Bernie Sanders, The American People are angry

Another round of class warfare from the top down

From Canadian Business:

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The two Republicans running for lieutenant governor say people receiving welfare or unemployment benefits in Mississippi should be subject to drug testing.

The proposal is part of a policy agenda that one of the candidates, state Sen. Billy Hewes, unveiled Wednesday during a news conference in the state Capitol.

His opponent in the Aug. 2 primary, state Treasurer Tate Reeves, said in a separate interview that he agrees with drug testing for people on public assistance. Reeves questioned why Hewes hasn't already pushed it into law, since Hewes has been in the Legislature 20 years.

"Has he filed a bill to do that?" Reeves asked.

The legislative website shows that Hewes did file such a bill this year, and that it died in the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee.

Hewes said he also wants to repeal the state inventory tax, strengthen vocational training in high schools, consolidate administrative functions for state agencies, order audits of state consulting contracts and require more disclosure about contracts for private attorneys who handle lawsuits on behalf of the state.

Reeves said his priority would be job creation.

"I don't believe government creates jobs," Reeves said. "Government simply creates the environment which encourages the private sector to invest capital and create jobs."

Reeves said he also wants to eliminate the inventory tax but over time. Doing so immediately, he said, could hurt local governments that rely on the revenue. He said he also wants to increase educational attainment in Mississippi and streamline state government by reducing the number of publicly-owned or leased vehicles and cell phones. Reeves said he agrees with requiring more disclosure about public contracts for private attorneys.

Hewes and Reeves both said they'd push for a "Caylee's Law," requiring parents or grandparents to promptly report missing or dead children. Legislators in several states say they'll push for such laws to honor Caylee Anthony, a toddler slain in Florida.

Reeves questioned the timing of Hewes' releasing a list of policy proposals.

"After 20 years in the Legislature and with only 13 days to go in this campaign, I wonder why my opponent is just now bringing up some of these ideas," Reeves said.

The drug testing proposal is not unique to Mississippi. Other states, including Florida and Missouri, enacted laws this year requiring drug testing for people on public assistance.

The Florida law requires people applying for welfare to pay for their own drug testing. If they pass, they're reimbursed. If they fail the test, they can't receive public assistance for at least a year. The Missouri law requires testing if there's reasonable cause to suspect a welfare recipient is using illegal drugs.

Hewes responded to questions Wednesday about whether he'd require drug testing only for low-income people on public assistance or if he'd also propose it for executives of companies receiving tax breaks or other incentives to bring jobs to Mississippi.

"I think if we're going to do drug testing at one level, we should have it at all. If you're receiving any sort of assistance from the state, it ought to be across the board," Hewes said.

Then, after more detailed questions, Hewes said his drug testing proposal would only be for people receiving welfare or unemployment benefits. He also said he would not kick children off Medicaid, for example, if a parent tests positive for illegal drug use.

"You can't fault the kids for what the parents are doing," Hewes said.

Janis Lane, a Hewes supporter who attended the news conference, said people who work for private companies are often subject to random drug testing and she believes it's fair to put the same requirement on those receiving public aid. Lane, 63, is retired from a telephone company and is president of the Central Mississippi Tea Party.

"I don't spend my money on drugs, and I don't think anyone should because I think we should have clear minds so that we can make reasonable decisions and we can conduct our business appropriately," Lane said. "With drugs, you're taking away from your children, and that money could be used more wisely, being spent on your children."

The lieutenant governor's race will be decided, for all practical purposes, in the Republican primary. No Democrat is running. A Reform Party candidate is expected to be on the Nov. 8 ballot, but the Reform Party has no history of winning elections in the state.

The current lieutenant governor, Republican Phil Bryant, is running for governor this year.

The lieutenant governor presides over the 52-member state Senate, appoints Senate committee chairmen and assigns bills to committees.

Hewes, 49, of Gulfport, is in the insurance business and has been a state senator the past 20 years. Reeves, 37, of Flowood, has been state treasurer for the past eight years.

The face of a human monster

Socialism in it's truest form is about love, and humanity. Capitalism is about greed and envy. The capitalist masters try and divide us based upon religion, race, ethnicity and nationality.

Look at the patch on his left arm.

The never ending debt cycle with this capitalist economy

The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s

William Klein’a story may sound familiar to his fellow graduates. After earning his bachelor’s in history from the College at Brockport, he found himself living in his parents’ Buffalo home, working the same $7.25-an-hour waiter job he had in high school.

It wasn’t that there weren’t other jobs out there. It’s that they all seemed to want more education. Even tutoring at a for-profit learning center or leading tours at a historic site required a master’s. “It’s pretty apparent that with the degree I have right now, there are not too many jobs I would want to commit to,” Mr. Klein says.

So this fall, he will sharpen his marketability at Rutgers’ new master’s program in Jewish studies (think teaching, museums and fund-raising in the Jewish community). Jewish studies may not be the first thing that comes to mind as being the road to career advancement, and Mr. Klein is not sure exactly where the degree will lead him (he’d like to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East). But he is sure of this: he needs a master’s. Browse professional job listings and it’s “bachelor’s required, master’s preferred.”

Call it credentials inflation. Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master’s is now the fastest-growing degree. The number awarded, about 657,000 in 2009, has more than doubled since the 1980s, and the rate of increase has quickened substantially in the last couple of years, says Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960.

“Several years ago it became very clear to us that master’s education was moving very rapidly to become the entry degree in many professions,” Dr. Stewart says. The sheen has come, in part, because the degrees are newly specific and utilitarian. These are not your general master’s in policy or administration. Even the M.B.A., observed one business school dean, “is kind of too broad in the current environment.” Now, you have the M.S. in supply chain management, and in managing mission-driven organizations. There’s an M.S. in skeletal and dental bioarchaeology, and an M.A. in learning and thinking.

The degree of the moment is the professional science master’s, or P.S.M., combining job-specific training with business skills. Where only a handful of programs existed a few years ago, there are now 239, with scores in development. Florida’s university system, for example, plans 28 by 2013, clustered in areas integral to the state’s economy, including simulation (yes, like Disney, but applied to fields like medicine and defense). And there could be many more, says Patricia J. Bishop, vice provost and dean of graduate studies at the University of Central Florida. “Who knows when we’ll be done?”

While many new master’s are in so-called STEM areas — science, technology, engineering and math — humanities departments, once allergic to applied degrees, are recognizing that not everyone is ivory tower-bound and are drafting credentials for résumé boosting.

“There is a trend toward thinking about professionalizing degrees,” acknowledges Carol B. Lynch, director of professional master’s programs at the Council of Graduate Schools. “At some point you need to get out of the library and out into the real world. If you are not giving people the skills to do that, we are not doing our job.”

This, she says, has led to master’s in public history (for work at a historical society or museum), in art (for managing galleries) and in music (for choir directors or the business side of music). Language departments are tweaking master’s degrees so graduates, with a portfolio of cultural knowledge and language skills, can land jobs with multinational companies.

Our Socialist neighbor to the north took his discriminatory act to court:

COLUMBUS, Ohio(CGE) -

The Ohio Socialist Party candidate who tried but failed to enter last year's three televised debates hosted by Ohio's big eight for-profit newspapers, between losing candidate Lee Fisher, a Democrat, and the winner, Rob Portman, a Republican, has now filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Federal Elections Commission, alleging its criteria for selecting candidates to be included in the debates were unlawfully kept secret from him and all other minor-party candidates and that the debates therefore constituted an illegal contribution to the candidates respective campaigns.   

 

Dan La Botz, an elementary school teacher in Cincinnati who got himself on the ballot and found over 25 thousand Ohioans who voted for him and not the other four candidates on the ballot, hopes this legal ploy will remedy the FEC's wrongful dismissal of the administrative complaint he filed at the time against the Ohio News Organization (ONO), its corporate members, the senatorial campaign of Robert Portman, and the senatorial campaign of

Lee Fisher. 

 

The ONO is a for-profit, unincorporated business association consisting of the eight largest newspapers in Ohio, which are all for-profit corporations organized under the laws of Ohio: The Toledo Blade, the (Canton) Repository, the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Dayton Daily News, the Akron Beacon Journal, and the (Youngstown) Vindicator. 

 

La Botz filed his administrative complaint with the FEC in late September of 2010, alleging that ONO and its corporate members had scheduled a series of televised debates between Portman and Fisher in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA).

 

In his filing, La Botz alleges that ONO and its corporate members made illegal campaign contributions to the Fisher and Portman campaigns by financing and organizing a series of televised debates including only those two major-party candidates without establishing and announcing permissible “pre-established objective criteria to determine which candidates may participate in the debate” and by categorically limiting the debates to these two major-party candidates. 

 

Acting on advice of its General Counsel, the FEC subsequently dismissed La Botz's administrative complaint on May 19, 2011.  

 

La Botz argues he was never afforded an opportunity by ONO and its corporate members, prior to its selection of only the two major-party candidates, to present evidence or argument showing that he should be included in the debates or otherwise satisfied ONO’s secret standards.   

 

"The Commission’s dismissal of Plaintiff’s administrative complaint is contrary to law, an  abuse of discretion, and arbitrary and capricious," La Botz's law team of Mark Brown of Capital Law School and Oliver B Hall of the Center for Competitive Democracy in Washington, D.C. wrote.

 

A collection of corporations like ONO that selects the Republican and Democratic candidates for televised debates, and categorically excludes all other ballot-qualified candidates, thus makes illegal contributions to those two major-party candidates, in violation of the Federal Election Campaigns Act, the lawsuit states.

 

Citing Buchanan v. Federal Election Commission, La Botz said that “[t]aken together, these statements by the regulation’s drafters strongly suggest that the objectivity requirement [of 11 C.F.R. § 110.13(c)] precludes debate sponsors from selecting a level of support so high that only the Democratic and Republican nominees could reasonably achieve it.”

 

La Botz, who told CGE via email Sunday that he won't be a candidate in next year's contest involving incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, his Republican challenger or another minority party candidate, said he qualified for Ohio’s 2010 United States Senate ballot in May 2010 by winning the Socialist Party of Ohio’s (a ballot-qualified party in Ohio) political primary.

 

The Socialist Party USA, of which the Socialist Party of Ohio is a member, is a direct descendant of Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party of America. Eugene Debs ran for President five times from 1900 to 1920.

 

The debates negotiated by ONO, its corporate members and the Fisher and Portman campaigns were scheduled to be held (and in fact were held) in Cleveland, Toledo and Columbus during the month of October 2010, the lawsuit said. It noted all three of ONO’s debates between Portman and Fisher were broadcast live on local television, either through independent broadcasters or broadcasters affiliated with ONO’s corporate members.   

 

Socialist Party candidates have only won a handful of votes in Ohio, compared to major party candidates. For example, in 1912, Debs won 8.69 percent of the vote (90,144 votes) in Ohio’s presidential election. A Gallup Poll from February of 2010 reports that “socialism” is viewed favorably by 36 percent of Americans.

 

La Botz argues, using several examples to make his point, that Ohio has unconstitutionally excluded minor-party candidates for sixty-plus years from its ballots. This, he says, has "led Ohio’s primary news outlets, including the eight corporate members of ONO, to habitually and presumptively focus exclusively on the two major parties. Ohio news organizations, especially those corporations that have joined to form the ONO, regularly ignore candidates who are not affiliated with either the Democratic or Republican Parties."

 

These organizations also control the Ohio Statehouse press corps, which is a creature of the legislature, who ultimately decides which media outlets gain access to the floors of the House or Senate, the sole perk of membership in the group that is now as outdated as the 1893 mission of the group is in today's Twitter- and Facebook-driven world of news.

 

In is filing, La Botz offered a response from Bruce Winges, editor and vice-president of the Akron Beacon Journal, one of the eight corporate members of ONO, describing ONO’s criteria for inclusion in the debates: "The Ohio News Organization generally follows the structure used by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which allows for only the major-party candidates to debate. The logic is sound: In a television debate format, when time constraints limit the number of questions and answers to be heard, it is of the utmost importance that voters hear from the two candidates who are clearly the front-runners for the office. While we have and will continue to write about third-party candidates when warranted, including them in debates limits Ohioans’ ability to hear answers from the top candidates on issues critical to the state’s future."

 

One counter argument to Winges' is that if voters never hear from minority party candidates, they won't vote for them, and not voting for them will maintain the supremacy Democrats and Republicans have enjoyed since the Civil War, but which Americans have grown weary of, as the rise of the tea party last year showed. Sufficiently inspired, Americans will vote for other candidates, albeit in small numbers, but maybe with more reporting on them, more voters might think their positions more sensible than what Democrats and Republicans have been foisting on the electorate over the decades.

 

CityBeat, a Cincinnati weekly that caters its content on topical issues, art and culture to young professionals, endorsed La Botz last year over Portman or Fisher.

 

Recently, in Columbus, the first ever We the People Convention took place, at which over a thousand motivated advocates and activists tired of the on-going gridlock and self-serving actions put both parties on notice that they intend to have an effect on next year's elections, if not sooner.

 

One Independent Candidate for U.S. Senate from last year, Dr. Michael Pryce, upgraded his status from Independent to Republican, just so he can take on whomever Republican powerbrokers choose to run against Sen. Brown. So far, it looks like the new, young Republican Auditor of State, Josh Mandel, has been anointed to be that candidate.

 

Dr. Pryce told CGE in an interview at the WTP convention that he doesn't intend to bow out, as GOP chairman Kevin DeWine told him to do. Last year, running as an Indepdent, Pryce, like La Botz, his political polar opposite, also said the decked was stacked for the major party candidates.

 

Last year, La Botz netted 26,454 votes, a puny amount compared to the 3.7 million votes the majority party candidates won. The four minority party candidates, combined, won 143,059 votes.

 

Minority party candidates didn't win any seats last year, but in the race for governor, the votes they did get - 151,224 - was almost twice the margin John Kasich defeated Ted Strickland by, a skinny 77,127 votes. Kasich could only muster 49 percent of 49 percent of the voters who turned out to vote. Had the three minority party candidates not run, it could be argued that Strickland would have won. Polls show that if Kasich and Strickland were to run again today, based on Kasich's track record so far, Strickland would win going away in a second runoff.

 

But while La Botz may have leverage using FECA, the new campaign financing landscape made possible with the Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court can create its own leap-frog-scenario, where another funding source other than ONO can pay for debates, invite ONO members and majority party candidates to it and likely not be in violation of FECA.

 

La Botz wants the court to declare the FEC's dismissal of his complaint "contrary to law, an abuse of discretion and arbitrary and capricious." He also wants it sent back to the FEC and for awarding attorney's fees and litigation expenses.

 

Liberals have their points, but they're arguing over yards not miles

The whole system needs to be rethought, 401k's should be a choice for external revenue for retirement, not it's main means, all retirement should be guaranteed through state coffers:

The banks, bailouts and ultimate failure of capitalism

Marxism-Leninism Today:

The Crisis and Speculative Capitalism

Billionaire investor George Soros, writing in the Financial Times, calls it “the worst financial crisis in 60 years.” In The New York Times, liberal economist Paul Krugman speaks of “a sort of minor-key reprise of the banking crisis that swept America in 1930 and 1931.” For economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, contributing to the same paper, the crisis deepens because the US consumer is “totally spent.” Chalmers Johnson sees the “debt crisis” as the “the greatest threat to the American Republic.” The Wall Street Journal on March 17, 2008 ominously stated “The last six days have shaken American capitalism.”

The desperate meeting of Federal officials, JP Morgan Chase chiefs, and Bear Sterns executives on Sunday, March 16 only underscores the chorus of dire assessments. The Fed chairman, the Treasury Secretary, their staffs and their corporate counterparts sought to salvage the pieces of the collapsing Bear Sterns giant brokerage house and secure a firewall against further disaster in the financial sector.

Finally the depth and breadth of the economic crisis has set in. Fear and panic have replaced a hollow confidence that markets will restore order with time and careful attention from the authorities at the Federal Reserve. Instead, the smug, arrogant pushers of market fundamentalism are beginning to creep toward the exits. You can hear it in the uneasy jokes and halting comments of the media talking heads.

We began writing and warning of the seriousness of this disaster last April.

How did we get here?

I suppose we, too, are fundamentalists – Marxist fundamentalists. In volume III ofCapital, Marx writes of the role of foreign trade in maintaining or increasing – temporarily – the rate of profit. Bear in mind that Marx believed that capitalist accumulation led, all things being equal, to a decline in the rate of profit within the capitalist system. For reasons that we will not discuss here, he maintained that this tendency of the rate of profit to fall was the primary cause of capitalist crisis. Yet he recognized that there were countertendencies – events that would restore vigor to a system headed for the historical junk pile. An expansion of trade was one such countertendency. Marx’s world was different than ours, but we can apply the same thinking to trends in our time. After the demise of the socialist community, the entire world, with the possible exception of Cuba and The People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, was drawn into a single global market. World trade organizations and trade agreements greased the rails for this development. Many countries joined this global market eagerly, some reluctantly under the weight of inevitability (“There is no alternative”), and a few, like Yugoslavia, under coercion. This has been vulgarly described as “globalization” – vulgar, because the word masks the underlying process. The radically enlarged market had one fundamental trait that benefited capital enormously: the cost of labor was radically reduced. In Marxist terms, the rate of surplus value (rate of exploitation) exploded. Put another way, the mass of value captured by the capitalist class grew while the value secured by the working class diminished sharply, especially in the US. This trend has been ably reported in the mainstream press, though one has to put the two facts next to each other to appreciate Marx’s point. While Marx argued that in the long run the rate of profit (capitalist surplus divided by labor costs and other factors of production) would fall, he recognized that, on many occasions, the rate of surplus value could spike with a consequent restoration or growth in the profit rate. This is precisely what occurred through jost of the decade after the elimination of the socialist economic union.

The seeds of the current crisis spring from this period of expansion, high profits, low labor costs and great expectations. One might think that, under the weight of competition, labor militancy, or government policy, capitalism would settle into a period of measured, blissful growth. But that is not how this system works. The motor driving capitalism is accumulation – acquisition of more and more and an ever greater share of the whole of society’s wealth. Gordon Gekko in the movieWall Street put it simply and crudely: “Greed is good.” Without this powerful drive for accumulation there would be no capitalism.

While in Marx’s time there were, of course, banks, he knew nothing of the giant financial engines of our time that pool huge sums of capital to invest and lend in pursuit of profit. With the world market-based surge of profits playing out at the end of the twentieth century, capitalism, and especially its financial sector, refused to be weaned from the unusually high profits secured during this period. The spike in productivity generated by computerization, robotization, and information technologies played out at the same time, with incremental investments in these areas producing decreasing growth in productivity. As Marx would predict, this had a dampening effect upon profit growth. Nonetheless, the financial sector refused to accept a diminishing growth in profit. Billions of dollars of investment capital flowed into the high technology sector with the faith that either a new technology revolution was around the corner or the old one was still alive. Of course, the hyperbole of the surge drew investors like honey, creating a bubble with no relation to the realities of the actual profitability of the high technology sector. Any sense of real value was spurned for the hope of high returns. The collapse of this high-tech bubble is now widely recognized, spawning the recession of 2000-2001.

With the economy stagnating, the Federal Reserve, under Alan Greenspan’s leadership, lowered interest rates dramatically, flooding the US economy with cheap – nearly free – credit. Thus, even the jost marginal enterprises were able to borrow their way out of the recession. Losses were covered by debt with aljost magical affect.

The financial titans pounced on this period of easy credit, leveraging assets to borrow vast sums and investing in every imaginable scheme from buyouts to complex security trades. Because of the easy credit, the acceptance and manipulation of debt became the centerpiece of financial activity.

In Marx’s time, loans were largely the exchange of real assets for deferred assets; a lender surrenders an agreed upon asset with the understanding the asset or something of equal value plus interest will be returned within a fixed time. Burrowers assumed debt for productive activity calculating that the success of the productive activity would outweigh the costs of debt.

But today’s financial capitalists view debt differently. Complex financial strategies – more and more often deeply buried in opaque hedge funds – resemble gambling. This speculative capitalism, growing inversely to the decline of productive capitalism, has become decisive in the US economy. The easy money of the Greenspan credit splurge only accelerated this trend. The language and the mechanism are complex and challenging, but the idea is simple: establish market wagers on the performance of other actors in the market and back these wagers with as much borrowed money as confidence will allow. For example, if research reveals that a peak in soybean futures prices always coincides with the opening date of the Illinois State Fair, borrow money, buy the futures well in advance of that date, and sell them off immediate after the Fair opens. Repay the debt and enjoy a fat return. 

Two factors separate speculative capitalism from traditional investment. Firstly, the speculative capitalist has no vested interest in the outcome apart from achieving a return on a predicted outcome. If thousands of buyers and sellers in the soybean market lose millions because of the speculative wager, if the soybean market collapses after future prices declines, the speculative capitalist could care less. He or she has moved on to the next wager.

Secondly, speculative capitalism distorts markets. The millions of borrowed dollars entering the market before the Fair will accelerate the rise in soybean futures and the quick exit after the Fair will speed their fall. Other investors’ positions will be affected in ways that are not reflective of the supply and demand or the real value of soybeans.

Of course there’s nothing new about people speculating in the market, but the scope and manner of today’s speculative capitalism is different. The following features separate contemporary speculative capitalism from its predecessor:

1. Contemporary speculative capitalism relies more on the tools of game theory, computational speed, statistical analysis, and, in far too many cases, inside or privileged information. It is one thing to acquire all the public information about market entities and weigh it in investment decisions, quite another to possess and use tools that guarantee an advantage in investment speculation. The former allows for everyone to be a winner short of foolhardiness; the latter succeeds only if some win and others lose. Using Black Jack as our model, card counters win because others are not using their strategy. If all players are card counters, no one accrues an advantage.

1.  Contemporary speculative capitalism has devised and expanded new vehicles for market wagers. Hedge funds – mysterious, private entities –  have been in existence for less than fifty years. Unlike other funds, they are free of outside scrutiny, open to only select players, and based upon cutting edge betting strategies. When they were new and small in number, they achieved returns far greater than any other kind of fund – they enjoyed the advantages of a card counter in the game of Black Jack. But the number of hedge funds grew exponentially because of this success. From the early 90’s through now, their capital grew from $200 billion to $2 trillion. As a result, the advantage of individual hedge funds over other investment vehicles has been diminished. Thus, their ability to remain advantaged over others has declined and their capability of amplifying crisis has grown. In time of crisis, they begin to more ruthlessly seek advantage, a development that The Wall Street Journal aptly calls “Crunch Capitalism.”

1. Today, speculative capitalism depends overwhelmingly on borrowed money. It’s a simple truth that if you have a winning strategy, the more money bet, the more money won. Thus, speculators incur debt in order to bet far greater sums than they can draw from their own coffers. The powerful brokerage houses and investment banks both devise their own hedge funds to make these bets and preference hedge funds for loans. The Greenspan period of low interest rates provided an opportunity of nearly cost-free borrowing. It was as if a gambler could approach the Black Jack table with nearly unlimited chips. Obviously, having both limitless stakes and little personal risk can court betting disaster.

1. Contemporary speculative capitalism lives and dies on immediate investor return. Unlike productive capitalism, speculative capitalism must produce instant and satisfying results. Intense competition shifts investment aljost instantaneously in the speculative market. The current credit seizure was preceded by an ocean of liquidity. At first glance this may appear paradoxical, but it explains how speculation brought the system into crisis. More than two years ago, we explored the ocean of capital (and potential credit) existing in the world. We explained elsewhere that it was increasingly difficult to find an investment haven for the enormous mass of wealth accumulated in the hands of the capitalists. We noted that only by taking greater risk could the customary profit be maintained. It was this thirst for the accustomed rate of profit in an environment of fewer high profit opportunities that spawned the crisis that now plagues the US economy. The logic of capitalist accumulation drove financial institutions to make new use of this pool of capital, including loans to millions who were unlikely to find the means to repay. The imperative of instantaneous and high yields demanded it.

Several conclusions are recommended by our discussion of speculative capitalism and its role in the current economic crisis. jost obviously, speculative capitalism is parasitic. It is a growth feeding off of and expanding from the nourishment of the productive sectors of the economy. As in Marx’s time, the creation of means of production and, broadly speaking, the means of consumption (the maintenance and enrichment of the lives of human beings) remain the fundamental basis for economic activity.

For the vast majority of people – working people – speculative capitalism plays no direct role in their lives beyond some clerical and maintenance jobs and an occasional blip in their retirement accounts. Despite the impression left by the media, financials – especially, the stock market – are no true barometer of the health of economic life except in their capacity to absorb wealth or disrupt the economy’s normal function. We see that clearly in the current crisis. The effects of speculative capitalism run amok are disrupting, corrupting, and distorting all other healthier sectors of the US economy. Moreover, federal, state and local public officials bear the blame for inviting speculative capitalism into the public sector through privatization, contracting out, and public-private partnerships. Bond issuance counts as another insidious device for enriching speculative capitalism and burdening working people collectively with long term debt. All of these policies are explained by the Marxist concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism as we have argued.

Distracted by the credit meltdown, jost people have failed to notice the latest result of the insatiable appetite of speculative capitalism. As The Wall Street Journal noted on February 29, 2008, investors have fled the stock and bond market and turned to commodity speculation. The recent spike in inflation so worrisome to consumers “has been fueled by institutions, hedge funds, and individual investors. These investors are pouring money into new investment vehicles that let investors quickly and easily make bets in relatively small markets.” And so the disease infects another area of the economy.

In another move sparked by speculation, hedge funds disrupted the municipal bond market recently. As The Wall Street Journal reported on March 1-2, 2008, “Months of turmoil in the municipal-bond market, long a placid haven for individual investors, reached a boiling point on Friday – as hedge funds were forced to unwind complicated bets and in the process dump billions of dollars of the securities. As a result of that surprising forced selling, yields on debt from municipalities and other tax exempt issuers jumped to their highest levels in history…”

Does any sane person believe that this insatiable foraging for profit serves the public good?

No working class program of action can ignore the dangers of speculative capitalism. Like any parasitic growth, speculative capitalism should be excised from the economic body.

We are at a critical juncture. Even the jost optimistic, true believers see the current crisis stretching well into 2009 and the next administration. Depending on public policy, this could prove to be far too short-sided. As we have argued, the crisis is deeply seated in the political shifts of the last century, changes that generated a moment of substantial recovery for a flagging capitalist world economy. These gains have been exhausted. The desperate attempts to rekindle this “gilded” era have produced speculative orgies that have brought mountains of debt and a falling standard of living upon the working class. The ruling class response has been to ignore the consequences for the vast majority of people and shore up the collapsing parasitic, speculative financial system. With millions facing home loss, financial ruin, unemployment and battered personal savings, the elite consensus cares only to offer life support to the perpetrators of this fine mess.

It takes little insight to see that the recent government sponsored rescue of the sinking Bear Sterns financial empire was a weekend stealth mission to restore the confidence of the financial bandits that plundered the US economy. As a result, the bandits are once again remorselessly on the prowl seeking new victims. Out of the shambles comes a new, invigorated JP Morgan Chase proud owner of Bear Sterns assets and $30 billion in federal loans. In exchange, the public treasury now owns the dregs that brought Bear Sterns down: the jost worthless securities in the company’s portfolio.

If that were not enough, the Federal Reserve offered up to $200 billion in exchange for depressed securities to the 20 jost rapacious Wall Street wolves. In the ensuing week the gluttonous carnivores tapped on average $13 billion per day! This is the same Federal government that can never find money for AMTRAK and public transportation systems. This is the same Federal government that starves social programs from Social Security to veteran’s benefits. This is the same federal government that dismantled welfare and scrapped affirmative action. Different administrations come and go, but show the same fealty to monopoly capitalism.

A true working class program would call for the elimination of parasitic speculative capitalism. The jost fatal and effective weapon against these destructive creatures is the weapon of nationalization. Public ownership of financial institutions would insure that savings, credit, and investments were protected and directed towards the good of all. The foolish notion that private individuals and corporations, motivated by an insatiable drive for profit, could guide these important functions in a socially beneficial way is soundly discredited by the raging crisis. The current crop of Presidential aspirants has offered no solutions that even remotely seek to tame the ravages of speculative capitalism. There is absolutely no recognition of the class aspects of the speculative debacle. A long hard road lies ahead.

 

Obama is many things, a Marxist/Socialist he is not

Obama Doesn't Want a Progressive Deficit Deal (Rolling Stone):

One expects the debt-ceiling mess to involve a lot of ostentatious chest-pounding on both sides, for despite the fact that this is a deadly serious issue – the fact that we're even considering incurring an intentional catastrophe via a default is incredible, a testament to the bottomless stupidity inherent in our political climate – this whole debate is primarily an exercise in political posturing.

That Republicans are holding up what should be a routine, if unpleasant, decision to raise the debt ceiling in order to portray themselves as the uncompromising defenders of the budget-balancing faith (a howling idiocy in itself, given what went on during the Bush years) is obvious to most rational observers. It's the obvious play for the lame-duck party entering an election year, and they're playing it, with the requisite hysteria.

But what is becoming equally obvious, to both sides, is that the Obama White House is using this same artificial calamity to pitch its own increasingly rightward tilt to voters in advance of the 2012 elections.

It has been extremely interesting in the last weeks to see observers on both sides of the aisle make this point. Just yesterday, the inimitable New York Times conservative Ross Douthatlisted Obama's not-so-secret rightward push as a the first in a list of reasons why the Republicans should dig in even more, instead of making a sensible deal:

Barack Obama wants a right-leaning deficit deal. For months, liberals have expressed frustration with the president’s deficit strategy. The White House made no effort to tie a debt ceiling vote to the extension of the Bush tax cuts last December. It pre-emptively conceded that any increase in the ceiling should be accompanied by spending cuts. And every time Republicans dug in their heels, the administration gave ground.

The not-so-secret secret is that the White House has given ground on purpose. Just as Republicans want to use the debt ceiling to make the president live with bigger spending cuts than he would otherwise support, Obama’s political team wants to use the leverage provided by those cra-a-a-zy Tea Partiers to make Democrats live with bigger spending cuts than they normally would support.

Douthat makes this observation, then argues that the Republicans should recognize Obama's hidden motive and hold out for an even better deal. It will then be a race to see which party can abandon employment in favor of deficit reduction faster. He writes:

Why? Because the more conservative-seeming the final deal, the better for the president’s re-election effort. In that environment, Republicans have every incentive to push and keep pushing. Since any deal they cut will be used as an election-year prop in 2012, they need to make sure the president actually earns his budget-cutting bona fides.

 This is interesting because just last week, the liberal opposite of Douthat at the Times, Paul Krugman, came to the same conclusion:

It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it. And maybe that’s not a false impression; maybe it’s the simple truth.

One striking example of this rightward shift came in last weekend’s presidential address, in which Mr. Obama had this to say about the economics of the budget: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”

Krugman seems to believe that Obama has basically purged all of his real economic advisors and is doing what Bush did on foreign policy -- engaging in complex and portentous policy initiatives at the behest not of experts, but political advisors. Just as Bush had Karl Rove telling him when and how to launch military invasions and drop bombs on unsuspecting foreign human beings in order to establish electoral credentials, Obama might be playing chicken with the budget for the benefit of undecideds in Florida and Ohio:

Some of what we’re hearing is presumably coming from the political team, whose members seem to believe that a move toward Republican positions, reminiscent of former President Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” in the 1990s, is the key to Mr. Obama’s re-election. And Mr. Clinton did, indeed, rebound from a big defeat in the 1994 midterms to win big two years later. But some of us think that the rebound had less to do with his rhetorical move to the center than with the five million jobs the economy added over those two years — an achievement not likely to be repeated this time, especially not in the face of harsh spending cuts.

The blindness of the DLC-era "Third Way" Democratic Party continues to be an astounding thing. For more than a decade now they have been clinging to the idea that the path to electoral success is social liberalism plus laissez-faire economics – in other words, get Wall Street and corporate America to fund your campaigns, and get minorities, pro-choice and gay marriage activists (who will always frightened into loyalty by the Tea Party/Christian loonies on the other side) to march at your rallies and vote every November. They've abandoned the unions-and-jobs platform that was the party's anchor since Roosevelt, and the latest innovations all involve peeling back their own policy legacies from the 20th century. Obama's new plan, for instance, might involve slashing Medicare and Social Security under "pressure" from the Republicans.

I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that theywant to go into that briar patch.

One of the smartest men on earth agrees with us

“The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.”
—Albert Einstein, "Why Socialism?", May 1949