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Abstract
The current capitalist system has had a devastating impact on working people across the globe. The crisis in the Eurozone has been clear with the massive cuts in social services all over Europe, especially in Greece, Spain, and Portugal. These cuts have been enacted under the banner of austerity in order to restore the economic health of these societies. The United States has hovered between the draconian austerity in Europe and the new assertiveness of the working peoples and their representatives. For a short moment, the neo-conservatives wanted to roll back the rights of workers and diminish the rights to collective bargaining. These struggles came to a head in the 2012 elections when the people voted decisively against the candidate of the one percent. In the wake of the massive statement of the electorate, the scare of the debt ceiling is being used to enact strict austerity measures in the United States. The article stresses the need for progressive people to organize to oppose militarization, defend livelihoods and social security protection, and chart the path towards alternatives. This organization will demand a level of literacy on the role of the dollar in the international political system and the need for new relations to bring about a multipolar world devoid of military or economic hegemons. The article will argue that austerity has already been enacted on the oppressed workers, especially the black and brown workers and that a new awareness of the nature of the capitalist system is necessary at this conjuncture.
Notes
Statement by Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, October 6, 2011, Reported in the Guardian, UK, October 6, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/06/britain-financial-crisis-quantitative-easing.
Joseph Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” Vanity Fair, May 2011, http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105. See also his book, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012).
Matt Taibbi “Secret and Lies of the Bailout,” Rolling Stone, January 4, 2013, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104.
In this article, the financial oligarchy refers to the bankers and financiers who were bailed out by the U.S. government after the crash of 2008. Also see Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), which further outlines the political and ideological power of the financial and those who work to preserve and bolster their power.
See Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption and the Hijacking of America (New York: Crown Books, 2012).
Horace Campbell, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013). See also Vijay Mehta, The Economics of Killing: How the West Fuels War and Poverty in the Developing World (London: Pluto Press, 2012).
Government Accountability Office, “Audit of the Federal Reserve Reveals $16 Trillion in Secret Bailouts.” Revealed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. See details, http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3. For the figures of the Eurpopean bailout see, Seumas Milne, The Revenge of History: The Battles for the Twenty-First Century (London:Verso Books, 2012), 279. See also Dean Baker, “When Being Rich Makes Us Poor, People Should Occupy Wall Street,” [Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), October 10, 2011] for the papers of the CEPR. For the figures of the amounts that were going see CNNMoney.com bailout tracker see http://money.cnn.com/news/storysupplement/economy/bailouttracker/index.html.
James Kwak, “The Profitable Bailout? Inside the Real Costs of the Saving AIG and Wall St.,” The Atlantic, September 12, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/the-profitable-bailout-inside-the-real-costs-of-the-saving-aig-and-wall-st/262281/.
Viral Acharya, “A Critical Assessment of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act,” naked capitalism, October, 21, 2010, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/10/a-critical-assessment-of-the-dodd-frank-wall-street-reform-and-consumer-protection-act.html.
Neil Barofsky, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street (New York: Free Press, 2012).
Paul Krugman, “Europe's Austerity Madness,” New York Times, September 27, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/opinion/krugman-europes-austerity-madness.html.
James Crotty, “The Great Austerity War: What Caused the Deficit Crisis and Who Should Pay to Fix It?” The Helen Sheridan Memorial Lecture, Boston, April 15, 2011.
Costas Lapavitsas et al., Crisis in the Eurozone (London: Verso Books, 2012). See also Harold James, Making the European Monetary Union (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2012).
“Detroit and Michigan Come to Terms on Bailout, Averting Bankruptcy,” Christian Science Monitor, April 5, 2012.
US Bureau of Census, “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance in the United States: 2011– Highlights,” http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2011/highlights.html.
Congressional Budget Office, Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007 (Washington, DC:Author, October 2011).
Tavis Smiley and Cornell West, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto (new York: Smiley Books, 2012).
Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy; Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Boston: South End Press, 2006) and Issa Shivji, Where is Uhuru? Reflections on the Struggle for Democracy in Africa (London: Pambazuka Press, 2009).
Samir Amin, “Audacity, More Audacity,” Pambazuka News, December 1, 2011.
Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War (London: Verso Books, 1986).
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981).
Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976). See his 2003 article “In the Grip of a Permanent War Economy,” Counterpunch, March 15–17, 2003, http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/03/15/in-the-grip-of-a-permanent-war-economy/.
Seymour Melman, What Else Is There To Do? (New York: National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament, 1996) and After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Democracy (New York: Knopf, 2001).
Martin Luther King, “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam,” delivered April 1967.
Samir Amin, “Capitalism in Crisis: An Obsolete System,” Pambazuka News, December 2, 2010, http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/69276.
George Soros, “The Road From Depression,” http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-road-from-depression.
Paul Krugman, End this Depression Now (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012).
Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy, How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (New York: Harper-Collins, 2008); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Dialog Press, 2012).
Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (New York: Putman Books, 1999). See especially chapter 4. See also Harriet Washington, Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself—And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future (New York: Doubleday Books, 2011).
Tavis Bradford, The Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry (Boston: MIT Press, 2006).
Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (New York: Anchor Books, 2011).
Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post Market Era (New York:Penguin Books, 2004).
Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).
Amin, The Liberal Virus, 68.
Martin Jacques, WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, second edition (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).
Fareed Zakaria, “The Real Challenge from China: Its People, Not Its Currency,” Time Magazine, October 7, 2010, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2024220,00.html.
Martin Honeywell et al., The Poverty Brokers: The IMF and Latin America (London: Latin American Bureau, 1983).
The anti-communist political logics that underpinned the Plaza Accords of 1985 is discussed in Barry Gills, “The Crisis of Postwar East Asian Capitalism: American Power, Democracy and the Vicissitudes of Globalization,” Review of International Studies, 26(3), 381–402, July 2000. See also Walter Russell Mead, “The United States and the World Economy,” World Policy Journal, 6(1), 1–45, Winter, 1988/1989) and C. Randall Henning and I. M. Destler, “From Neglect to Activism: American Politics and the 1985 Plaza Accord,” Journal of Public Policy, 8(3/4), 317–333, July–December.
“Quantitative Easing,” New York Times, September 13, 2012, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/q/quantitative_easing/index.html.
Federal Reserve (The Fed), http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_reserve_system/index.html.
“Quantitative Easing,” New York Times, September 13, 2012, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/q/quantitative_easing/index.html.
Horace Campbell, “Devaluation of the US Dollar: Quantitative Easing 3,” Pambazuka News, September 27, 2012.
Robert Fisk, “Countries Holding Secret Meetings to Replace the Dollar,” The Independent UK, October 6, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-demise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html; for two versions of the debt ceiling debate see Horace Campbell, “US Debt Ceiling Debate and the Alternatives before Human Societies,” Pambazuka News, August 4, 2011. See also Jonathan Masters, “U.S. Debt Ceiling: Costs and Consequences,” Council for Foreign Relations, December 2012, ww.cfr.org/international-finance/us-debt-ceiling-costs-consequences/p247.
James Crotty, “The Great Austerity War: What Caused the Deficit Crisis and Who Should Pay to Fix It?” (Boston: The Helen Sheridan Memorial Lecture, April 15, 2011) http://www.networkideas.org/featart/jun2011/James_Crotty.pdf.
Michael Hudson, “America's Deceptive Fiscal Cliff,” http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/michael-hudson-americas-deceptive-2012-fiscal-cliff-part-iv-why-financial-and-tax-reform-should-go-together.html#ZR2rO1ZJEiefwHUZ.99.
Bill Fletcher Jr., BlackCommentator.com, January 21, 2010, Quoted in Horace Campbell, Barack Obama and Twenty First Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the United States (London: Pluto Press, 2010).
Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). There is no corresponding audacity from the intelligentsia that is calling for “The Rights to the City.” These debates on the rights to the city evade the more fundamental questions of the future of agriculture where 5 of the 7 billion citizens of the planet carry out their livelihood.
Grace Lee Boggs, “Beyond Budgets and Speeches,” February 10, 2010. http://boggsblog.org/2010/02/10/beyond-budgets-speeches/ See also her book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).