has been well-documented. That one of these could lead, sooner rather than later, to the independence of Scotland, is ironic, but all this is beside the point. Brown was fully implicated in the New Labour project and funded its hyper-militarism. He is too weak to even mimic Zapatero in Spain and Rudd in Australia by withdrawing British troops from Iraq. Instead, one of his zombies devised the pathetic idea of Armed Forces Day to celebrate militarism and encourage school-leavers to take up killing foreigners as their main subject and graduate or die in the university of the world.
Democracy Inc.
May 25, 2008
Chalmers Johnson reviews Sheldon Wolin’s new book on the US ‘Managed Democracy’.
It is not news that the United States is in great trouble. The pre-emptive war it launched against Iraq more than five years ago was and is a mistake of monumental proportions—one that most Americans still fail to acknowledge. Instead they are arguing about whether we should push on to “victory” when even our own generals tell us that a military victory is today inconceivable. Our economy has been hollowed out by excessive military spending over many decades while our competitors have devoted themselves to investments in lucrative new industries that serve civilian needs. Our political system of checks and balances has been virtually destroyed by rampant cronyism and corruption in Washington, D.C., and by a two-term president who goes around crowing “I am the decider,” a concept fundamentally hostile to our constitutional system. We have allowed our elections, the one nonnegotiable institution in a democracy, to be debased and hijacked—as was the 2000 presidential election in Florida—with scarcely any protest from the public or the self-proclaimed press guardians of the “Fourth Estate.” We now engage in torture of defenseless prisoners although it defames and demoralizes our armed forces and intelligence agencies.
The problem is that there are too many things going wrong at the same time for anyone to have a broad understanding of the disaster that has overcome us and what, if anything, can be done to return our country to constitutional government and at least a degree of democracy. By now, there are hundreds of books on particular aspects of our situation—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bloated and unsupervised “defense” budgets, the imperial presidency and its contempt for our civil liberties, the widespread privatization of traditional governmental functions, and a political system in which no leader dares even to utter the words imperialism and militarism in public.
What New Labour Wrought
May 20, 2008
‘This government has been the most rightwing since the second world war’, writes George Monbiot of the New Labour government. ‘The prospect of a Tory in No 10 does worry me – but no more so than another term for this cabinet of war criminals’.
You can hear the wringing of hands and tearing of cloth all the way down Farringdon Road. Dismayed by the local election results, convinced that Labour will be crushed in Thursday’s byelection, afraid that this will presage disaster in the next general election, my fellow columnists are predicting the end of the civilised world. But I can’t understand why we should care.
Yes, I worry about what the Tories might do if they get in. I also worry about what Labour might do if it wins another term. Why should anyone on the left seek the re-election of the most rightwing government Britain has had since the second world war?
New Labour’s apologists keep reminding us of the redistributive policies it has introduced: Sure Start children’s centres, reductions in child poverty, raising the school leaving age, the national minimum wage, flexible hours for parents and carers, better conditions for part-time workers, the decent homes programme, free museums, more foreign aid. All these are real achievements and deserve to be celebrated. But the catalogue of failures, backsliding and outright destruction is much longer and more consequential.
Two Labour Strikes, a Strategy and One Reality
May 16, 2008
Today’s guest editorial on developments in Egypt and Lebanon from regular Fanonite contributor Alberto Cruz of CEPRID.
On April 6th a general strike was called in Egypt. One month later, on May 7th, another one was called in Lebanon. The causes were the same in both countries: calls for an increase in the minimum wage and improvements to workers’ statutory benefits and also to protest against the neoliberal, IMF-friendly, pro-Western political attitudes of the respective governments. The responses of the Egyptian and Lebanese governments were the same, although with different results: attempts to defuse the protests with repression, confronting the people and increasing the minimum wage as a last resort. The media account of the two strikes was the same too: minimizing the effects of the protest in government and international media, while the few media that can be described as independent in these countries reflected the strike calls’ success.
