Economy Watch

brechtforum

Obama’s Magic Number? 150,000 Jobs Per Month

On Friday morning, the Labor Department announced that the economy added 243,000 jobs in January and an average of 201,000 jobs over the last three months.

The unemployment report on Friday will give us the most tangible read to date on how the economy is performing in 2012. It might also represent the most important number yet for President Obama’s prospects of winning re-election.

by Nate Silver

from FiveThirtyEight blog
[New York Times], 2/3/12

Manifesto!

A new historical vista is opening before us in this time of change.
by David van Arsdale, Michael McCabe, Costas Panayotakis, Jan Rehmann, Sohnya Sayres, & Richard D. Wolff

for Economic Democracy and Ecological Sanity, February 2012

What You're Really Worth

Sometimes economists (even lefty economists) are very frustrating. They tend to operate in extremely abstract terms, and often miss the fact that the import of their analysis is being missed by the vast majority.

by Sam Calvin

from Following Sylvis blog, 1/31/12

Unrest in China

IN AN industrial zone near Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in south-west China, a sign colourfully proclaims the sprawl of factories to be a “delightful, harmonious and happy district”. Angry steelworkers must have winced as they marched past the slogan in their thousands in early January, demanding higher wages. Their three-day strike was unusually large for an enterprise owned by the central government. But, as China’s economy begins to grow more sedately, more such unrest is looming.

from The Economist, 1/28/12

Marx 2.0

Lenin graces the cover of a recent issue of The Economist. The Financial Times is running an entire series on the “crisis in capitalism.” Francis Fukuyama, a recovering neoconservative, makes a plea in Foreign Affairs for the left to get its intellectual act together.

by John Feffer

from Huffington Post, 1/31/12

The EU: Best-Laid Plans

I. The crisis of European imperialist integration
The year 2011 (and as it seems today quite probably 2012 also) was marked by the crisis of one of the main international pillars of capitalism: the European Union (EU). What is usually described as a crisis of the Eurozone (strictly speaking the European Monetary Union – EMU) is in fact a crisis of the whole EU edifice system, of which EMU is its most avant-gardist structure.

by Stavros D. Mavroudeas

from Spectrezine, 1/30/12

Who Really Pays Taxes?

As US capitalism suffers from a crisis now in its fifth year with no end in sight, the Republican presidential candidates and Obama endlessly repeat cheerleading for the system as if it were, as usual, beyond question or criticism. Obama’s State of the Union Speech at least found campaign fodder in referring to income inequality. He tried to make political use of what the Occupy movement inserted onto the mass public consciousness so powerfully last autumn.

Obama even suggested a 30% minimum tax on those earning $1 million or more annually.

by Richard D. Wolff

from truthout, 1/30/12

Big Money, Little People

Sasha Lilley: Protests against Wall Street have inspired many people to move their money from big banks to smaller banks and credit unions and encourage others to do the same.  Why might you be skeptical of this effort?

Doug Henwood interviewed by Sasha Lilley

from MRzine, 1/21/12

Smoke, Mirrors and Defense Spending

In November, when lawmakers were discussing the defense budget, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a dire warning: In a letter to Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, he wrote that a threatened deep reduction — about $1 trillion over the next decade — would create “an unacceptable risk in future combat operations.” It would, he said, leave America with the smallest Army since the eve of World War II, the smallest number of

by R. Jeffrey Smith

from iWatch news (Center for Public Integrity), 1/26/12

Neoliberalism and the End Of Shorter Work Hours

While in previous crises shorter work hours were discussed as a measure to combat growing unemployment, an astonishing feature of the current economic downturn from 2007 on was that work time reductions were nowhere on the political agenda. Not even in France and Germany, the champions of shorter work hours, both introducing a partial 35-hour week in the face of high unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s, was this the case.

by Christoph Hermann

from The Bullet (Socialist Project, Canada), 1/25/12

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