A majority (53.1 percent) of workers earning less than $12.16 per hour—the bottom 30 percent of wage earners—earn so little on the job that they must rely on public assistance to make ends meet.
"The proletariat of each country must, of course, first settle matters with its own bourgeoisie," Marx wrote, but the corporate class formatively battles internationally, including locating fake corporate headquarters to low-tax nations, in effect bleeding their home sovereign nations of tax dollars, starving state services and aiding in turning both governing and opposition parties into austerity regimes. This book and film chart the practice and ways to combat it.
The millions of service members who live on military bases around the world experience a kind of economic and social security that is foreign to most of America’s middle class. In the military, clothing, food, shelter, and medical care are guaranteed. And although it offers less choice about what to wear or where to live than the private sector, there’s a baseline of care for service members that doesn’t exist in the civilian world.
Unlike most other countries, the United States doesn’t control drug prices. It leaves pricing up to the market, which enables drug companies to charge as much as the market will bear. So what, exactly, did Martin Shkreli do wrong, by the standards of today’s capitalism? It’s easy to go after bad guys, much harder to go after bad systems.
"FOSSIL CAPITAL" The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Verso Books, 2016 By Andreas Malm. Reviewed by Martin Empson
Portside's moderators every day contribute our best at finding and sharing the most interesting and useful material we can for the modest task of remaking the world into a fairer and more peaceful place. We expect no pay -- seeing the material on Portside read and forwarded and acted on is reward enough. Once a year, we appeal to readers to contribute some cash to sustain the Portside infrastructure that makes our work possible. Here's why...
The disparities in wealth that we term “income inequality” are no accident, and they can’t be fixed by fiddling at the edges of our current economic system. These disparities happened by design.
Tax havens cost the world’s governments hundreds of billions of dollars a year, promote corruption, and undermine the rule of law. They are part of a larger worrisome pattern in which the world’s corporations outrun the governing capacity of states.
Portside is proud to bring our readers a full chapter from the book Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. Periodically Portside will be sharing with our readers chapters and excerpts from books we feel are noteworthy. What better way to launch, than a book about socialism-in the USA. Ron Reosti's chapter - A Democratically Run Economy Can Replace the Oligarchy - argues we can democratically design and control an economy that satisfies the needs and desires of the people.
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