Dr Richard Wolff and Gar Alperovitz

Richard Wolff and Gar Alperovitz are both members of the Green Party and of Jill Stein's Green Shadow Cabinet. Here they share insights into Democracy in the Workplace, and worker control of the means of production.

Ben Fine: Intro to Marxist Economics (Part 2)

Ben Fine from SOAS University explains the fundamental ideas of Marxist Economics as a part of lecture series "What you won't learn in an economics degree: an introduction to heterodox economics".

The lecture was hosted by Post-Crash Economics Society Manchester and Manchester's Political Economy Institute.

Cheri Honkala: You can't spoil what's already rotten!

She talks about the terror of being selected as the VP candidate, organizing poor and homeless people, why she left the Democratic Party, being arrested with Jill Stein down at Wall Street, and the OWS 1 year anniversary, the planned Super Rallies, and disparity between those with internet access and those without.

What is the true cost of gasoline?

The Price of Gas from CIR on Vimeo.

Austan Goolsbee falls on his face

I know that this is old, but I didn't see it until recently, and I'm surprised that nobody else has said much of anything about how terribly this interview went. Instead of editing the interview so that it was more funny, they had to edit it so that Mr Goolsbee looked like he performed better than he actually did:

The interview that aired on Comedy Central:

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

The extended Interview:

Part 1:

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Part 2

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Part 3

The Colbert Report
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Colbert was doing something he normally does not do, and pitched Austan Goolsbee softball question after softball question, and Austan Goolsbee flubbed every single answer, answering with GOP talking points, as though Colbert were a Fox News anchor, and Goolsbee was going to somehow butter Colbert up and win political points. This isn't just a failure of Austan Goolsbee to realize that Colbert's job in the mediascape is to play a foil to the conservatives, by creating a parody of them.

Apparently, the Obama Administration has decided that the way to win in 2012, is to concede every single unfounded GOP talking point and let the GOP and Tea Party frame the entire debate.

By advocating for raising taxes on the rich, while conceding that "government hasn't created one job" (which is absurd, as any police officer, firefighter, librarian, or schoolteacher can tell you) and that Government has no role to play in the economy, Obama's administration continues to lose the message battle in defense of government.

And this isn't limited to just this interview. Digby has more on how this has been an administration-wide failure.

If you look how many Wall Street crooks, aka "Business community" members have become a part of Obama's administration, look at where $7.9 million in campaign contributions came from in 2007 and 2008, it's no wonder the Obama Administration has been falling all over itself these past 3 years to kiss the Wall Street Oligarch's buttocks, and why they are "losing" the message battle.

Obama and his administration aren't losing the battle. They aren't even fighting it.

Maddow: It's not about the budget

They just don't give a fuck

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

To quote Chris Hedges,

"Totalitarianism, George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith but an age of schizophrenia. "A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial," Orwell wrote. "That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud."

Our elites have used fraud. Force is all they have left. Our mediocre and bankrupt elite is desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved. More importantly, they are trying to save themselves. . "

I have a homework assignment for you

Yup.

The Punk Patirot Fixes the USA Economy

With quantitative easing, people are worried about inflation!
If we don’t do anything, the Fed is worried about deflation!
By blaming our shitty economy on people who receive welfare checks, we’re having a big problem with CONFLATION!

I’m the Punk Patriot, and I’m going to fuckin’ fix the economy for you.

I was watching the news the other day, they were doing “man on the street” interviews, and I saw this one person give his thoughts on the economy: “I think thar’s too much people gittin on welfur, and too much of our jobs is bein’ sent overseas.”

Well, you got half of that right. Thanks to NAFTA, CAFTA, and the WTO, our manufacturing jobs have almost all left the country. Manufacturing is important, because it’s a job that takes a low-cost raw material and transforms it into a high-value consumable good. This happens through the MAGIC OF LABOR!

Because people are working on transforming low value materials into high value goods, the product that they create using their skilled labor has more use and therefore more value, than the stuff that they started with. Which means that they are creating wealth. Factories are not just places to create goods, they are places that create wealth. And right now, all our wealth is being created in other countries. Thats why the economy fucking sucks so bad.

I work in a boot factory. I make boots. I transform leather and rubber, both of which are relatively low cost, low value materials, into a high-value, higher-function good-- a boot.
You can’t keep your feet dry and warm with scrap leather and rubber alone. You need it to be crafted into a fucking boot. That takes skilled labor. You’re welcome.

Your retail jobs don’t do this. They simply move a product from one place to another. You will never grow an economy on retail sales, because the margins are slim, and no wealth is created by moving a product from one point to another. An economy based entirely on retail sales-- which is what we’ve pretty much had for the past 30 years, will eat itself alive- which is pretty much what we’re seeing right now.

Now, the address the conflation of “Too much people gettin on welfar”...

For whatever reason, it’s a common misconception that people receiving welfare is bad for the economy. People getting on welfare isn’t the reason you don’t have a job. The reason you don’t have a job is because nobody fucking MAKES anything anymore. Which means that all our wealth has left the country. Which means that nobody has any money to fucking buy anything anymore. Which means that the retail jobs are having to lay people off. Which means that more people have less money to buy things with. Which means that more layoffs are in the works. Which means that more people have less money to spend.

Welfare spending actually reverses this trend. If a person receives welfare spending, what do they spend it on? (DRUGS!) No! Actually they spend it on food and rent. If more people have more money to spend on food and rent, then the grocery stores can hire more people, and the superintendents are better able to afford repairs. Which means that construction and repair workers can stay employed and grocery stores can hire more people, which means that they can buy other things like cars. Which means that more people can get paid to make cars. Or whatever. Money flows in one direction-- from the bottom, up. This is a fundamental truth of capitalism. Fixing the interest rates for all the rich fucks on Wall Street can start doing more derivatives trading again doesn’t do ANYTHING to fix the economy.

Which is why Quantitative Easing is doomed to fail. Capitalism is fundamentally flawed, and supply-side economics, which apparently even Obama has drunk the kool-aid on, is even more so.

You’re not going to fix fundamental flaws by fucking around with interest rates. The problem isn’t our monetary policy, it’s our monetary system, which is biased towards savings, wall street mathematical gymnastics, and scarcity. It’s the fundamental flaws in our entire economy-- that we do NOT RECOGNIZE that the poorest people amongst us are actually the ones who create all wealth in society by providing consumer demand. If it wasn’t for consumer demand, all the pioneers of industry would be wasting their money and time. Which with the economy in recession, it looks like they’re doing.

Rich people don’t create jobs. They don’t create a single fucking job. If labor hadn’t worked their asses off striking and protesting and doing work-slowdowns, and sit-down strikes, and taking police billy clubs to the head, and being shot and killed, so that we could have all the labor laws we take for granted, things like overtime pay, minimum wage, the right to organize, a half hour lunch, 15 minute breaks, OSHA safety requirements, etc etc etc-- we’d be no different than those third world countries that all our jobs have gone to.

If we didn’t have these labor protections mandated by law, we’d be working our fingers off- literally right off our hands, getting them caught in unsafe machinery, or permanently damaged due to repetitive motion injury.
Now Randian regressives who would prefer we live in a pre-Great Depression laissez-faire, free-market system, would have us believe that we should be willing to make ourselves POORER-- by taking cuts in benefits and wages, to make ourselves richer, by having more jobs. We aren’t going to make ourselves richer by making ourselves poorer. That’s so fucking illogical I don’t even know where to begin with debunking that...

You want to fix the fucking economy? I’ll fix it for you.
First thing we need, is a trade policy where we stop importing goods from whoever is fucking over their workers the most, just because it’s cheaper to do so. We can harness the greed and consumption of America to do good work for the rest of the world. Pure free-market economics is like a child with an overactive ID and no superego telling them what’s right and wrong.

What we need is to put in a safeguard to protect us from our own greed and stupidity. If we implement a trade policy in which we only trade with countries who have labor laws and environmental protection laws at least as good as our own, then we force third world countries to give their lower class more protection by their governments, and increase their standards of living, by giving them more labor protections, and higher wages, and more protection from getting poisoned by lazy fucks that we call the “captains of industry”, who pollute because it’s cheap and easy to do so.

Second, we need to implement a MAXIMUM WAGE law. Now there’s been talk about this for a while. Some think we should just cap it arbitrarily. I think that’s wrong. I think that would stifle the GOOD things about capitalism and greed-- the incentive to make the best fucking product you can for the lowest amount of money to the consumer, so that you can make the most money you can. Capitalism works really well for creating amazing consumer goods. Like cellphones and computers. People really wanted to be able to watch YouTube videos and so now you can do it on your fucking PHONE. In fact, some of you are probably watching this on a phone. A FUCKING PHONE! That’s crazy! That couldn’t happen without capitalism responding to consumer demand.

But there’s a problem-- the Average CEO makes 10million dollars a year.
The average worker makes 40,000 a year or less. The average worker spends the majority of their income on meeting their basic needs-- which is all shit that actually makes our economy function.
The average CEO keeps it. This is called “dead money.” That money sits in the bank, or goes to wall street where it does mathematic gymnastics, but doesn’t create a single fucking job.

So what’s the solution? The maximum wage needs to be indexed to the lowest paid employee at any company. Let’s set it at say, 20 times what your lowest paid employee makes-- which is roughly the same ratio that we saw in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when the USA was far more properous. Back in the 1960s, indexed for inflation, we worked half as many hours, got paid the same amount, but the cost of living was a third of what it is now.

Today, CEOs make roughly 300 times as much as their lowest paid employees. That’s fucking absurd. If a company is doing really well, it’s because of EVERYBODY at that fucking company working their ass off, least of which is the CEO. If they have enough money laying around to give themselves bonuses, they have enough money to let everybody share in the wealth. After all, all those poor fucks are the ones who put their labor into making that company successful.. They should share in that wealth. So if a company does well, and the executive board wants to give themselves raises as a pat on the back-- go ahead. But you have to a raise that is proportional to your income-- to everybody else in your company. If you want to give yourself a raise, you have to give EVERYBODY in your company a raise.

This forces more of the wealth downwards into the lowest classes, where it belongs. Because it’s all going to end up back in the pockets of the CEOs anyways. Fixing the economy to work better for the rich and the traders on wall street, is like fixing a tree to work better for a fungal parasite. You’re going to end up killing the tree.

This is the punk patriot, to life, liberty, and pursuit of a less fucked up government.

How to Fix Trickle Down Economics & Make It Work

Advocates of trickle-down economics often say that the ones at the top of the structure generate all the wealth of society, and those at the bottom are nothing more than bottom feeding parasites. And they're not entirely wrong about this.
Something that might shock you--I actually don’t think that Trickle Down Economics is entirely wrong.

Trickle Down Economics, aka Supply Side Economics, aka Voodoo Economics! I think of it as being like a giant physics equation that just had a couple variables in the wrong places. Let me explain:

So traditionally, Trickle Down Economics has looked like this:

You’ve got this big pyramid, and the people with the most money are at the top. Let’s say the top 10%. If you cut taxes on the top of the pyramid, then the money is free to fall down and enrich the rest of society.

However, in reality, it doesn’t work that way. If you cut taxes on the wealthiest, the money just stays there at the top. It goes into savings accounts. It goes into wall street mathematical equations that only create virtual wealth. It actually doesn’t create any new wealth for society.

Now, this idea of adjusting one part of the economy in order to bring prosperity to the entire system isn’t totally unfounded. Here’s where trickle down economics has a fatal flaw in their understanding of how the world works.

The chart should actually look like this: [flip pyramid upsidedown]

See, how the economy works, is that wealth is first created by the labor working class. That wealth then proceeds to trickle down to the bottom of this funnel. It does so through various means: franchise contracts, paying the salaries of the management class, CEO Bonuses, sales, the stock market, poorly-written intellectual property rights laws, and most often, the consumption of material goods by the working class.

Through worker’s wages, there are small eddies in this constant downward flow of wealth, in which wealth temporarily floats upwards against the torrent of downward trickling. However, the overwhelming majority of wealth flows steadily to the bottom of this funnel.
If no method intervention is taken, eventually all the wealth collects at the bottom of this funnel and becomes stagnant.

Once the water becomes stagnant, the top stops being able to transfer their wealth downwards via consumption. Then they are laid off from their jobs and stop being able to introduce new wealth into the system.

When the constant downward trickling ceases, and the economy goes into recession, and the wealth begins to dry up and disappear.

So how do we prevent this? There are many ways. The monetary wealth that has settled here in the bottom can be brought back to the top through higher wages to the working class. This ensures that they have more purchasing power, and ensures that their consumption of goods will continue fueling the economy.

Wealth can also be brought back to the top through other means, such as taxation.
If we tax the wealth of the richest folks at the bottom of this funnel, and pump it back to the top of the funnel through public services like Single-Payer Healthcare, through building infrastructure that facilitates our economy, things like railroads, bridges, trains, highways, water purification, renewable energy sources, etc, we then can ensure that the economy has a steady flow of wealth from the top of the funnel to the bottom.

And that’s good for everybody at every level of this funnel, from the labor at the top, to the parasites at the bottom.

[VIDEO] Evolution and Capitalism

Evolution and Capitalism

by The Punk Patriot



Our society today has largely been shaped by the selfish individualism of Ayn Rand, in ways we won’t fully understand for centuries.

So much so, that nobody growing up in this age knows any different from it. People raised in the post-Reagan world see these drastic changes in human behavior as just being the status-quo.

Individuals are having to change in order to better cope with this new environment that Ayn Rand’s philosophy has created.

Empathy, something born from the communal lifestyle of our ancestry in social mammals, is becoming maladaptive.
To become a member of the most successful elite, one needs to behave in ways that are anti-social, misanthropic, disingenuous, and cold-hearted.

Now average lay people might call such behavior immoral, or they might call such a person a “selfish asshole”, but this type of behavior is actually beneficial to the individual, given the confines and structures of our autistic economics.

The very things we think of as making us human: love, empathy, concern for others, are now in the world we live in, maladaptive behaviors.

The Neo-human, the human evolving to best suit this crazy new breed of hyper-capitalism, has no genetic needs to socialize, to love, to be loved, to care or be cared for. What this Neo-human needs to survive, can be purchased with money.

Emotional currency is useless and worthless to him. With no desire to be loved, and no empathy for others, this autonomous being feels no emptiness, and does not feel lonely. He can kill with out a second thought.

Contemporary psychology will call this person a sociopath, but contemporary psychology is still mired in the mammalian standards of what is normal. Soon, as hyper-capitialism reaches a crescendo, and our social norms are slowly redefined by this dramatic shift, it will turn out that WE were crazy for thinking our systems morality had value.