Ignoring the memory of the over 1,100 factory workers that passed away at the Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh last month, at least 14 major North American retailers have declined to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety , an agreement that would have entailed a five year commitment from all participating retailers to conduct in
In historic breakthrough, Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren offers bill to force the Federal Reserve to finance student loans at 0.75% with no cost to taxpayers; measure embodies principles needed for US economic recovery from current depression. I urge a major all points mobilization in support of Sen Elizabeth Warren's Bank on Students bill mandating that the Federal Reserve provide...
Frances Coppola explores how increasing automation is fundamentally shifting the nature of work away from 'making stuff' towards personal services. One of the most interesting issues to arise in the course of the "comment-athon" on my post "The Golden Calf" was the suggestion that the link between money and work is broken, and indeed that there is no longer...
As the death toll in the Rana Plaza building collapse outside the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka climbs past 400, the kinship between our purchasing decisions and the loss of life is becoming harder to ignore. This has been the deadliest industrial disaster to hit the beleaguered South Asian nation, resulting in three times the number of fatalities as the devastating Tazreen Fashions fire a...
News reports tell us that more than 500 people have now died and more than 2,500 were injured in Savar, Bangladesh, while the toll in West, Texas stands at 15 dead and over 200 injured. Behind these two disasters is a common thread of greed – and a common need for unionized resistance. “It was like a nuclear bomb went off,” said the mayor as a mushroom cloud soared...
Above. Workers from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) chant slogans during a May Day rally at Seoul City Hall Plaza in central Seoul May 1, 2013. Thousands of workers who took part in the rally asked for an extensive revision of the labor law and demanded that the government provide temporary workers employment stability by converting their status to full-time workers...
Wage theft is fast becoming a top trend of the 21st-century labor market. Imagine you’ve just landed a job with a big-time retailer. Your task is to load and unload boxes from trucks and containers. It’s back-breaking work. You toil 12 to 16 hours a day, often without a lunch break. Sweat drenches your clothes in the 90-degree heat, but you keep going: your kids need their...
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix C onspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic...
There are few ways to make a decent living in Bangladesh, but there are many ways to die trying. The cruel weight of that reality bore down on a Dhaka factory complex on Wednesday as it crashed to the ground and instantly extinguished hundreds of lives and livelihoods. As of this writing, the body count at Rana Plaza is about 300 and rising , with hundreds more workers still unaccounted...
1. Green Worker Cooperative’s Co-op Academy?, The Bronx, N.Y. Ideas for co-ops may flourish, but few people understand exactly how to make theirs real. The Co-op Academy is providing answers. Founded four years ago by Omar Freilla (who recently made Ebony magazine’s list of the Power 100), the academy runs 16-week courses that offer intensive mentoring, legal and financial...
Two acts of terror last week, only one terrorism investigation The way I see it, we had two acts of terrorism in the US last week. The first took place at the end of the historic Boston Marathon, when two bombs went off near the finish line, killing three and seriously injuring dozens of runners and spectators. The second happened a couple days later in the town of West, Texas, where a...
Too many Americans are unaware of the extreme disparities that have been caused by the unregulated profit incentive of capitalism. Our winner-take-all system is flailing away at once-healthy parts of society, leaving them like withered limbs on a trembling body, even as the relative few who benefit promote the illusion of opportunity and prosperity for all. Concerned citizens armed with facts...
The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes. Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a...
(1)Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind - driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm...
There are over 7 billion people on this planet; (1,2) * 3 billion are living below the poverty line (less than $2US a day) * 1 billion are starving * 1% of the population own 40% of global assets * The richest 10% of individuals account for 85% of the world’s total assets * An estimated 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. That’s one child every 3...
Q. In a freed market, who will stop markets from running riot and doing crazy things? And who will stop the rich and powerful from running roughshod over everyone else? A. We will. Sheldon Richman put up a nice piece last week for The Goal Is Freedom called Regulation Red Herring: Why There’s No Such Thing as an Unregulated Market . (Incidentally, while you’re...
The persistently sky-high unemployment in the U.S. has clouded an equally problematic trend—deteriorating working conditions and diminishing pay for unskilled and low-skilled work. Home healthcare workers, childcare providers, and housekeepers are the backbone of our economy, but they receive low wages, practically no benefits, and face a dearth of opportunities to build assets and...
A leader in the revolutionary left in the US should feel like a fox in a chicken coop. Increasingly large capitalists (Walmart, Enron, Wall-Street) are being exposed as so destructive to our society. The Bush administration created global chaos and suffering. Attacks on democratic rights are expanding. Thoughtful people in all strata of our society realize that there are dangerous trends that...
The Freeman editor Sheldon Richman, speaking at George Mason University, raised the question of just what mainstream libertarians mean when they call a country “capitalist.” What qualifies a country as “capitalist”? A lot of countries with relatively low indices of economic freedom (including those ranked as “mostly unfree”) are conventionally regarded as...
Our little group of a dozen families was running out of time. After meeting every weekend for three years to plan our hoped-for cohousing community, and after investing much of our savings to acquire a few acres of land, it looked as though our dream would fail. We couldn’t find a bank that would finance a cooperative. It was our local credit union that saved us...
Power is not to be conquered, it is to be destroyed. It is tyrannical by nature, whether exercised by a king, a dictator or an elected president. The only difference with the parliamentarian ‘democracy’ is that the modern slave has the illusion of choosing the master he will obey. The vote has made him an accomplice to the tyranny that oppresses him. He is not a slave because...
The worsening social pains of government austerity programs now intensify the vast social suffering caused by the crisis since 2007. Beyond this especially severe business cycle, longer-term trends show capitalist mega-corporations moving blue and white collar work to lower wage regions far from the former centers of capitalist production (US and western Europe especially). Profit and...
In many towns across America, Walmart, or a similar mega-retailer, is the only option you have when you need (almost) anything. Big-retail is a monopoly in its truest form and it has become so, not through "free market" economics, technological innovation, supply and demand, or healthy competition, but rather through a combination of pro-monopoly rules and regulations, human...
Anarchy and Distribution On the LeftLibertarian2 Yahoo! group, we’ve been experiencing some disagreements about the likely consequences of an anarchist society. There are so many aspects of our current culture, economy, infrastructure, etc. that have been distorted by privilege. Civil society has become so confused with the institution of the State that it’s hard to extricate...
Free enterprise is often associated with the past. This perception puts the market’s champions, seen as hopeless reactionaries, on the defensive. A typical narrative follows: America had an insufficiently active government under the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution expanded government to meet society’s needs. In this climate, where property rights continued to trump...
In 1888, at the height of the Gilded Age, a rather prominent American said some startling things. First he observes: Our cities are the abiding places of wealth and luxury; our manufactories yield fortunes never dreamed of by the fathers of the Republic; our business men are madly striving in the race for riches, and immense aggregations of capital outrun the imagination in the...
Although it's pretty safe to say that no canonical definition of left libertarianism exists, there is a growing consensus around a certain body of concepts, priorities, and attitudes towards the State. Here is a collection of different perspectives from individuals who identify as left libertarian: Jake Freeman Smith Left-libertarianism is a growing tendency amongst...
Carson indicts historically existing capitalism as a betrayal, rather than a manifestation, of free-market libertarian principles. He points out that libertarians have typically focused on the role of state coercion in the present-day capitalist market, neglecting what he calls the “subsidy of history” — the role of past state coercion and robbery, including selective state...
The word “libertarian” is becoming an increasingly popular descriptor of political ideology in the US, though many in the US incorrectly associate libertarianism only with the capitalist Libertarian Party. Historically libertarianism was a term used most commonly by anti-authoritarian socialists to describe their political philosophy. In fact, in most countries the term is...
Via Ross Heckmann on the Distributism yahoogroup . A quote from the Agrarian Wendell Berry’s book What Are People For?
As of January 26, it’s illegal to unlock your cell phone and switch to a different service plan without the permission of your current provider . This comes as the result not of a new law, but of the opinion of the Librarian of Congress (who apparently has authority to interpret the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). This is just one more example of an old problem. In all areas of...
In a word, no. While " anarcho "-capitalists obviously try to associate themselves with the anarchist tradition by using the word " anarcho " or by calling themselves "anarchists" their ideas are distinctly at odds with those associated with anarchism. As a result, any claims that their ideas are anarchist or that they are part of the anarchist tradition or move
Left-libertarianism in the relevant sense is a position that is simultaneously leftist and libertarian . It features leftist commitments to: engaging in class analysis and class struggle; opposing corporate privilege; undermining structural poverty embracing shared responsibility for challenging economic vulnerability; affirming wealth redistribution; ...
What is wrong with work? For the majority of us, most of our lives are dominated by work . Even when we are not actually at work, we are traveling to or from work, worrying about work, trying to recover from work in order to get back to work tomorrow, or trying to forget about work.
Let me begin with a good quote from a bad economist: This, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. So wrote Milton Friedman, in his 1982 preface to the twentieth anniversary edition of his famous manifesto, Capitalism and Freedom, first published...
Is greed all that's wrong with capitalism? No. It is not enough to attack capitalists for being greedy, although this is a common tactic. I hope to explain why in this short essay. Consider a small business family who work longer hours than do their employees, who live frugally, keeping just enough of the income from the business to support their modest lifestyle, paying the rest out...
Dr. Richard Wolff, currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University here in New York City is no shy flower when it comes to provoking thought; more "Thorny Rose" than "Sweet William." The New York Times Magazine has named him "America's most prominent Marxist Economist" and he continues to...
Being a libertarian means opposing the use of force to restrain peaceful, voluntary exchange. That doesn’t mean it should be understood as involving support for capitalism. Whether this claim makes any sense at all depends, of course, on what you mean by “capitalism.” For some people, perhaps, the term just refers to free exchange. And if that’s all you intend when...
“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” —Arthur Young; 1771 Our popular economic wisdom says that capitalism equals freedom and free societies, right? Well, if you ever suspected that the l
Defenders of freed markets have good reason to identify their position as a species of “anti-capitalism.”[ 1 ] To explain why, I distinguish three potential meanings of “capitalism” before suggesting that people committed to freed markets should oppose capitalism in my second and third senses. Then, I offer some reasons for using “capitalism” as a label...
Intro: Tragedy, Violence and Bourgeois Discourse Your average American is
A couple years back when I was working toward a philosophy major in college, I wrote a rebuttal on the section of The Anarchist FAQ that covers anarcho-capitalism . I removed the rebuttal from the web because I didn't have the time or inclination to continue to maintain it or expand upon it. Three years later, I've come to find myself disagreeing with my old rebuttals and agreeing...
A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work (Part 1) Last year in Lansing, Michigan, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union leadership fought a pitched battle with the Lansing City Council to push capitalist real estate developers to use union labor. When discussing the fight, Joe Davis, the union representative, proclaimed, “It’s important to...
Disambiguation: According to the capitalist lexicon, the “Free Market” is the economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses. Any sensible person can recognize immediately that neither human beings nor resources are free in such a system; hence, a “Really Really Free Market” is a market that operates...
Left-libertarians differ from the (current) libertarian mainstream both in terms of what outcomes they regard as desirable , and in terms of what outcomes they think a freed market is
Every once in a while you may hear politicians, union leaders and ordinary citizens demand fair wages or fair pay for work. While this is surely a noble goal, the fact that people still struggle for fair wages clearly shows that they have not yet been realized. Women are still paid less than men, black and Latino workers are statistically paid less than white workers, and corporate executives...
Chances are if you are reading this, you have spent a fair amount of time discussing the [Occupy Wall Street movement]. Anyone with a basic familiarity with the protests is aware that the demonstrators represent a broad spectrum of ideologies, beliefs and goals. Ordinarily, there is nothing inherently negative about his fact. Since the 1970′s, America’s top capitalists have...
A 'cult,' according to Merriam-Webster, can be defined as "Great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work..(and)..a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion." Capitalism has been defined by adherents and detractors: Milton Friedman said, "The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the...
Leaders must aim to bring down global inequality at least to 1990 levels. An explosion in extreme wealth and income is exacerbating inequality and hindering the world’s ability to tackle poverty, Oxfam warned today in a briefing published ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos next week. The $240 billion net income in 2012 of the richest 100 billionaires would be enough to...
About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006. Before we look at the details, a heartfelt plea from the Save the CEO’s Charitable Trust: There’s so much suffering in the world. It can all...