Economy Archives - Page 14 of 18

Capitalism

Charlie Chaplin and Karl Marx in Conversation

On Working and Being in Modern Times

September 21, 2020 • by Steven Stoll

Modern Times, directed by Charlie Chaplin, was released in 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression. It opens with a clock marking the beginning of the working day and a sentence: “A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.” Stampeding sheep dissolve into men ...

Charlie Chaplin and Karl Marx in Conversation

Capitalism

What the “Gender Reveal” Reveals

And what the party that caused California’s El Dorado fire was really all about

September 10, 2020 • by Benjamin Bernard

The El Dorado fire, one of the many currently burning on the west coast, is getting attention for its somewhat unusual cause: an explosive pyrotechnic device set off at a gender reveal party, something that might more accurately be termed a “genital and chromosome disclosure ritual.” The news reports in ...

Labor

In Honor of Essential Workers

Take a minute on this Labor Day to think about a future for labor beyond Trump

September 3, 2020 • by Helaine Olen

----------- This is our fourth Labor Day weekend in Trump’s America. In no way, can we say it is a good year for American workers. We plunged from record employment to near Great Depression levels of unemployment within a matter of weeks, as the nation all but shut down in response ...

Corporations

Enjoy Your Pandemic Waterpark

A corporation deigns to let taxpayers into a previously private park they paid for

September 2, 2020 • by Pat Garofalo

Back in 2017, Nashville, Tennessee, provided real estate investment trust Ryman Hospitality with about $13.8 million in tax breaks to build a waterpark at its Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. However, taxpayers weren’t able to access the park unless they stayed overnight at the four-star facility. The hotel limited waterpark access ...

Capitalism

Is Capitalism in Crisis, Dying, Dead — or Very Much Alive, for Better or Worse?

In search of an elusive concept

August 27, 2020 • by Ben Kodres-O'Brien

In 2014, a Museum of Capitalism opened for the first time, as if to commemorate a dying form of life. “The museum began just as capitalism ended,” declared the wall text for the most recent iteration of the travelling museum, at The New School in New York in fall 2019: ...

Is Capitalism in Crisis, Dying, Dead — or Very Much Alive, for Better or Worse?

Economy

How to Reopen the American Economy Now

We don’t have to choose between a depression and tens of thousands of avoidable deaths

August 24, 2020 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

And, of course, economists are on the case. In my favorite economic paper on the COVID-19 economy, Harvard University economist James Stock describes a new family of epidemiological-economic models that provide guidance about how best to reopen the economy. Here are his smart reopening requirements: promote collective behaviors to stop the spread of the ...

Economy

Where Is the Risk in the COVID Economy?

A look at shadow banking

July 30, 2020 • by Janet Roitman and Andrew Moon

We are witnessing a public bailout of the private sector that dwarfs the bailout response to the 2007–2008 Great Recession. Compared to the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) implemented in 2008, today’s mobilization of public funds through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act amounts to ...

Economy

Even If Joe Biden Wins in a Blowout, the ‘Global Economy’ Is Not Coming Back

July 27, 2020 • by Marshall Auerback

Many will regard these developments as chiefly driven by geopolitical prerogatives. But over time, the driving engine of the process will be a combination of maturing technologies that are rewriting the laws of profitability in manufacturing and production for advanced economies. The various capacities that enabled a far-flung global supply ...

Even If Joe Biden Wins in a Blowout, the ‘Global Economy’ Is Not Coming Back

Feminism

Wages Against Essential Work

Our undervaluation of traditionally female work is coming home to roost

July 9, 2020 • by Alissa G. Karl

The streets around Highland Hospital, a few blocks from my house in Rochester, New York, are lined with signage “thanking” and “supporting” the “essential” workers who labor there. Many signs are hand-made, propped on porches or taped to light poles; others are mass-produced, like campaign signs, anchored into residential lawns. ...

Capitalism

How Billionaires Get Away With Their Big Con

The rich have been successfully chipping away at Americans’ trust in government for decades

July 9, 2020 • by Thom Hartmann

About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency. In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent ...

How Billionaires Get Away With Their Big Con

Capitalism

There’s a Hidden Economic Trendline That Is Shattering the Global Trade System

Why economic nationalism is suddenly a fashionable excuse for countries to decrease their reliance on the existing global supply chains

July 8, 2020 • by Marshall Auerback and Jan Ritch-Frel

Covid-19 has accelerated a process that was well underway before it, spreading beyond U.S.-China-EU trade negotiations and into the world’s 50 largest economies. As much as many defenders of the old order lament this trend, it is as significant a shift as the dawn of the World Trade Organization (WTO) ...

There’s a Hidden Economic Trendline That Is Shattering the Global Trade System

Economy

We Won’t Have a Truly Global Economy Until We Start Taxing It That Way

Reconstructing our tax system is an integral part of future national industrial policy as we restart the economy

July 2, 2020 • by Marshall Auerback

Taxation is one of those areas that exposes the contradictions at the heart of globalization. Globalization of goods has proceeded quickly, as has the harmonization of industrial standards across countries. Harmonization of taxation? Not so easy. The power to tax is the ultimate national prerogative, one that very few sovereign nations would ...