http://billmoyers.com
Feb. 22, 2013
Image by Metro Centric via Flickr
Even as President Obama’s talking points champion the middle class and condemn how our economy caters to the very rich, modern American capitalism is a story of continued inequality and hardship. Even a modest increase in the minimum wage — as suggested by the president — faces opposition from those who seem to show allegiance first and foremost to America’s wealthy and powerful.
Yet some aren’t just wringing their hands about our economic crisis; they’re fighting back. Economist Richard Wolff joins Bill to shine light on the disaster left behind in capitalism’s wake, and to discuss the fight for economic justice, including a fair minimum wage. A Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and currently Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School, Wolff has written many books on the effects of rampant capitalism, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.
[...]
see
Obey–Film Based on Chris Hedges’ Death of the Liberal Class
Unlivable Wages by Ralph Nader
Socialist Register 2013: The Question of Strategy
Chris Hedges: NDAA: All These Laws Are Being Put Through By Design
Breaking the Chains of Debt Peonage by Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges and Richard Wolff: Capitalism=Cannibalism–The Human Cost is Staggering
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream
Filed under: Corporations Really Suck, Dandelion Salad Posts News Politics and-or Videos 2, Dandelion Salad Videos, Labor, Politics, The Economy Sucks and or Collapse 2 Tagged: | Capitalism on Dandelion Salad, Inequality on Dandelion Salad, Minimum Wage, Moyers-Bill, Saru Jayaraman, Wolff-Richard
[...] Moyers and Company: Richard Wolff: Taming Capitalism Run Wild [...]
[...] Moyers and Company: Richard Wolff: Taming Capitalism Run Wild [...]
[...] Moyers and Company: Richard Wolff: Taming Capitalism Run Wild [...]
[...] Moyers and Company: Richard Wolff: Taming Capitalism Run Wild [...]
Reblogged this on gfmurphy101 and commented:
Plenty here on this blog on the impending ‘death of capitalism’, perhaps we should note that ‘denial is not a river in Egypt’ just ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. Its understandable that the mass media wich is owned by the biggest beneficiaries of capitalism (the top 10%) won’t ask the question, so we must….WHAT IF THE PROBLEM IS CAPITALISM??
This is a vital conversation, but who exactly is listening?
Frankly, the idea of “equality” in the US (or the rest of the “West” for that matter,) is patently absurd ~ a ridiculous fiction. There can be no such thing, given the obvious disparities of access to a just means of livelihood, participatory ownership, investment and responsible privilege. Americans are fed nostalgia and deprived of all real opportunity. How can working people (anywhere) thrive in a system that relies upon offshore “economies of scale” that is simply a euphemism for indentured slavery and criminal resource exploitation?
Richard Wolff is great, because he tells it as it is. I look forward to learning about his solutions.
The only possible way out of this colossal sham, I believe, is to invoke the just law of proportionality. The present race to the top of the vulgar heap, is primitive mimicry, the massive pretension that anyone can be an all-powerful sovereign, a mogul emperor ~ all in the name of pragmatic economic necessity and sheer precocity. These are the just spoils of business warfare and war profiteering. All you have to do, is hitch your wagon to the engine of spectrum dominance, to get rich by any means possible, award yourself a “solar” star-spangled crown and lord it over les miserables. Then, once you’ve eviscerated every conceivable avenue of redress, proclaim yourself a magnanimous “philanthropist..!”
It is so childish, ignorant, simplistic & pathetic. Piratical enterprise is glorified and embraced by these adolescent moral midgets, while social intelligence and creative thinking is side-lined, ridiculed or at worst, actually pilloried.
Do people genuinely revere these masters of fraud or do they feel so obligated and cowed, that they must preserve and support their ethical impostures? The old argument that change cannot happen because we’re all in it together, trapped by necessity, locked into the least worst of all the feasible operating systems, is sophist and myopic.
This yoke of ideological tyranny has to be broken. Surely we can work irrevocably toward a broad coalition of independent planetary citizens and moral innovators? Why not celebrate 1215 and launch a new multinational Magna Carta for our time, that defends the socio-biological diversity of our global commons against corporate predation? We have to curb the populist excesses of these “grotesque” robber barons ~ affirming in no uncertain terms the sovereign ecological rights of humanity, and our determination to ensure their protection and our free exercise.
To be even more explicit in closing, I should add: “& our free exercise ~ of ethical intent…”