Newsitem List

Economic inequality must be reduced and democratic participation regained. Resisting tax avoidance, financial market regulation, climate policy, and globally combating poverty must be priorities. Unlike apples and bananas, financial products are not visible but hidden. Rainer Mausfeld explains how emancipative needs for change are neutralized. Opinion management is a vital technique of control....

Capitalism contains crisis as rainclouds contain rain, said Jean Jaures, 19th-century French socialist. Big Pharma, Big Wall Street, and Big Military Industrial Complex have armies of lobbyists. False concepts that financial markets are efficient and tend to equilibrium still rule economics. We the People should govern and politics should control economics. Fighting poverty should be part of public interest....

Not even shopping locally can save your favorite mom-and-pop — the problem is much, much bigger than that. The legendary punk record store Bleecker Bob’s in 2008. The store closed in 2013 due to high rents and was replaced by a frozen yogurt chain....

Economics should be a part of life, not a steamroller crushing creativity and self-determination. The state should serve the public interest and reduce poverty. Instead, private or special interests are in the driver's seat. Trumponomics is a disaster that is really a sleight of hand. $8 trillion was given to the super-rich. The poor, seniors, children and students are attacked....

At 7:45 a.m. this Sunday morning, 10/21/18, a long distance charter bus delivered scabs to the Marriott at Sutter & Powell, SF, by dropping them off on Bush Street at Powell, so they could easily walk into the side entrance on Powell, with no pickets to face. That must change now. We need mass picket lines, increased by all friends of labor, at all entrances to stop scabs, supplies and services deliveries to struck hotels....

All personal and corporate success depends on state investments in roads, schools, hospitals, libraries, food safety, water quality, clean air and airwaves. The Internet, touch-screen technology and GPS originated from state risk-taking. The state becomes corrupted when it turns away from public interest and reducing poverty and becomes the plaything of private or special interests. 8-hour day is 100 years old...

The change must begin with a fundamental collective questioning of our world of work and work morality. The main point is giving everyone the chance to find meaning and identity outside the world of work and to develop more freely. Burying our work fetish is the first step of the liberation of the individual from the straitjacket imposed on us by the performance-oriented society....

Capitalism is not "the end of history" as the American Francis Fukuyama postulated in 1992. The system question is open! The economy should be re-embedded in society. What seems rational in micro-economics collides with the irrationality of maximum profits as an end-in-itself. Capitalist elements could be implemented in a socialist economy. A paradigm shift is necessary....

Protectionist measures could lead to losses of prosperity and increase the pressure to introduce more measures. This danger exists. Before the 2008 crisis, world trade grew over 6% per year (now 2%). Growth will decline again through the trade war. Why must US consumers pay more for imports from the EU? Why should European consumers be punished with higher prices for US imports? These questions aren't even discussed....

The IMF's austerity policy of the last years was misguided. That austerity policy led to intensified growth declines and increasing unemployment and did not reach its goal of permanently calming the financial markets. Public investments could raise economic growth both in the short- and long-term. State expenditures have a considerable influence on employment and growth....