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index of papers
END OF AN ERA?
panel discussion January 28, 2009
featuring Rick Welland, environmentalist,
Cliff DuRand and Betsy Bowman, Research Associates of the Center for Global Justice.
To view entire discussion go to http://vimeo.com/3007304 The text of the DuRand-Bowman presentation follows:
By Cliff DuRand & Betsy Bowman
OUTLINE
Introduction (Cliff)
1. neoliberal globalization (Cliff)
2. crisis of overaccumulation (Cliff)
3. temporary solutions to the accumulation problem (Betsy)
4. the war against the workers and the poor (Betsy)
5. financialization of capitalism (Betsy)
6. wealth transfer upward (Betsy)
7. the debt economy (Betsy)
8. stagnation problem remains (Betsy)
possible alternatives:
9. Schweickart’s model of economic democracy as a way out of the current crisis. (Cliff)
10. Latin American efforts to find a solidaristic alternative to the neo-liberal model (Bolivarian Revolution and ALBA) (Cliff)
A prophetic warning from Thomas Jefferson: “If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency . . . the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake up homeless.”
INTRODUCTION
The Presidential election of 2008 combined with the unfolding financial and economic crisis, the exhaustion of military imperialism abroad, and the looming energy/climate crisis combine to mark a clear turning point in the present as history. The rejection of the politics of fear in favor of a politics of hope opens new possibilities of social development. The election of the nation’s first African American President is also a powerful expansion of what America is. It does not end racism nor the continuing effects of racism on many of those at the bottom of our society. It is a measure not so much of how far people of color have come, but of how far whites have come.
But it is not just this historic election that makes for an end of an era. What makes this the end of an era is the convergence of a number of interacting factors. Among them are two unwinnable wars, the economic crisis, a chronic health care crisis, and potentially devastating climate change. Each by itself would be significant. Taken together they signify the need for and the possibility of fundamental change.
Take the energy/climate crisis that is mounting. Since the industrial revolution in Europe and North America, the burning of fossil fuels has led to a warming of the earth’s climate, as Al Gore has so convincingly shown in “An Inconvenient Truth.” Now as additional countries industrialize, the release of greenhouse gases is accelerating. The spread of industrial farming adds further to the problem as we approach a tipping point where climate change becomes irreversible. At the same time, we are reaching peak oil. With that the present industrial and transportation system becomes unsustainable. Without new energy sources industry, agribusiness, suburbia, and global trade will become increasingly costly.
We have already seen oil wars as states strive to control access to this dwindling supply of black gold, the key not only to economic wealth, but also geopolitical power and financial dominance. The question becomes how much blood and treasure will be sacrificed to maintain this? The neo-cons in the Bush administration knew no bounds and ended up over reaching in their imperial ambitions.
But imperial reach has been a feature of U.S. foreign and economic policy at least since the end of WWII, and even longer in Latin America. There has long been a bi-partisan consensus that the U.S. has a special leadership role in the world and that this means protecting, supporting and advancing what is called “the national interest”, but usually amounts to the interests of corporations. Policy debates have centered on how best to accomplish this, not on whether it should do it at all.
The Bush administration has laid U.S. imperialism bare to our view. But now that it is discredited, will it be rejected, or will it only be reformed, replacing military hard power with diplomatic soft power? Or can we consider an alternative where democratic international institutions protect all and allow no nation to dominate or exploit another? And is this possible as long as the global injustice of a world divided between rich nations and poor nations endures?
THE END OF NEO-LIBERALISM
Since the mid 1970s public policy in the US and most other countries as well has been guided by the ideology of neo-liberalism as embodied in the Washington Consensus. In the name of “free markets” neo-liberalism calls for deregulation, privatization, free trade, and reducing the role of government. The mantra has been to let the market work its magic and we will all prosper. We just need to “get government off our backs,” as Ronald Reagan put it.
Neo-liberalism is a resuscitated version of 19th century liberalism that was based on an idealized view of markets as made up of individual buyers and sellers, each pursuing their own material self-interest alone as they seek to maximize their gains. The market is seen as summing up these individual exchanges, producing the greatest good for the greatest number. For the market to work its magic, government needs to leave it alone –laissez faire.
It is now generally recognized that unbridled markets are not self correcting and led to the present economic crisis. Neo-liberalism has led us to a dead end –perhaps even the end of capitalism. New ideas are needed to move us forward into a new era. But before we consider what they might be, let’s review how we got to the present crisis point.
CRISIS OF OVERACCUMULATION
The present economic crisis has its root in the very logic of capitalism. Although it may seem counterintuitive to say this, the problem is, there’s too much money! I don’t mean the average American has too much money –so many don’t have enough to pay their mortgage, fill their gas tank, buy groceries, send the kids to college. We don’t have enough money. It’s the wealthy capitalists who have too much money. They have so much that there is a problem finding places to invest it profitably –as capitalists that is what they seek to do: invest money in order to make more money, to accumulate more capital.
But one of the central contradictions of capitalism is that this accumulation of capital runs up against limits. This happens when there is too much capital and not enough places to invest it profitably, particularly when the rate of profit is not high enough. This is what political economists call a crisis of overaccumulation. When such limits are reached, there are ways of fixing the problem. (1)
When there is a surplus of capital, one way to find profitable investment is to seek out new sources of lower wage labor. This can be done by bringing into the wage labor force new ethnic, racial, gender or immigrant groups, or by forcing peasants off the land, or by increasing the reserve army of labor (high unemployment), or by globalizing production so as to tap Third World workers, etc. All of these fixes have the effect of driving down wages thereby making investments more profitable. But the expanded reproduction this leads to adds further to capital accumulation and eventually another crisis of overaccumulation.
Another fix is to expand consumer demand by making credit available. This increases effective demand and enables value to be realized so that it is available for reinvestment. This also forces workers to keep their noses to the grinding stone so as to keep up with credit payments. But that means more gets produced, further contributing to overaccumulation. The same results occur when capital finds ways to expand commodification (through technological innovation or by privatization of the commons), for these profitable investments also add to accumulation.
In sum, all the fixes for a crisis of overaccumulation are only temporary because they end up eventually leading to a new crisis. The logic of capitalism is to ever expand the accumulation of capital and thus to ever run up against the limits of capital.
Over the last several decades, all of the above fixes have been employed in order to sustain this contradictory logic. Globalization has given capital access to the vast reserves of cheap labor throughout the Third World. In the First World, women entered the workforce in greater numbers as households needed two incomes to sustain accustomed standards of living. This enabled capital to get two workers for the price of one. Since the mid-1970s incomes have been stagnant or declined for most of the working class, while the incomes and wealth of the top 1% or so have risen astronomically. This would have seriously crimped consumer demand and hampered the ability of capital to realize profits were it not for the credit fix that has been massively extended to consumers. Easy credit became available to most of the population and savings declined or dropped below zero.
All of this added further to the overaccumulation of capital. During the 1990s massive quantities of surplus capital was thrown into the dot.com bubble. When this burst, surplus capital was redirected into real estate. This had the added advantage of sustaining effective consumer demand by enabling homeowners to take out second mortgages and cash in on the equity in their house as its market value inflated. The consumer demand that sustained the economy for so long was based on debt rather than a redistribution of income. Economic inequality has grown and with it the pool of surplus capital has become so vast that it has had to look to ever lower income groups to extend credit to even though such investments were admittedly risky. These risks were passed off to other unknowing investors by packaging and securitizing them in what was a vast unregulated ponzi scheme. It was this house of cards that began to collapse when the real estate bubble burst.
1. The conceptual framework I’m using here is that of David Harvey. Cf. The Limits of Capital, The New Imperialism, and A Brief History of Neoliberalism, among others.
TEMPORARY SOLUTIONS TO THE OVERACCUMULATION PROBLEM
Temporary solutions to capitalism’s fundamental logic of stagnation or falling profits are applied by governments in between crises. From the perspective of the transnational elites, crises are problems in capital accumulation and opposition to the processes of capital accumulation – democratic opposition movements. Crises are not increased hunger, etc. Keynesianism (government spending to stimulate capital accumulation) is one solution; neoliberalism another (raising rate of capital accumulation through deregulation and privatization); war is another “fix” as it destroys any back-log of unsold products and destroys excess factory capacity.
Since WWII, the years that marked the highest level of profitability for corporations engaged in manufacturing, providing services, etc. ie in what we now call the real economy was the late 1940s. The rate of profit, gain, surplus has been falling almost steadily ever since with a slight, short-lived, up-tick in the 1990s. Rate of factory utilization is also low, around 80%, has been low, and is shrinking. Why build more factories to make things if 20% of your factories are idle?
The anti-poverty programs of the 1960s were having a salutary effect; poverty and hunger were decreasing. Educational programs such as Head Start were helping enormously. The huge expansion of the public, higher education system in the 1960s and early 1970s permitted millions of working-class and middle-class people to go to college. No longer was a college education a bastion for the elite at places like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton. In those days, students studied history, literature, languages, philosophy, and they learned how to think critically! Now they study business and computers.
The anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s was morphing into an anti-capitalist movement. The Civil Rights movement was successful and growing. The anti-war movement unleashed the second wave of feminism and the women’s movement. A significant segment of these three movements – anti-war, civil rights, women, was saying that capitalism – the system of capital accumulation – was at the foundation of war, racism, and sexism. This was a powerful critique to which the elites actually paid attention. The Trilateral Commission published The Crisis of Governability. Their conclusion was that there was too much democracy and too much opposition.
After Richard Nixon was forced to resign, we thought things would get better!
THE WAR AGAINST THE WORKERS AND THE POOR
By the early 1970s, the corporate elites recognized that something had to be done and the state needed to intervene in the economy and help corporations raise their profit rates. A crisis in the rate of capital accumulation is often called a recession. And just since the 1970s, we’ve seen a series of recessions and a series of transitory fixes.
1971: Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard. This marked the end of the Bretton Woods arrangement of stable currencies. It opened up the possibility of speculation in currencies and the limitless growth of the money supply and the amount of credit that could be extended. This was opening Pandora’s box.
Another event of 1971:
David Harvey reports in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, that Lewis Powell, soon to be confirmed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, in Aug. 1971 wrote a letter to the US Chamber of Commerce arguing that “criticism of and opposition to the US free enterprise system had gone too far and that ‘the time had come . . . for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations’. The National Chamber of Commerce, he argues, should lead an assault upon the major institutions – universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts – in order to change how individuals think ‘about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.’ p, 43
When I first read this a year or so ago I must say that my breath was taken away. Never have I read such a straight-forward and unambiguous call to arms of the wealthy elites against the workers. This was and is nothing short of a declaration of class war of the rich against the poor. During the 1970s, corporations, accounting for about one half of the GNP of the US, spent close to $900 million annually on think-tanks (Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the Center for the Study of American Business, the American Enterprise Institute, Olin Foundation, Scaife, Pew Charitable Trust) and of course lobbyists. US businesses had chosen a policy of collective pressure to enact policies and laws and regulations that would benefit corporations in general and not just their individual corporation. These think-tanks issued a mountain of reports and books promoting ideas that favor policies agreeable to the wealthy – cutting personal and corporate taxes, dismantling the welfare state, privatizing education, health care, and the results of government funded research and development, changing so-called costly regulations to protect consumers and the environment so as to “externalize” costs, etc. etc. Jack Rasmus, in his boook The War at Home, details the steps taken, the policies instituted, etc.
1973 – the Arab oil embargo as a result of the US backing Israel in the war. This was resolved by the US making a deal with Saudi Arabia: The US would not invade Saudi Arabia; on the contrary it would back the House of Saud against all enemies, against all reason. Saudi Arabia would continue to denominate petrol in US dollars and would keep supplying the US with oil.
Mid to late 1970s: stagflation. During the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, from 1976 to 1980, inflation was very high; but so was unemployment. Paul Volcker took the head of the Federal Reserve and tried a new fix for the problem of capital accumulation: raising interest rates, a monetary measure. The government can use fiscal measures such as increasing government spending; it can use monetary measures such as raising or lowering the interest rate. The basis of neoliberalism is using monetary and not fiscal measures to solve the capital accumulation problem. Raising and lowering the interest rate has been the primary means of adjusting the economy since 1980.
Meanwhile the mid to late 1970s marked the point of the highest purchasing power of wages of workers in the US, Canada, Mexico and probably lots of other places. Ever since wages have gone down or been stagnant, except for those at the very tippy top whose take of national income has soared.
Volcker’s medicine of raising interest rates brought upon a severe recession in the early 1980s. This opened the way for the Republicans’ favorite solution: tax cuts. Beginning in 1986, taxes on both individuals and corporations were cut and cut and cut and cut. Give the elites more capital and they will invest more. The result will be more growth. More growth will raise all ships. Everyone will prosper.
1987 the Stock market crash. The bursting of the real estate bubble, the collapse of the Savings and Loan industry. That cost the US government from $150 to $175 billion.
Then the dot.com bubble of the 1990s and its bursting, wiping about $7 trillion off the stock exchange. Then the real estate bubble of this decade and its bursting, costing the government at least $700 billion, probably lots more.
FINANCIALIZATION OF CAPITALISM
The problem is that there is too much capital and not enough investment opportunities for it. The growth imperative of capitalism, or the metabolic expansion imperative of capital, requires more and more profit, gain, surplus to accrue to the owners of capital. If profit cannot be made through what is increasingly called “the real economy” -- manufacturing and providing services at a price – then such opportunities need to be created. Financial institutions created new financial instruments: futures, options, derivatives, hedge funds, etc. What was once a small part of the economy – finance ie buying and selling pieces of paper indicating ownership – has now become the most profitable part of the economy and has overtaken “the real economy.”
Many mainstream economists have been warning about this trend since the 1980s. Trade in currencies alone has gone from $570 billion in 1989 to $2.7 trillion in 2006. The credit derivatives market has grown from close to nothing in 2000 to $26 trillion by mid 2006.
WEALTH TRANSFER UPWARD
According to Jack Rasmus, there are approximately 114 million households in the US today. The wealthiest 1% (or 1.4 million households) receive between 19-21.5% of annual GDP of the U.S. In 1980, that top 1% received 8% of annual GDP. The top 1% has been very successful in getting more and more of the pie while the bottom 99% are getting either no more or less than before. The solutions that we have seen to the capital accumulation problem have worked; the top 1% once again has about the same percentage of income as it did in 1929.
The dollar amount of this transfer of wealth from the bottom 99% to the top 1% is about $1.09 trillion – and that’s a low estimate. Rasmus gets this figure by using US Dept. of Commerce statistics. Wages and salaries as of April 2006 constituted only 45.3% of GDP. In 2001 that percentage was 50%. In 1970 it was 53.6%. So labor’s share of GDP has dropped about 8.3% between 1970 and 2006. Each percentage point equals about $132 billion. So the 8.3% drop represents about $1.09 trillion that has been shifted from labor to the elite. The bottom 90% have seen a virtual 35 year wage freeze. Their standard of living was maintained through various solutions. In the 1970s the solution to the wage freeze was to have a second family member in the workforce: women. In the 1980s people worked more, and USians overtook the Japanese in hours per year worked (today USians work about 2 months more every year than do Europeans). In the 1990s mail boxes started getting flooded with credit cards and people used them. More recently, people have taken the equity from their homes by refinancing and are spending the money.
THE DEBT ECONOMY
In 1985 US debt was about twice GDP (about $26 Trillion,), by 2005 it had risen to about 3 1/2 times GDP or close to the $44 trillion GDP of the entire world. US debt includes personal/consumer, corporate, and government.
Let’s look at consumer debt.
In 1975, consumer debt was $736 billion or 62% of total disposable income.
In 1985, consumer debt had grown to $2trillion $272 billion and was 73% of disposable income.
In 1995 consumer debt was $4 trillion 858 billion and 90% of disposable income. 2005 consumer debt reached $111 trillion 496billion and is 127.2% of disposable income.
But those in the lower 90% of income pay close to 18% of their family income in debt service payments. Those in the top 10% pay only 9% of family income in debt service payments.
Let’s look at those families whose debt service payments are above 40% of family income:
In the bottom 20% of income as of 2004, 27% of those families’ debt service payments were above 40% of family income.
In the 20-40 percentile 18.6% of families paid above 40% of income in debt service;
in the 40-60 it was 13.7% of families paid above 40% of income in debt service;
in the 60-80 it was 7.1% of families paid above 40% of income in debt service;
in the 80-90 it was 2.4 % of families paid above 40% of income in debt service;
and top 10% only 1.8% of families had debt service payments above 40% of income.
So not only have workers had a 35 year wage freeze, they have now lost their savings, their homes, and they have debts. Beware of those politicians who want to tamper with Social Security. For more people than we would like to think Social Security is all they will have at retirement. No savings, no equity in their homes, no shit.
STAGNATION PROBLEM REMAINS
But the stagnation problem of the real economy remains. Capital accumulation has continued since the real economy stopped returning high enough profits. But it was done at the expense of asset bubbles – late 80s real estate, dot.com of the 90s, again real estate in the current decade. But this time things are different. Finance is international. People around the world invested in US derivatives and lost big. What looks like the last plunder of the Bush gang – the $700 billion given to the bankers – actually isn’t working. Or maybe it is. Maybe we are dealing with not a liquidity crisis but a solvency crisis and a capital strike. The capitalists are on strike and won’t lend so that the real economy can continue. The only solution to the accumulation problem is pushing down the standard of living in the US and Europe; seizing social security, sovereign wealth funds, central reserves. But I’m getting alarmist.
The rich always get richer, but never the same way twice.
ALTERNATIVES: ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY
What has the response of the political elite been to the financial crisis? As we are all too painfully aware, it has been to bail out the very financial institutions whose practices were the proximate cause of the crisis. $700 billion usd is being given to them by our government. Once again, as in the words of B. Traven, ordinary working people are the ragged trousered philanthropists, as working people give a helping hand to the wealthy. We do it, grudgingly, because we fear that if they fail, the entire economy will come crumbling down. In effect, in this system the wealthy are able to hold the rest of us hostage.
We give billions to the banks so they will be able to again extend credit to businesses, consumers, car buyers, students. But instead they hoard the money, pay down their own debt, or buy out other banks. The New York Times of January 18 quoted John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, which received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money, as telling a group of bankers “Make more loans? We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”
We give billions to the big three US automakers. But rather than making more fuel efficient cars or develop greener vehicles, they keep producing the more profitable big gas guzzlers. Time and time again we see banks and other corporations promoting their own self interests rather than the common good. But we shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, this is capitalism. They can quite correctly plead “the market made me do it.”
However, taxpayers can quite rightly complain, “but that’s our money you are using. We should have a say in how it is used to make sure it promotes the common good.” Notice that such a plea goes against the neo-liberal notion that there are only individual goods. It reflects the human reality that we are all interconnected and share some common interests that can only be effectively pursued collectively. And that means that sometimes individuals, or in this case corporations, have to set aside their own narrow self interests and bow to the democratic will of the citizenry.
It is that understanding that the present crisis is moving us toward, step by baby step. Government seeks to bail out the banks by recapitalizing them with public funds. But credit remains largely frozen. The banks won’t use the money in the way intended. And they need still more money. More is given, well not exactly ‘given’, rather ‘invested’ as capital shares are purchased. This enables public officials to have a voice in running the banks, it enables them to direct the banks toward the intended purpose of the bailout. As the economic crisis deepens, it becomes necessary to out and out nationalize the banks, not just to save them but to save the economy as a whole. We haven’t gotten to that point yet, but we may well in the foreseeable future.
Such nationalizations have taken place in recent years in moments of crisis in other capitalist societies: Mexico, France, Sweden, Japan. But these were always temporary measures. Once restored to health, the banks were then returned to private hands, often at fire sale prices. But that doesn’t have to happen. What if -- and I hope I’m not being utopian here -- what if the public comes to understand that public ownership of financial institutions gives them the democratic power to advance the common good in ways that private profit seeking banks can never do? And what if that public is well organized so it can insist that officials do not reprivatize the banks once normalcy is restored, but that they be retained as public-utilities and subject to the democratic will of the citizenry?
Such an economic democracy is a possible outcome of the present crisis. And not only in the financial sector, but in the commanding heights of the productive sector as well. To save General Motors it might become necessary to nationalize it. Probably not all at once –no one is ready for that radical a step –yet. But if the crisis deepens, as looks likely, step by baby step we may move towards nationalization of major corporations. Then the challenge will be to figure out how to run them in a democratic manner, responsive both to the interests of their workers and the larger public.
Philosopher David Schweickart has developed a model of how such an economic democracy could function. Publicly owned enterprises could be leased to their workers who would be organized as cooperatives. They would be democratically run by their employees who would receive a portion of the profit as compensation after paying a tax or leasing fee to the government owned investment banks. These banks, presumably accountable to the citizenry, would then direct social development toward the common good by directing investment to those products and cooperatives deemed most socially valuable. Read more about his plan at http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/articles/bailout.html and in his numerous books on the subject.
While we are now a long way from such an economic democracy, the dynamics of a rapidly deepening collapse of the capitalist economic system could lead us in such a previously unimagined direction. A crisis is an opportunity to set aside old ideas that have failed us and consider new possibilities. Remember, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
ALTERNATIVES: THE SOLIDARITY ECONOMY IN LATIN AMERICA
While the U.S. is now just beginning to feel its way toward some alternative to neo-liberal policies, being pushed all the way by an unfolding economic crisis, in Latin America for some time now there has been a popular recognition that neo-liberal globalization has not lived up to its promises. Rather than bringing rising standards of living, it has increased economic inequality, making the few rich richer, and the many poorer. This has made electorial success possible for progressive leaders in several countries to our south. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua, maybe El Salvador, even Honduras, Bolivia, Venezuela have been added to the list long headed by Cuba. The winds of change have been blowing in Latin America. Mexico and Colombia stand alone as the bulwork of neo-liberalism.
Let me look briefly at aspects of the alternative that is emerging there. In Venezuela the government is using its oil wealth to foster cooperatives and community councils among the poorer sections of the population, planting the seeds of an alternative to the capitalist economy -- an alternative that empowers ordinary people.
This is coupled with social services that bring health care and education to people who were long denied it. This has been done with the assistance of the vast pool of teachers, doctors, nurses and other professionals from Cuba. (1)
In return, Venezuela has supplied Cuba with oil at preferencial prices. This is trade based not on commercial values, but on solidarity and mutual social benefits. It is very different from the free trade that the U.S. has been promoting – a trade that ends up benefiting the transnational corporations of the North at the expense of the global South. So after the U.S. effort to generalize NAFTA to all of the Americas (FTAA) was rejected at the hemispheric summit in Buenas Aires in 2005, Venezuela and Cuba put forward an alternative to U.S. hegemony called ALBA or Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas as a regional trading alliance based on solidarity that by my latest count includes not only its initiators, but also Bolivia, Nicaragua, The Dominican Republic, and now Honduras –six countries and still growing.
ALBA is the embodiment of the 19th century revolutionary ideals of Simón Bolívar and Jose Martí and is arguably the most important initiative in Latin America in the last 50 years. As Cuban Vice-President Carlos Lage pointed out recently, over 1.3 million Latin Americans have recovered their sight through the Operation Miracle free-eye surgery program; over 3.2 million have been taught how to read and write; 6,693 medical doctors have graduated under the initiative, while another 40,000 youth are currently studying medicine.
In addition to this humanitarian assistance, a new televisión network has been established called Telesur, an alternative to the U.S. dominated media that offers a Latin American perspective. Also a Bank of the South has been established, giving ALBA countries some independence from the U.S. dominated World Bank, IMF and the Inter-American Development Bank. And now finance ministers from the ALBA countries along with Ecuador (which has observer status) are establishing a regional monetary zone with its own currency to be called the sucre (standing for Unitary System for Regional Compensation, and also the name of a historical figure). The aim is not only for it to replace the weakening U.S. dollar in trade, but to eventually become legal tender within these countries as well, just as the Euro has in the European Union. At the founding conference in November, Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, which had switched to the dollar in 2000, excoriated the dollar system. “Imperialism of the XXI century is no longer boots, no longer planes, no longer aircraft carriers, ships, or cannons. It’s called ‘dollars’, that’s how they seek to dominate us, and we’ve had enough of these pressures.” (2)
Further, a Security and Food Sovereignty Agreement has been developed among 18 nations, further contributing to Latin American integration. These are just a few of the initiatives coming from the rest of this hemisphere as it seeks to create an alternative to the neo-liberal policies that have failed it. There’s a loto f energy and creativity there. One can only hope that the Obama administration will have the wisdom to step aside and let Latin America find its own way. It is long past the time when the Monroe Doctrine should be repudiated. The exhaustion of neo-liberalism offers the perfect opportunity for that.
1. Cf. Cliff DuRand, “Humanitarianism and Solidarity Cuban Style” at
http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/articles/report_cubahumanitarian.htm
Also Steve Brouwer, “The Cuban Revolutionary Doctor: The Ultimate Weapon of Solidarity” Monthly Review 60,8 (January 2009), pp. 28-42.
2. http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2008/12/coping-with-crisis-latin-america-seeks.html
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BIBLIOGRAPHY: END OF AN ERA
Neoliberal Globalization
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Noam Chomsky. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. (Seven Stories
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DuRand, Cliff. “Neo-Liberalism and Globalization” 2004
http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/papers/durand2.htm
-----. “Neo-Liberalism on a Global Scale: The Case of Mexico” 2008
Faux, Jeff. Global Class War. (John Wiley, 2006).
Foster, John Bellamy. “Monopoly Capital And The New Globalization,” Monthly Review, 53:8, 1/02, 1-16.
Frank, Thomas. One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the
End of Economic Democracy (Doubleday, 2000).
Green, Duncan. Silent Revolution: The Rise and Crisis of Market Economics in Latin
America. (Monthly Review Press, 2003).
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. (Oxford University Press, 2003).
-----. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. (Oxford University Press, 2005).
-----. The Limits of Capital. Verso: 2006.
Henwood, Doug and Figueroa, Hector. “Does Globalization Matter?”, In These Times, March 31, 1997.
Li, Minqi. “Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism,” Monthly Review, 60:3, 7-8/2008, 51-67.
McMutry, John. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 1999).
Robinson, William I. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a
Transnational World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
Sivanandan, A., and Ellen Meiksins Wood. 1997. “Globalizaton and Epochal Shifts: An Exchange,”” Monthly Review, 48:9, 19-32.
Stiglitz, Joseph. Making Globalization Work. (W.W. Norton, 2006).
Sweezy, Paul. 1997. “More (or Less) on Globalization.” Monthly Review, 49:4, 1-4.
Tabb, William K. 1997. “Globalization is an Issue, the Power of Capital is the Issue.” Monthly Review, 49:2, 20-30.
Crisis of Overaccumulation
Amin, Samir. “World Poverty, Pauperization and Capital Accumulation,” Monthly Review, 55:5, 1-9.
Brenner, Robert. “The Looming Crisis of World Capitalism: From Neoliberalism to Depression?”, Against the Current, No. 77 Nov.-Dec. 1998; 22-26.
-----. The Economics of Global Turbulence, (Verso, 2006).
-----. The Boom and the Bust: The US in the World Economy. (Verso, 2002).
DuRand, Cliff. “Reflections on the Financial Crisis and Overaccumulation” 2008
http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/articles/financialcrisis.html
Financialization of Capitalism
Foster, John Bellamy. “Monopoly-Finance Capital,” Monthly Review, 58: 7, 12/06, 1-14.
-----, “The Financialization of Capitalism,” Monthly Review, 58:11, 4/07, 1-12.
-----. “The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis,” Monthly Review, 59:11, 4/08, 1-19.
-----, and Magdoff, Fred. The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences. (Monthly Review Press, 2009)
Tabb, William K, “Financial crisis and Financialization’s Appropriations,” Z Magazine, 6/08, 33-37.
Wealth Transfer Upward
Rasmus, Jack. The War At Home: The Corporate Offensive from Ronald Reagan to George W. BushKylos Prodctions, 2006.
----- .“The Trillion Dollar Income Shift, Part I, Z Magazine, Feb. 2007, 44-49.
-----. “The Trillion Dollar Income Shift, Part 2, Z Magazine, April 2007, 48-51.
Stagnation of Incomes
Rasmus, Jack. “Tolling the Retirement Bell in America, Z Magazine, 10/06, 39-43.
-----“The Road Back to 1929,” Z Magazine, 11/04, 27-32.
-----“A Medical Mount St. Helens,” Z Magazine, 3/05, 48-53.
-----“Stealing Social Security Past, Present, and Future,” Z Magaine, 12/04, 22-25.
Tabb, William K. “Wage Stagnation and the U.S. Working Class,” Monthly Review, 59:2, 6/07, 20-36.
Ghilarducci, Teresa. ”The End of Retirement,” Monthly Review, 58:1; 5/06, 12-27.
The Debt Economy
Foster, John Bellamy.“The Household Debt Bubble,” Monthly Review, 58:1, 5/06, 1-11.
Tabb, William K.“Trouble, Trouble, Debt, and Bubble,”Monthly Revie, 58:1, 5/06, 28-37.
Beitel, Karl. “Understanding the Subprime Debacle,” Monthly Review, 60:1, 5/08, 27-44.
Magdoff, Fred. “Debt and Speculation Explode,” Monthly Review, 58:6, 11/06, 1-23.
Sweezy, Paul M. and Magdoff, Harry. “Working Class Households and the Burden of Debt.” Monthly Review, 52:1, 5/2000, 1-11.
The Burden of Militarism
James M. Cypher, “From Military Keynesianism to Global-Neoliberal Militarism,” Monthly Review, 59:2, 6/07, 37-55.
The Current Crisis
Rasmus, Jack. “An Emerging Epic Recession?”, Z Magazine, 6/08, 38-41.
-----, “From Global Financial Crisis to Global Recession, Part I, Precipitating the fall,” www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticlePrint/16736
Mészáros, István .“The Structural Crisis of Politics,” Monthly Review, 58:4, 9/07, 34-58.
Navarro, Vincent. “The Worldwide Class Struggle,” Monthly Review, 58:4, 9/07, 18-33.
Alternatives: Economic Democracy
Bowman, Betsy and Stone, Bob: “Cooperativization on the Mondragon Model as Alternative to Globalizing Capitalism,” http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/articles/bowstone/htm
DuRand, Cliff. “We Are All Bankers Now” (2008)
http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/articles/bankers.html
Mészáros, István. The Challenge and the Burden of Historic al Time: Socialism in the
Twenty-First Century. (Monthly Review Press, 2008).
Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism. (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
-----. After Capitalism. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)
-----. “Bailout” 2008 http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/articles/bailout.html
index of papers
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