Monthly Archives: May 2012

CAPITALISM: Interview / Richard Wolff on Challenging Capitalism in His New Book, “Occupy the Economy”

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Can we challenge capitalism and prevail, considering that the top one percent control 50% of the available capital and the top five percent some 70% of the nation’s private funds?  Richard Wolff is a closely followed Truthout contributor on economics.  Currently, you can obtain his just-released “Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism” directly from Truthout.  If you want to know about alternatives to the current destructive course of our economy and how we, as a nation, got to this point, get your copy of “Occupy the Economy” by clicking here.

The following is an interview with Richard Wolff by Truthout staff member Matt Renner.

Matt Renner: In your introduction to the book, you discuss New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “cleanliness” excuse for clearing the original Occupy Wall Street encampment at Liberty Square. Why do you think so many public officials and right-wing pundits describe the occupiers as “unclean”?

Richard D. Wolff: Their problem has been, and continues to be, that they have no response to Occupy’s basic attack on the inequity and antidemocratic social conditions summarized in the confrontation of, “1 percent against 99 percent.” They know that the vast majority of Americans feel the truth of Occupy’s social criticism, experience it in their lives, and sympathize with protest against and efforts to change a system with such unjust outcomes. So, they can refute little and need instead to distract public opinion from what Occupy focuses on.

One way to do that is to assert the existence of and then condemn some other quality or dimension of Occupy. In Bloomberg’s pathetic example, the best he and his advisers could come up with was a reference to Zuccotti Park as being “unclean” so as to then position the mayor and the police as militant janitors. Everyone who knows even a little about New York City knows that the mayor and the police preside over many filthy subway tunnels, highways, streets, empty lots and abandoned buildings without doing anything to clean them. So, suddenly asserting the importance of cleanliness simply exposed them to the ridicule such a position deserved. I suspect something similar is underway when others, perhaps taking their cue from Bloomberg in New York, decided to follow the cleanliness ploy.

Continue reading . . .

SOCIAL ACTIVISM: Chris Hedges / Why OWS Frightens the Corporate Elite

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“I don’t waste any emotional or intellectual energy on these elections. All hope is in the street. All hope is through acts of civil disobedience. We may not win, but if we’re going to win that’s the only place we are going to win.”

LITERATURE: In Writing, Fuentes Shed Light On Poverty, Inequality / (NPR’s Morning Edition AUDIO)

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Carlos Fuentes was the son of a Mexican diplomat and spent years living abroad, including in the United States. But Mexico — the country, its people and politics — was central to his writing.

Fuentes, one of the most influential Latin American writers, died Tuesday at a hospital in Mexico City at the age of 83. He was instrumental in bringing Latin American literature to an international audience, and he used his fiction to address what he saw as real-world injustices.

[…]

One of his most famous novels was The Old Gringo, about an American writer who travels to Mexico to die. It was made into a Hollywood movie starring Gregory Peck as the writer and Jimmy Smits as a Mexican general.

The Old Gringo became the first novel by a Latin American writer to make it to The New York Times best-seller list.

Read transcript, and listen to NPR’s Morning Edition AUDIO here . . . 

A wonderful scene from the movie can be seen here:

Bill Moyers: Interview / The Social Consequences of Inequality / Richard Wilkinson (TED Talk VIDEO)

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“If Americans want to live the American dream they should go to Denmark.”
~ Richard Wilkinson

Richard Wilkinson is an epidemiologist and a leader in international research of inequality. He is also the co-author of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger with Kate Pickett. Their book has been described by The Sunday Times of London as having “a big idea big enough to change political thinking. In half a page,” the Times says, “it tells you more about the pain of inequality than any play or novel could.”

His TED talk — “How economic inequality harms societies” — has garnered over 1 million views on the TED website since October 2011.

We caught up with him to talk about how inequality can be dangerous to our health.

Read interview, and watch TED talk video here . . .

Research Report: How Secular Humanists (and Everyone Else) Subsidize Religion in the United States

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Nowhere did we find prior research summarizing and detailing religious finances and tax policy, so we decided to investigate it ourselves. This article is the result. It took some digging, but we think we now have a moderately clear understanding of the tax laws regarding religions in the United States. What we found suggests that religious institutions, if they were required to pay taxes the same as for-profit corporations do, would not have nearly as much money or influence as they enjoy in America today. In this article we estimate how much local, state, and federal governments subsidize religions.

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. . . [R]eligions spend a relatively small portion of their revenue on “physical charity”, and while they spend a larger portion of their revenue addressing “spiritual concerns”, most of that qualifies as labor, not charity. What little would qualify as “spiritual charity” would not be replaced by government if discontinued. In short, religions are, by and large, not engaged in charitable work.

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. . . [T]he subsidies to religions in the United States today may not be encouraging the growth of religions, but they may be keeping alive on the equivalent of subsidized life-support many religions that should be dead.

If these subsidies were removed—though we have no basis for believing that they will be anytime soon—we wonder what the damage to religion would be. There is evidence that donations to religions are tied to taxes; as the tax benefit of donating goes up, so do donations and vice versa. In other words, it seems likely that the removal of these subsidies would result in a substantial decrease in the supply of religion in the United States. To what extent it would affect demand for religion is uncertain.

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. . . [I]t seems likely that subsidies are propping up religion in the United States, though to what extent is not clear. Certainly many religions that are near failing would have done so already if not for the subsidies they receive from the government. Another practical result of these subsidies is that religions are more affluent and more influential than they would otherwise be, because they have the resources to fund efforts to change legislation, create widely consumed media, and influence public policy.

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. . . These subsidies should be phased out. But since that is unlikely to happen, we’d accept the following alternative: . . . direct cash transfers to us from the government for trying to convert people to our worldviews while claiming to provide social services[.]

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Book Excerpt: “Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism” / Richard Wolff

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For the last half-century, capitalism has been a taboo subject in the United States. . . . Politicians repeated, robot-style, that the “U.S. is the greatest country in the world” and that “capitalism is the greatest economic system in the world.” Those few who have dared to raise questions or criticisms about capitalism have been either ignored or told to go live in North Korea, China or Cuba as if that were the only alternative to pro-capitalism cheerleading.

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Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.

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Across the pages that follow, what emerges is the central importance of how capitalism very particularly organizes production: masses of working people generate corporate profits that others take and use. Tiny boards of directors, selected by and responsible to tiny groups of major shareholders, gather and control corporate profits, thereby shaping and dominating society. That tiny minority (boards and major shareholders) of those associated with and dependent upon corporations make all the basic decisions—how, what, and where to produce and what to do with the profits. The vast majority of workers within and residents surrounding those capitalist corporations must live with the results of corporate decisions. Yet they are systematically excluded from participating in making those decisions. Nothing more glaringly contradicts democracy than how capitalism organizes the corporate enterprises where working people produce the goods and services without which modern life for everyone would be impossible.

From: Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism By Richard Wolff

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