David Simon on Moyers

The Wire's creator David Simon gives a GREAT interview on The Journal.

We'll Give Them Their Bonuses..In the Form of Full Metal Jackets

Yahoo for the Rebirth of Liberalism!

This is great. It's tinged with racism ("third world peasants"), but nonetheless it's wonderful to see liberals regain some backbone and some anger. Note how thick the Fox interviewer is: he cites a $70 per hour figure for worker compensation, then denies asking anything about healthcare pensions. Obviously autoworkers don't make $70 an hour; the kind of cooked numbers Fox presenters use include all future costs for the worker. The guy could at least have the courtesy to understand how his numbers are distorted.

Iceland's Government Collapses!

Huzzah! The ruling Independent Party in Iceland has been forced to resign by massive protests in response to the country's economic devastation. The Social Democratic Alliance, which had been a minority partner in the government, looks poised to win the early elections scheduled for May 9th.

There are also massive protests in Eastern Europe, where many countries face the same kind of debt trap more commonly associated with the Global South. All this coming in the wake of the continent-wide protests over Israel's assault on Gaza. Which came after the "Greek Intifada." Just a few months ago the victory of the fascists in Italy and the routing of the Left in the London mayoral elections had many convinced that continent was on a rightwards drift. Things are looking up.

Profiling Obama's Economic Team

A recent Counterpunch essay by Patrick Bond gives some important insights into the ominous track records of Obama's economic advisers and potential heads of the Fed - Lawrence Summers and Paul Volcker.

On Volcker,

Conference calls and face-to-face meetings of the Obama economic team are often reorganized to accommodate his schedule. When the team discusses the financial crisis, 'The most important question to Obama: What does Paul Volcker think?' says Jason Furman, the campaign's economic-policy director... When Sen. Obama raised the prospect of a package of spending and tax measures to 'stimulate' the economy, Mr. Volcker disapproved. 'Americans are spending beyond their means,' he told the group. A stimulus package would delay the belt-tightening and savings needed, he added, proposing instead better regulation and assistance to banks."

On Summers:

Summers is best known for the sexism controversy which cost him the presidency of Harvard in 2006. But fifteen years earlier he gained infamy as an advocate of African genocide and environmental racism, thanks to a confidential World Bank memo he signed when he was the institution's senior vice president and chief economist: "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted, their air quality is vastly inefficiently low..."
After all, Summers continued, inhabitants of low-income countries typically die before the age at which they would begin suffering prostate cancer associated with toxic dumping. And in any event, using marginal productivity of labour as a measure, low-income Africans are not worth very much anyhow. Nor are African's aesthetic concerns with air pollution likely to be as substantive as they are for wealthy northerners.
Such arguments were said by Summers to be made in an 'ironic' way (and in his defense, he may have simply plagiarized the memo from a colleague, Lant Pritchett). Yet their internal logic was pursued with a vengeance by the World Bank and IMF long after Summers moved over to the Clinton Treasury Department, where in 1999 he insisted that Joseph Stiglitz be fired by Bank president James Wolfensohn, for speaking out against the impeccable economic logic of the Washington Consensus.

To contextualize the inter-imperial ambitions of the US and it's competitors toward Africa, check out this article from the International Socialist Review.

Felipe Calderón tries to open Mexican oil to privatization

This is a big deal. It seems the the Mexican government is attempting to use the world financial crisis and the inefficient(read: massively corrupt) Mexican national oil company, PEMEX, to erode the President Lazaro Cardenas' 1938's nationalization of the nation's oil in 1938. A longer post is on the way.

The human cost of economic meltdown

Most of us would welcome Paulson, Bernanke and CO. throwing themselves from buildings. Unlike most of their precursors during the Great Depression, however, the bankers and other capitalists who helped cause the current economic meltdown seem to be floating pretty with the help of golden parachutes. On the other hand, the brunt of the violence caused by this crisis is faced by the millions of Americans suffering eviction, job loss, continued unemployment and bankruptcy. As a recent article from TomDispatch shows, Addie Polk is not the only one driven to the most desperate of actions. Suicides and violent confrontations with the police are taking place across the country and receiving no coverage from the media. This article gives a sobering view of the inhumanity of the crisis never mentioned by Obama, McCain and the rest who support bail outs to Wall Street and nothing for the rest of us.