Once again, the two old wings of the political establishment do business as usual in Washington.  In the tax deal between Obama and the Republicans -- passed with the help of a majority of Democrats -- they all cut taxes, especially on the rich, and extended unemployment benefits.  In short, the government keeps spending mountains of money to subsidize a deeply recessional private capitalist economy, to prevent it from spiraling down into depression.

 

Deficits have now risen, yet again, to headline status. Conservatives inside and to the right of the Republican Party frame the national debates by attacking deficits. They want to reduce them by cutting government spending. Liberals respond, as usual, by insisting that overcoming the crisis requires big government spending (“stimulus”) and hence big deficits. Most Americans watch the politicians' conflicts with mixtures of confusion, disinterest, and disdain.

The US national debt is the outstanding total of each year’s deficits in the federal government’s budgets (where deficit simply means the difference between federal expenditures and tax receipts). Each year’s deficit results from the federal government deciding either to not reduce spending to the level of tax receipts or else to not raise taxes up to the level of federal expenditures. In other words, deficits reflect the political decisions of elected officials in the Congress and the White House. In 1989, the US national debt was about $3 trillion.

Professor Wolff's repsonse to today's release of the Deficit Commission's report. on the Mitch Jesserich's "Letters to Washington" show, on KPFA.   Highlights from the President's Commission Deficit hearing; Report from Leigh Ann Caldwell on the Commission's recommendations; Analysis of the recommendations with Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts; and analysis of European economic crisis.

The economic crisis that Obama rode to victory in 2008 also rode him down in the 2010 elections.  Obama and his economic advisors badly "mismanaged the crisis."  While the Obama team seems to have learned little from its failure, we need to draw its lessons if we are to reduce the costly social consequences of that defeat.   Obama's administration decided to handle the severe crisis inherited from Bush by following standard Keynesian economics.  It undertook massive new spending.

European financial and political leaders are now imposing a social disaster on Ireland’s people. It parallels and worsens the similar disasters underway in Greece and eastern European countries and being planned for Portugal and Spain next. The cause of all these disasters - the global capitalist crisis – emerged from the interaction among capitalism’s three great institutions: private property, markets, and the exploitative organization of production.

 

 

گند سرمایه داری بالا زده است

یک بررسی مارکسی از بحران اقتصادی جاری

 

Richard Wolff appears on The Rick Smith Show in order to discuss the current economic crisis and provide some insight into topics such as The Tea Party, misdirected public rage and some historical insight.

EUROPA Los gobiernos sostienen que las reformas laborales y pensionales son inevitables, pero la gente protesta en las calles porque no quiere pagar los platos rotos del salvamento del sistema financiero.

Sábado 23 Octubre 2010