Several years ago, I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It’s a classic piece of American naturalism published in 1906, that exposed the horrible conditions of life for immigrant workers in the meat packing industry. It also exposed the unsanitary, dise…
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RedBedHead: Italy Votes To Kill Its Economy To Save Its Debt Rating
The parasites and rumour-mongers who run the debt ratings agencies, having done their work getting the Greek government to screw their population, have moved on to Italy. Let’s be honest, the ratings agencies are just the propaganda arm – fully funded …
Continue readingRedBedHead: Obama’s Phoney Budget War
There’s a fairly decent chance that the morons who run the American Empire will let the country slip into default at the beginning of August, causing a cascade of penalties and blowback that will kill the barely breathing recovery. Greek politicians ca…
Continue readingRedBedHead: Greece: Bigger Than Lehman Brothers
What a frigging disaster. Back in 2008, the US Federal Reserve let the Lehman Brothers investment bank – which held more than a bellyful of toxic debt, go to the wall. It was meant to bring “calm” to increasingly panicked financial markets. That will p…
Continue readingRedBedHead: The Marvellous Meltdown Of Murdoch’s Media Machine
It couldn’t, to paraphrase, happen to a nicer newspaper. After 168 years the British News of the World has closed down in the face of a momentous scandal regarding phone hacking and corruption. That scandal is touching every aspect of British society, …
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Austerity Leads to Suicide Rate Increase
Friday’s Vancouver Sun had a short item that you might have missed, “Suicides up, road deaths down due to recession.” It’s in the bottom corner of page B5: Suicides rates rose sharply in Europe in 2007 to 2009 as the financial crisis drove unemployment up and squeezed incomes, with the worst hit countries like Greece […]
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: RSA – Animate – Choice
Within structural systems there is great pressure to conform, in Capitalism is not an exception.
Filed under: Politics Tagged: Capitalism, Choice, RSA Cognitive Media, Social Change
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Global Capital – Our enemy, our friend?
From a recent interview of Noam Chomsky by Michael Learner – ML: […]What path is rational for a movement seeking to build a world of environmental sanity, social justice, and peace, yet facing such a sophisticated, powerful, and well-organized social order? NC: […]At the moment we can’t realistically talk about challenging global capital, because the […]
RedBedHead: A View From The Volcano: Report From Greece
This is a fascinating interview from the British Socialist Worker Newspaper on what’s going on in Greece. All we’re really getting is the maneuverings and panic of the politicians and the bankers. This interview with a socialist gives a flavour of what…
Continue readingRedBedHead: China or Greece: Which Is The Next Lehman Brothers?
Back in 2007, when the US Fed let the 100-year old Lehman Brothers investment bank go belly up, it was like a blasting cap that blew apart the global economy. While there was some recover last year and early into 2011, the global economy – and the econ…
Continue readingMontreal Simon: The Postal Workers and the War on Pensions
I visited a postal worker’s picket line yesterday morning. And in the evening Sébastien dropped by and took this great picture after the Cons announced they intend to force them back to work.
The Conservative government is vowing t…
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Is Capitalism Terminally Ill?
Today (June 15th) the Toronto Star broke news that the NDP was planning to drop the term “socialism” from its party’s platform. This was a mere formality of what had been in existence for decades: the party hasn’t been “socialist” in any shape or form for a very long time. On the very same day, […]
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Built to crash: the coming economic tsunami
`Would you rather have a perfectly efficient system that, if hit by a pebble, would shatter? Or, would you rather have an adaptable system that may not give you the exact output you want, but can handle anything? According to Barry Lynn of the New Am…
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Social Determinants of Health
(Note: This post contains a portion of the talk that I gave last month at the 16th International Conference of the Association of Psychology and Psychiatry for Adults and Children in Athens). Research has now clearly established that economic, and social variables – more than individual or family behavior – are the most salient factors […]
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Does Capitalism Save Lives?
I was watching CNBC and happened to see this panel about how the number of Americans killed by natural disasters has declined over time. It was also noted that, in early 2010, fewer people died in Chile’s earthquake than in Haiti’s earthquake. The discussion quite reasonably outlined how improvements in emergency preparedness, building codes, and […]
Continue readingRedBedHead: The Tories’ Bankrupt Brains
“I see, said the blind man to the deaf dog, who wasn’t listening anyway” is a phrase that comes to mind reading reports of federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s press conference on the economy. Generally speaking we expect governments to do more to s…
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Contemporary Capitalism Conference
PEF members Louis-Philippe Rochon and Mario Seccareccia have organized a conference on “Contemporary Capitalism: Its Financial Circuits, Its Transformation and Future Prospects” on May 31 and June 1 in Ottawa, right before the PEF summer school and…
Continue readingForecast 2011
“Gird your loins for lower living standards.”
A scary and often hilarious ride!
Warning: political correctness almost totally absent
It is What it is
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because y…
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Tell No Lies
Last week’s Got Your Back conference included an interesting mix of speakers and workshops – and due to the physical layout of the event, for a change i actually got to listen in to the closing panel’s each day, as they were in the area right next to w…
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