Mid-August, 2009, was a peculiar time in the US economy.   Wall Street, big banks, and the media were mostly celebrating "economic recovery."  Meanwhile, average Americans were suffering record levels of unemployment, job insecurities, home foreclosures, personal debt anxieties, and the upsets, tensions, and angers that inevitably result.  One economist referred to the US as "one nation, two national economies."   Two particular sets of August economic data reveal the deepening economic divide behind the "recovery" talk.

The media, academics, and politicians often speak and act as if government economic policies can or will "solve" or "end" or "overcome" capitalism's crises.  They don't.  They never have.  The often-cited counter-example,  FDR's New Deal program in the 1930s,  failed to get the US out of the Great Depression.  World War 2 finally did that.  Government economic policies targeted at crises are mostly secondary, weak sideshows.  The main event is the intrinsic relationship between capitalism and its crises.

In an interview, Rick Wolff analyzes the current debate over health care reform in the US in relation to the uniquely high costs of medical care and its relatively poor results. Generally accessible health care in the US is compared to that in most other wealthy industrial societies. Wolff identifies some of the key obstacles to changing and improving the US health care system.

Capitalism has generated recurring "crises" everywhere and throughout its history.  It alternates bursts of growth and prosperity with crisis periods when many workers lose jobs and homes, bankruptcies close enterprises, production shrinks, and governments reduce public services.  Growth periods almost always promote speculation, overproduction, inflation, and excess debts that crises then erase or even reverse.  As crises deepen, the increasingly desperate unemployed accept lower wages and poorer working conditions.  Business "revives" if and when lo

The crisis in capitalism today is not, or not yet, a crisis of capitalism. Whether it evolves into a crisis of capitalism - when the system itself is in question for significant numbers of people - depends on three factors. The first is the extent of the economic meltdown now underway, and the mass suffering, resentment, and opposition it provokes. The second factor comprises the policies undertaken to contain and reverse the crisis, their effects, and their public perception.

Global capitalism’s deterioration is fast outrunning the disorganized, uncoordinated patchwork of too-little-too-late government “programs.” Nothing illustrates this sorry spectacle better than the twists and turns of U.S. monetary policy to be executed by the Federal Reserve, and Congress’s just-passed “stimulus” program, about to be enacted by the Obama administration.