The Economic Crisis
Articles about the recession and financial crisis that began in late 2007.
Capitalism Hits the Fan Movie
Published on April 30, 2009VIDEO
Watch as Professor Richard Wolff breaks down the root causes of today's economic crisis, showing how it was decades in the making and in fact reflects seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself. Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing and debt that ultimately exploded in the mortgage meltdown.
Lessons from the Housing Disaster
Of the roughly 56 million homes in the US today with mortgages, one in seven is "delinquent." That is over 7 million homes more than 30 days behind in mortgage payments. Those homeowners face foreclosure procedures likely leading to evictions. Very high (and still rising) unemployment levels guarantee rising mortgage delinquencies.
Mass media and political statements about government and banks helping people avoid foreclosures ("mortgage modification") are often misleading. Relatively few have been helped and the help has been too little.
Chronology of Capitalism
Published on February 9, 2010AUDIO
From the National Radio Project:
"It’s a time of economic transition, and systems that may have seemed stable over the past few decades are proving to be far from it. But how did we get here? And how can we learn from the past, to build a more fair and just system in the future? While many politicians and pundits claim that no one saw the current economic collapse coming, in fact, we had plenty of warning, depending on who we listened to. Rising Income Inequality in the US: Divisive, Depressing, and Dangerous
The gap between annual incomes of the top 10 per cent of US citizens and what the other 90 per cent gets has been widening sharply for the last 30 years. The nation's economic development has been increasingly divisive. Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, a leading expert, summarizes the facts on his website, from which the graph below is gratefully taken. This graph shows how the top 10 per cent of income earners in the US took home, after the 1970s, an ever more outsized share of the total national income.
The so-called Crisis in Greece
2010 marks year #3 of this crisis in global capitalism. This is a systemic crisis with extreme symptoms in different places at different times: now Icelandic banks, then US homeowners being foreclosed, now Mexico losing emigrants’ remittances, then Greece’s government bonds, and so on. Capitalist hegemony cannot admit or deal with the disease of capitalism as a system. Instead, the focus shifts from symptom to symptom to press local institutions to shift the costs of crisis onto workers.
Capitalism’s systemic crisis is no mystery.
Oregon Counters Massachusetts
The stunning win of a Republican novice in the Massachusetts Senate race to replace Ted Kennedy is well known. It is being interpreted as a sign of Obama's fading popularity and also as a sign that the US electorate wants more right-of-center policy. To show the flaw in thinking that right-wing answers to the economic crisis are the only popular option, consider the results of the January 26, 2010 referendum in Oregon. That referendum's 1.2 million voters decisively passed Measures 66 and 67 by margins of over 53 to 46.
