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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15220734
'Put America back to work' to address deficit, says economist
7 October 2011 Last updated at 13:33 ET Help
The US economy added 103,000 jobs in September, ahead of many economists' expectations.
But the jobless rate was stuck at 9.1%, according to latest data from the Department of Labor.
Professor Joseph Stiglitz won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001, and is a professor at Columbia Business School. He told the BBC that the figures did not reflect the dire situation within the US jobs market.
ROADMAP VS. POLITICAL JARGON
China's shadow banks 26 Oct 11
Wed, 26 Oct 11
Duration: 19 mins
Available: 30 days remaining
Concern is growing about rapid lending by China's shadow banks. Some fear it could lead to a Chinese debt crisis. Lesley Curwen talks to Professor Frank Yu of the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai about the risks for the economy. Plus, one of the world's greatest thinkers on strategy, Professor Richard Rumelt attacks Europe's politicians for their lack of strategy over the eurozone crisis. And the BBC's Howard Johnson reports on Lebanon's efforts to boost its internet speeds, after research suggested they were the slowest in the world.
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STRATEGIES FOR FIGHTING THE POWER OF THE SYSTEM
Charles A. Reich (born 1928) is an American legal and social scholar as well as writer who was a Professor at Yale Law School when he wrote the 1970 paean to the 1960s counterculture and youth movement, The Greening of America. Excerpts of the book first appeared in The New Yorker,[1] and its reception there[2] helped it to leading the New York Times Best Seller list. As a law student, he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal (1951–1952), [3] and he clerked for Justice Hugo L. Black during the 1953-1954 term. Prior to his academic career he was a lawyer for major Washington, D.C. area firms.[4] [5]
BooksReich has also authored and co-authored a number of books. The following is a selection:
- 1970: The Greening of America: How the Youth Revolution is Trying to Make America Livable
- 1972: Garcia: A Signpost to New Space (co-authored with Jerry Garcia and Jann Wenner, Straight Arrow Press; re-issued, Da Capo Press, 2003 [2])
- 1976: The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef (autobiography)
- 1995: Opposing the System
Charles A. Reich begins Opposing the System (1995) on front dust cover with a jeremiad:
Unless it is stopped, the system will soon cause irreparable damage to the human community. The great political deception that has long suppressed any effective action must be exposed. We need constitutional curbs on corporate tyranny, a restored social contract that protects economic justice and personal security, and a resurgent protest movement guided by a new map of reality. It is time for the greening of America.
A NEW MAP OF REALITY~PERMANENT STAGE OF ECONOMIC DISEASE
America’s Search for Change
Although written in the mid-1990s, Opposing the System reads too much like today’s headlines. It also reads like a tutorial for Occupy Wall Street, which is still in its infant stage. Charles A. Reich writes that discontent has become a powerful force in American life. The desire for change comes not only from the margins of society but straight from the heart of the middle class. As expressed in the 1994 election, the force of change has been described as an earthquake, a tidal wave, a revolution. Its concerns are profound: that democracy is not working and people feel powerless; that the economy forces most people into a losing struggle where earnings can never catch up to expenses; that rising social conflict is destroying safety and security; and that we have lost the ability to imagine a better future.
BBC WORLD SERVICE
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Magazine / 20 October 2011… way," he says. A curious Lloyd visited the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, New York, to have a look at some of the people wearing…
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18 October 2011Film-maker and author Michael Moore talks to Jeremy Paxman about the significance of the 'Occupy' anti-capitalism protest movement, which began…
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US & Canada / 10 October 2011Occupy Wall Street. "The only commonality that we have is that we are both opposed to the bailouts of Wall Street - and that is it." On Monday,…
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7 October 2011Thousands of protesters have marched on New York's financial district, with rallies also held in other US cities.
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6 October 2011On the streets of New York and other major cities, protests are spreading against what demonstrators claim is corporate greed.
In response to this cry of pain we have seen the victory of those who would lead us back toward the pre-New Deal past. Apart from them, there is an extraordinary silence. Where are the voices of progress, of betterment, of hope? The main progressive ideas of this century have seemingly all been abandoned, and those who once had faith in these ideas appear ashamed, apologetic, and ready to recant. The silence of our thinkers reveals a crisis deeper than discontent—a failure of human intelligence to understand and master the unknown malady that threatens us. If we cannot explain the problem, we cannot fix it or cure it. So long as we cannot see what is wrong, we will have no valid new ideas or visions. (3-4)
Reich accurately predicts the angst at beginning of the 21st century because it began in 20th century economic decisions. Reich writes that every generation of Americans has had its dreams. What has prevented their fulfillment? Where are the Four Freedoms, including freedom from want and freedom from fear, described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the goals of World War II? Where is the ideal of a society based on love, caring, and community that the pioneers of the sixties pictured? Where is the “city on a hill” that Ronald Reagan imagined? Where is the “society that puts people first” that Bill Clinton promised? What has prevented these hopes from being realized, and where may they yet be found?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/bizdaily
Eurozone deal 27 Oct 11
Thu, 27 Oct 11
Duration: 19 mins
Available: 30 days remaining
Is the eurozone deal a milestone? Will the losses agreed on Greek bonds be seen as a default? Lesley Curwen talks to David Geen of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association. And James Watson, director of economic affairs at BusinessEurope discusses the eurozone deal with Veronica Nilsson, from the European Trade Union Confederation.
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The invisible system that governs us has no name. It represents a combination of two kinds of government—public government and private economic government, functioning together, [i.e., Congress and the American Enterprise Institute]. This combined system has escaped all traditional limits and controls. It has circumvented the Constitution, nullified democracy, and overridden the free market. It usurps our powers and dominates our lives. Yet we cannot see it or describe it. It is new to human history. It is immensely powerful but without brakes, indifferent to the effect of its actions on human beings.
There is no imposing marble building in Washington, D.C. with “THE SYSTEM” carved across its portico. The System is a merger of governmental, corporate, and media power into a managerial entity more powerful by reason of technology, organization, and control of livelihood than any previously known form of rule.
To describe the System in this way must inevitably sound alarmist. But before dismissing this picture, remember how powerless most people feel. Ordinary people feel no ability to influence the decay, the violence, the insecurity that threatens their lives. Even those in high places have no control over what is happening to our [or their] society.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/docarchive
One Day In Syria
Thu, 27 Oct 11
Duration: 27 mins
For Assignment, Bill Law paints a portrait of one day in the Syrian revolution, talking via the internet and phone to people across the country.
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Our experience of helplessness contradicts the image of a democracy subject to law and to the will of the people. Our stress, anger, and frustration do not square with the conventional picture of a market that is responsive to our needs and desires. Our fear of the future does not accord with the premise that we are in a charge, that the society obeys our will. Instead, we feel like terrified passengers on a careening, off-course airliner or train.
Reich writes that the System represents a higher level of decision-making at which choices affecting us all are made. We need to see this higher level in order to have any effective influence upon it.
In the drama of our times, the System is the missing actor in the show—with the biggest part. Inability to discern the System’s functioning represents an intellectual failure by economist, political scientists, and legal scholars, whose incomplete assumptions about reality mislead them. If the System seems like an alien power out of science fiction, that is because it is so different from what we have known in the past.
Reich charges that the System has inevitably rejected more and more of the eighteenth-century constitutional and economic vision. Technology and organization emphasize control rather than freedom of economic opportunity, and the System these forces have joined to produce has predictably rejected both constitutional and market freedoms to become a law unto itself. The System has given us many benefits, but its hidden costs and failures are now being revealed.
Occupy Oakland Protester Hurt, Police Criticized
by Carrie Kahn
October 27, 2011
Downtown Oakland, Calif., has settled down after a violent Tuesday night, when police clashed with protesters with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.
It has been increasingly unable or unwilling to include everyone in the property that is its main justification. More and more of what the System calls economic growth had proven to be a depletion of fundamental values. Dehumanization and damage to human beings are side effects of the System’s operations. As these pathologies have become more acute, the System has resorted to blame and repression rather than reform. It is now producing a slow but overwhelming social and economic catastrophe that threatens to engulf us all.
At the heart of this catastrophe is the loss of the individual’s power over livelihood. Livelihood includes the right to work, the ability to make a living, the opportunity to participate in society. Basically we have lost control over this most basic of all human necessities. It is the System which now controls the right of livelihood, and in its indifference to individual human beings it treats many people as surplus, others as disposable or of little value, and everyone else as if their interests and happiness matter only to the extent that they are useful to the System [which globalization has made worldwide].
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/27/141733449/protests-pick-up-steam-will-obama-get-burned ~ Occupy Wall Street & Obama
Reich writes that we must ascend from spontaneous protest to intelligent opposition. Protest is directed at particular wrongs. Opposition seeks to change the System itself. Unlike protest, opposition requires a correct diagnosis of what is wrong and a believable vision of how things could be better. Opposition will provide a great learning experience for Americans. (151)
Comparisons of protest then and now can be helpful and important. In the nineties, protest will not be limited to youth or to students—the elderly will protest; people whose jobs are endangered will protest; there will be protests on behalf of children. Tangible economic issues such as health care, the minimum wage, and job security will be heard of more frequently than broad abstractions such as “alienation” and “dehumanization.” Protest will be better focused; such divisive issues as the Vietnam War and the draft will not be present to cause confusion.
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