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But that’s not who the Democratic Party is. It’s not who they have been for at least 40 years. Rather, they are a party standing up for the military-industrial complex, for the police state, for neoliberalism, for capitalism, and for corporate ascendancy.
This election was NOT a victory for the Republican Party. It was instead a total failure of leadership by the Democratic Party, and a well-earned defeat.
Four years from now, if there is another election, we should expect nothing different from them.
We need system change.
#USA #Politics #History #Economics
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In the end, the election was about despair.
Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.
Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13% approval rating.
The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic, and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy.
The American dream has become an American nightmare.
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FULL ESSAY ➡️ https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-cultural-despair
#USA #Politics #History #Economics #Israel #Gaza
The Politics of Cultural Despair
It is despair that is killing us. It fosters what Roger Lancaster calls “poisoned solidarity,” the intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear, envy, hatred and a lust for violence.Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report)
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America has always been a violent, racist country. Little wonder, being built on slavery and genocide, spawn of the brutal British Empire.
Our war for independence was no romantic story about a fight for freedom and justice. It was a revolt against a king not playing nice with his colonists. Some were fleeing religious persecution, but many were here to get rich. They had no compunction about murdering the indigenous people who saved them from starving in their first winter on these shores.
Native Americans were slaughtered, the survivors driven across the land to reservations, their resources stolen. Texas was annexed in 1845 from the brown people of Mexico under the newly invented guise of “Manifest Destiny” which argued we have moral virtue, and a divine right to that destiny.
Through this time and well before, Africans were packed into the holds of dank, leaking ships for weeks-long voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. The fifty percent that survived disease outbreaks from these barbaric conditions were sold as if animals. Eventually, slavery ripped families apart in the Civil War. The emancipation of blacks led to the Jim Crow laws in the south not overturned until 1965.
To understand what happened on November 5, we must consider history.
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Geoff has written a long, angry, and well-informed essay about our shameful past and present — and near the end, he also offers several good suggestions on how to organize and take action to build a better future. I hope you’ll read the whole thing.
➡️ https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/descent-into-madness
#USA #Politics #History #Economics #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange
But let's not fool ourselves into believing that a Harris victory would have been *good* for our climate and environment. We've been going in the wrong direction for at least 20 years under Presidents from both parties — and there's no reason to think that Kamala Harris would have charted a different course.
SEE ➡️ https://archive.ph/VnlWF
When it comes to our climate and environment, we can't blame either the Democrats or the Republicans. We have to blame both. We have to blame capitalism.
🧵 1/3
#Politics #History #Economics #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual
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For liberal America, this election season has not been fun. It has not been honest. It did not turn out well. And now that it’s over, the time has arrived for a dose of brutal honesty. Forget about Donald Trump’s real and perceived lies. We have lied to ourselves for too long.
Our country and our world are in a dire state. That state has everything to do with the climate crisis, species extinction (possibly including our own), wars with no end in sight, dysfunctional geopolitics and domestic politics, and worst of all, irrational devotion to economic growth that is literally killing us.
The energy transition demanded by the climate crisis is an area where facing up to hard truths is particularly vital. It is also the area of our misguided American experience of the last half century that I know most about. A long career of writing about the energy industry tells me that recovery from our binge of self-deception must start with admitting:
1. Trump’s presidency will not bring the great change for the worse in US energy policy that establishment environmentalists claim it will. Not, tragically, because Trump is better than they say, but because the Biden/Harris administration was much, much worse than hoped.
2. The US is not a leader in positive climate action. It has not been under Biden, and it will not be for the foreseeable future. On the contrary, both political parties seem determined — in practice, if not in words — to lead a reactionary defense of fossil fuels.
3. Climate breakdown is much more advanced than widely admitted. There’s no time left for a carefully designed transition, or even a thought-out, gradually implemented shift away from the devastating paradigm of economic growth. An economic collapse is the only evident path to slower climate destabilization.
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There's a lot more in the full essay, including some suggestions of books to read, along with action steps for those of us who are ready to start off in a new direction.
➡️ https://medium.com/the-new-climate/post-us-election-the-contrarian-take-on-climate-2ba24101b2c9
#Politics #History #Economics #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis
REPORT ➡️ https://www.circularity-gap.world/2024
That’s very bad! But I wonder, do you think the world has been doing better since 2021? 🤔
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that global consumption has NOT declined during the past three years. In fact, the level almost certainly has increased. But let’s just say it has remained steady.
If that’s true, it means another three years of the world annually consuming ~97 billion tonnes of materials. So the total over the past nine years is now at least 873 billion tonnes — or about 18% MORE than all the materials consumed in the entire 20th century!
Driven by capitalism’s incessant demand for profits at any cost, we are consuming ourselves to death. But who cares about that? As long as billionaires keep getting richer, that’s all that matters, right?
Business As Usual must go on.
#History #Economics #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual
This is unsurprising as the 'gravity theory' of trade suggests countries trade most with the nearest markets & less with those at a distance.
Only when this reality is acknowledged can UK trade policy start to rebuild what the Brexiters wrecked!
#economics
[meme-maker unknown]
See the flaws in this oversimplified meme and read the comment by @jrefior
#economics #education #inequality #billionaires #college #taxes #press #meme #PovertyTax
Read more: https://t.co/X0WSzeDPSG
#news #finance #economics #stocks #options
Bernie Sanders: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them"
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday accused the Democratic Party of neglecting the priorities of the working class, calling it the primary reason for their loss of the White House and Senate.Unusual Whales
#economics
@tomgauld.bsky.social
'Labour’s basic growth policy is much the same as the Tory policy of the last 40 years: liberalise, encourage foreign investment, support innovation, invest in some infrastructure & now make Brexit work'... so if you were looking for some new ideas about how to 'transform' the UK political economy you'd need to look elsewhere.
A different (more equal, greener) future is clearly visible, but Labour is unable to see it!
#economics #politics
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/06/labour-budget-repackaged-tory-ideas-economics
If Trump wins (as now looks likely) & imposes the tariffs he 'promises' then the NIESR suggest the UK's already meagre growth rates will be halved, presenting a further economic headache for Govt. & country!
#Brexit #economics #Europe
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/06/donald-trump-tariffs-would-cut-uk-growth-by-half-and-push-up-inflation-thinktank-warns
So, is this a medium-term blip while the country transitions to new specialisms (green tech); or
an indication Germany has joined other developed countries in a move from manufacturing to services; or
a sign of amore serious economic malaise?
#Germany #economics
Little (apart from relatively marginal things like Mastodon) has changed that argument.
Despite the promises of the internet utopians, we live in an information capitalism that often feels like a C19th economic system....
#technology #capitalism #economics
https://invidious.jing.rocks/watch?v=nx4l89GsvMs
Bckp.:
https://youtu.be/nx4l89GsvMs
#economics
https://www.theguardian.com/money/article/2024/sep/03/european-commission-to-investigate-ticketmasters-dynamic-pricing
#law #tech #discrimination #economics
Where does peace come from in Europe and Stalin's "bloodthirstiness"?
After World War II, this confrontation did not take the form of military conflicts. Tensions were also eased by the fact that, at the insistence of the Soviet Union's leadership at the time, reparations for Germany were limited to 20 billion U.S. dollars. Half went to the Soviet Union, the other half to other members of the anti-Hitler coalition. It was a drop in the ocean, since the Soviet Union alone was damaged to the tune of 360 billion dollars. Thus, one factor of contradiction was leveled. Europe gained the long-awaited peace.
#lang_en #WWII #germany #france #war
#WW2 #USSR #Stalin #history #economics #europe #eu #reparations
О лидерстве Германии и Франции в Европе
...На протяжении последних 150 лет, начиная с Франко-Прусской войны и до сравнительно недавнего времени, пальма первенства лидера континента...www.toalexsmail.com
Economic strategies and slavery: renting and buying enslaved labour in Classical Athens
Economic strategies and slavery: renting and buying enslaved labour in Classical AthensJason Porter (Edinburgh)26 October 2023YouTube
The Implications Of Remote Work Conference | Brilliant and Brief: PhD Lightening Talks
The Hoover Institution and Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) along with additional support from the Templeton Foundation hosted a virtua...YouTube
On the inevitable end of capitalism
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As Karl Marx (1818–1883) wrote, ‘the apologists content themselves with denying the catastrophe itself and insisting, in the face of their regular and periodic recurrence, that if production were carried on according to the textbooks, crises would never occur’.
There is an interesting anecdote that sheds light on this divorce between theory and reality in mainstream bourgeois economics. After the 2008 global financial crisis, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom visited the illustrious London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Like a naïve child asking the most untoward question in polite company, she asked the eminent economists gathered for the occasion – among them professors at the most prestigious universities, government advisers, and pundits for highly regarded organs of the financial press such as The Economist and Financial Times – the following question: ‘Why did no one see it coming?’. There was no satisfactory reply. The duty of these eminent economists, up until the 15 September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, had been to defend the impeccably rational functioning of markets in the face of criticism from their hapless less orthodox colleagues, choosing not to reply to Marxist criticism so as not to lend it legitimacy.
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The more finance oils the machinery of a moribund economy, the more debt accumulates. In the end, financial flows reach a magnitude that is disproportionate when compared to the productive base that has given birth to all the credit and market capitalisation that have been amassed. Thus, the later the crash, the worse the outcome. This is what happened in 2008 and – based on an examination of the economic data in the years since – will, in all probability, repeat itself again in the short- or medium-term.
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However, this creates a contradiction for capital. Most of the time, the advancement in techniques involves the incorporation of new machines and more expensive materials into the production process. Thus, constant capital – i.e., the plant, machinery, other equipment, auxiliary elements such as energy, and other similar expenses – increase in relation to living labour. What Marx calls the technical composition and the organic composition of capital (the difference need not detain us here), i.e., the ratio of constant capital to living labour, increases as well. However, the basic Marxist proposition concerning value posits that the source of all value, and therefore of surplus value, is living labour. As capital strives to increase the amount of surplus value, it is thereby ejecting from the production process the very source of value, i.e., labour.
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We have thus come to the end of a rather long journey of explaining the mechanism behind crises and, by extension, the current crisis. But pressing questions remain: why are there depressions? Why have depressions become the most salient but also the most destructive form of capitalist crises over the last 150 years? To answer these questions, we will look to Marx’s grand vision of historical change, of how humanity moves from one mode of production, one socioeconomic formation, to another.
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At the beginning of the passage from Capital quoted above, Marx emphasised the fact that the entire process of capital accumulation advances through ‘the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself’. In Capital, Marx traced the historical development of capitalism and established the laws that determine how a society based on capital functions. That is why Marx constantly talks of ‘necessity’: once established, capitalism necessarily proceeds towards its own demise on the basis of its own laws. In other words, through its very laws, capitalism generates, within its bosom, the forces that will destroy it. The effects of these laws may be mitigated, temporarily arrested, or even reversed for a certain period. However, as long as capitalism exists, as long as it develops according to its own inherent laws, at a certain stage of its development, it will undermine its own existence. Capitalism, in other words, creates the historical conditions for its own demise.
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Silvio Ghesell is mentioned in the article, but he is unnecessarily overlooked.
See more: Freigeld - free money
#freigeld
#economy #economics #Marx #capitalism #crisis #financecrisis #finances #finance #money
The World in Economic Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis
Español PortuguêsNotebook no. 4 Notebook no. 4 was researched and written by E. Ahmet Tonak (an economist at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research) and Sungur Savran (an instructor at Istanbul Okan University and editor of Devrimci Marksizm a…Amilcar (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)
Anyone in my network interested to study & discuss #valueflows , especially from a communist perspective?
https://www.valueflo.ws/
I've been trying for a while to dive into this, but think I'll need somebody to go along for the ride