January 17, 2015

Keiser Report: Banksterism

Published on Jan 17, 2015

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert are in Mexico City and they find the so-called “failed state” looks a whole lot better in many regards than certain Western countries. They look at the role of the US drug war in creating the ultra-violence which has led to the headlines that caused the perception of a failed state in Mexico. In the second half, Max interviews economist and journalist Guillermo Barba about Mexico’s unallocated gold reserves at the Bank of England, the failed state question and the future of the Mexican economy.

January 17, 2015

"Democracy is dead. ..... Any vestige of democracy is gone."

Listen to the interview: https://soundcloud.com/this-is-hell/832henrygiroux


The future demands a new political consciousness. We can't just wait for neoliberal economics to tear apart society and then build from scratch. Cultural critic Henry Giroux published his thoughts in the Truthout analysis article Authoritarianism, Class Warfare and the Advance of Neoliberal Austerity Policies. Author and cultural critic Henry Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies.


http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/28600-searching-for-radical-democracy-in-the-ruins-of-capitalism-s-economic-depravity

January 17, 2015

Syriza and Podemos: Leftists of the World Unite!

Podemos Leader to Stand By SYRIZA Leader in Final Election Rally


Pablo Iglesias, leader of the recently formed leftist Spanish party Podemos, will be present at SYRIZA’s final rally before the elections.

SYRIZA’s final rally and main event before the elections will take place on Thursday, January 22. Iglesias will appear to stand next to chief Alexis Tsipras in a gesture of solidarity between the two leftist parties.

The Iglesias visit will be an answer to Wednesday’s official visit of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy who offered his support to New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras for the upcoming general elections. The two PMs discussed the issues of immigration and terrorism.

The Podemos party, which was formed in March 2014, managed to secure five seats in the European Parliament after the May elections and is quickly rising in popularity in Spain. Iglesias expressed his support to SYRIZA and urged Greek people to vote for the leftist party. ................(more)

- See more at: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/01/15/podemos-leader-to-stand-by-syriza-leader-in-final-election-rally/#sthash.dV3hSF5M.dpuf

January 17, 2015

If gas is so cheap, why do retail sales stink?

from Fortune:



Some analysts argue that we shouldn’t be so thrilled about cheap oil.

Stocks are up modestly Thursday, following a four-day slump capped by a more than 1% decline in the Dow Jones Index on Wednesday. The market dip came on the heels of a Census report on retail sales that showed a big drop in spending by Americans in December.

So, where is the bounce the economy was supposed to get from cheap gas at the pump?

Some analysts argue that consumers have simply been pocketing the extra money they have been saving on gas, using it to pay down debt or bolster their savings. Others have a far gloomier story to tell. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://fortune.com/2015/01/15/gas-prices-retail-sales/

January 17, 2015

Richard Wolff: We Can Do Better Than Capitalism

&list=PLGiaCwrwSkT9u5o3fr6BFmn0_hZpYLcIh

January 17, 2015

Neoliberalism has made you a disposable human being

Listen to the interview: https://soundcloud.com/this-is-hell/832henrygiroux


The future demands a new political consciousness. We can't just wait for neoliberal economics to tear apart society and then build from scratch. Cultural critic Henry Giroux published his thoughts in the Truthout analysis article Authoritarianism, Class Warfare and the Advance of Neoliberal Austerity Policies. Author and cultural critic Henry Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies.


http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/28600-searching-for-radical-democracy-in-the-ruins-of-capitalism-s-economic-depravity

January 17, 2015

Money Dries Up for Oil and Gas, Layoffs Spread, Write-Offs Start

By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street


When money was growing on trees even for junk-rated companies, and when Wall Street still performed miracles for a fee, thanks to the greatest credit bubble in US history, oil and gas drillers grabbed this money channeled to them from investors and refilled the ever deeper holes fracking was drilling into their balance sheets.

But the prices for crude oil, US natural gas, and natural gas liquids have all plunged. Revenues from unhedged production are down 40% or 50%, or more from just seven months ago. And when the hedges expire, the problem will get worse. The industry has been through this before. It knows what to do.

Layoffs are cascading through the oil and gas sector. On Tuesday, the Dallas Fed projected that in Texas alone, 140,000 jobs could be eliminated. Halliburton said that it was axing an undisclosed number of people in Houston. Suncor Energy, Canada’s largest oil producer, will dump 1,000 workers in its tar-sands projects. Helmerich & Payne is idling rigs and cutting jobs. Smaller companies are slashing projects and jobs at an even faster pace. And now Slumberger, the world’s biggest oilfield-services company, will cut 9,000 jobs.

It had had an earnings debacle. It announced that Q4 EPS grew by 11% year-over-year to $1.50, “excluding charges and credits.” In reality, its net income plunged 81% to $302 million, after $1.8 billion in write-offs that included its production assets in Texas. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/money-dries-up-for-oil-money-dries-up-for-oil-and-gas-layoffs-spread-write-offs-start-gas-layoffs-spread-write-offs-start.html

January 17, 2015

Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Class

from In These Times:


Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Class
Scott Timberg argues that we’ve lost the scaffolding of middle-class jobs—record-store clerk, critic, roadie—that made creative scenes thrive.

BY JOANNA SCUTTS


Though Scott Timberg’s impassioned Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class focuses on the struggles of musicians, writers and designers, it’s not just a story about (the impossibility of) making a living making art in modern America. More urgently, it’s another chapter in America’s central economic story today, of plutocracy versus penury and the evisceration of the middle class.

Timberg lost his job as an arts reporter at the Los Angeles Times in 2008 after real-estate mogul Sam Zell purchased the paper and gutted its staff. But newspapers are experiencing a natural dieoff, right? Wrong, says Timberg. He cites statistics showing that newspaper profits remained fat into the 21st century—peaking at an average of 22.3 percent in 2002—as the industry began slashing staff. The problem isn’t profitability but shareholder greed, and the fact that we’ve ceded so much authority to the gurus of economic efficiency that we’ve failed to check their math.

The story of print journalism’s demise is hardly new, but Timberg’s LA-based perspective brings architecture, film and music into the conversation, exposing the fallacy of the East Coast conviction that Hollywood is the place where all the money is hiding. Movie studios today are as risk-averse and profit-minded as the big New York publishing houses, throwing their muscle behind one or two stars and proven projects (sequels and remakes) rather than nurturing a deep bench of talent.

For aspiring stars to believe that they may yet become the next Kanye or Kardashian is as unrealistic as treating a casino as a viable path to wealth. Not only that, but when all the money and attention cluster around a handful of stars, there’s less variation, less invention, less risk-taking. Timberg notes that the common understanding of the “creative class,” coined by Richard Florida in 2002, encompasses “anyone who works with their mind at a high level,” including doctors, lawyers and software engineers. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17522/portrait_of_the_dying_creative_class

January 17, 2015

100 Years Old Today: The Story Behind ‘Solidarity Forever’

from In These Times:


100 Years Old Today: The Story Behind ‘Solidarity Forever’
BY JONATHAN ROSENBLUM


On a windblown, gray Chicago day exactly 100 years ago today, Ralph Chaplin left his home on the city’s South Side for a raucous poor people’s rally at Hull House, the famed settlement house co-founded by Jane Addams. He asked a visiting friend he'd met organizing coal miners with Mother Jones to listen to the lyrics of a new tune he had been working on:

“Solidarity Forever,

Solidarity Forever,

Solidarity Forever,

For the union makes us strong!”

The self-described Chicago “stiff” and “rebel editor” merely wanted to write a song that could be for workers what “John Brown's Body” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” were for abolitionists. In fact, he borrowed the very melody.

One hundred years later, despite the rise and precipitous fall of workers’ movements in the U.S., Chaplin's song is a classic still widely sung with fists raised and demands for justice submitted. It's an international and national anthem, still regularly belted out by “Occupy” and sung every weekday by crowds from 20 to 100 protesters at the Wisconsin State Capitol rotunda.

.....(snip).....

As the IWW's radical antiwar and pro-wildcat strike tactics got the union increasingly on government enemy lists, Chaplin ended up in Chicago’s Cook County jail and then Leavenworth on a conspiracy rap while his song slowly made its way into the labor canon.

With the workers' success at winning better terms and the powerful growth of unions, “Solidarity Forever” spread in an arc that would take it across the United States, adopted as the official anthem of the United Auto Workers, and into Canada, France, Latin America and even Australia (one of the early IWW leaders fled there while under suspicion of communist activities; Australian Labor Party leader and former Prime minister Bob Hawke was known to sing it from memory). The French sing it as “Solidarite mes freres et mes soeurs.” A Spanish version can be found in the renowned manual of American community singalongs, “Rise Up Singing.” ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17542/solidarity_forever

January 17, 2015

Princeton study determines America is a DINO -- Democracy In Name Only

This won’t come as a total shock, but there’s some new hard data to back up what we already suspect anecdotally: Our democracy is really an oligarchy.

Looking at actual policy and polling, researchers at Princeton concluded that the wealthiest Americans tend to get what they want, or at least they did between 1981 and 2002 (the time frame on which the study focuses).

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” write Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

Another quote from the peer-reviewed study: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.” .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/there_goes_the_democracy_20150116