Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.

It's hard to believe that more than 90 percent of the workforce in Zimbabwe are part of the informal sector. These workers do everything from selling bananas and playing music to selling stone carvings and other crafts. Unfortunately because they are not considered part of the formal economy, they are often the most exploited—or ignored—by the government. As a result, in 2002, they formed the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations (ZCIEA), an associate of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), to help gain a voice for their members in government.

These workers, who traditionally competed against each other and with the formal sector —are now coordinated and working together to tackle pressing issues such as social security, disability benefits, improved infrastructure, working conditions, and many others.

The Informal Economy is being helped by ZCTU together with their elected leadership to lobby legislators to change the laws to that they become user friendly.

           Read more... 

Okay the Dog has had it right up to here with Republicans saying that unemployment assistance keeps people from finding work. Only a party that is the refuge of scoundrels and the ultra-rich could possibly think this. As one of those folks who is trying (and failing) to get by on the unemployment benefits, let the Dog lay it out for you.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

In the state of Colorado, you are entitled to 60% of your wages on unemployment. That is as long as you did not make too much money at your previous job. You see benefits are capped at $443 a week, so if you made any more than $38,400 you are out of luck for the rest of the 60%. This means that when middle class folks making around $50,000 a year become unemployed they are getting the shaft, twice. When the Dog was employed he was making $1,025 a week (not how they actually paid it but to compare apples to apples) so instead of getting 60% of that the hound is getting 43%.

           Read more... 

Raw Story, March 6th, 2010

In his film Capitalism: A Love Story [set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray Monday], Michael Moore squares off with the free-market system for its role in leveraging the United States's wealth into the hands of a few.

But in one clip cut from the documentary [Moore] interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, who explains how capitalism is actually contributing to the very downfall of the human race and the "degradation of the planet."

"All sorts of people who have spent their lives studying climate change, from Bill McKibben on down, have warned us that we don't have a lot of time left," Hedges said. "So it's not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but it literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life. If that's not thwarted soon...then we will begin to see massive dislocations, environmental refugees, further depleting of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. The UN estimates that by 2050 the size of the planet will double."

The very concept of capitalism, Moore declares in the film, is the problem because it inevitably leads to a system where the richest few control the means of production as well as the levers of power -- leading to a "plutonomy," a term used in a leaked Citigroup memo from 2005, in which the finance juggernaut concluded that the United States is no longer a democracy.

In the interview, Hedges decries America's turn toward supply-side economics over the last three decades as the cause of stagnating middle class incomes, contrasting it with the increasingly lavish fortunes of the wealthy and the aid they often receive from the government at the expense of working people.

           Read more... 

It may sound like a character from StarWars, but starting in Q2 of 2010, the WOCU or World Currency Unit will become the medium of exchange among trading nations. This is welcome news to a world weary of Dollar hegemony and the violent and bloody US imperialism that comes along with it.

One of the most beneficial aspects of the Wocu is a stabilization in the prices of imports, exports, and traded commodities -- freeing the people of the world from the crippling manipulation of currencies by Central Banks, which is directly responsible for a great deal of human suffering at the consumer level.

For me, it's not such great news since I am a currency trader and rely on the international corruption of big banks to make a living. Oh well, it's a small price to pay to finally jettison the Dollar and the massive reserves that nations are forced to hold [often against their will] in order to do business with one another. For my part, I'll find another Plutocratic enclave to exploit.

Meanwhile, the Wocu is apolitical -- and it's about damned time.

           Read more... 

An experienced economist and a novice economist are walking down the road. They come across some dog sh*t lying on the pavement.

The experienced economist says, "If you eat that dog sh*t, I'll give you $20,000!"

The novice economist runs his optimization program and figures out he's better off eating it, so he does and collects the money.

Continuing along the same road they almost step into another pile of dog sh*t.

The novice economist says, "Now, if you eat this sh*t I'll give you $20,000."

After evaluating the proposal, the experienced economist eats the sh*t and collects the money.

They go on. The novice economist wonders, "Listen, we both have the same amount of money we had before, but we both ate sh*t. I don't see us being better off."

The experienced economist retorts, "Not so! We've created $40,000 of trade!"

           Read more... 

Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and is a founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI).  His research centers on macroeconomics, conditions for low-wage workers in the U.S. and globally, the analysis of financial markets, and the economics of building a clean-energy economy in the U.S. His books include A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the US and Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity.

Here Pollin talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network and outlines a careful combination of job-generating public investments, incentives to mobilize private investment, and policies that protect economically vulnerable populations that can create the economic and policy environment that Obama could use to create 18 million jobs and lower the unemployment rate to only 4 percent by 2012.



Transcript here, and there is also a companion article to this by Pollin in the March 08, 2010 edition of The Nation.

Why was the US so quick to send so many troops into Haiti after the January earthquake? Why were there so many fears from around the world of US militarism and exploitation in Haiti?

Oil?

F. William Engdahl is an economist and author and the writer of the best selling book "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.", and has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s.

Here Engdahl talks with Paul Jay of The Real News, says that geophysics suggest there could be massive oil and mineral deposits in Haiti, and that the US may be motivated by the desire to strategically deny oil deposits in Haiti to the rest of the world.

ENGDAHL: Well, if you look at a geophysical map of Haiti and the Caribbean, it jumps out that Haiti and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, lies right along the conjunction of what are called tectonic plates, but three separate tectonic plates. If you can imagine a China vase that falls off the table and gets broken in many pieces and you glue it back together, well, these tectonic plates are a bit similar in terms of images.

But three of those converge right at the land area that's called Haiti, and generally where we have such a conversion of tectonic plates, we have a great amount of geophysical motion, energy, and so forth. They tend to be along—in the Pacific you have the Ring of Fire, which is literally the ring of vulcanic activity—. Indonesia is in one such zone; Saudi Arabia and the giant oil fields of the Middle East, from Kuwait and so forth, the Persian Gulf, are another such convergence of such plates.

And up until now there's been very little talk about petroleum and Haiti, but it's not because there hasn't been interest in petroleum in Haiti. My take on it is that there are—according to geophysicists knowledgeable about the geophysics of the Caribbean basin—you probably have large multinational oil companies, US, British oil companies and their allies, who are aware that with a little bit of exploration onshore and offshore, that there are probably enormous oil finds.

And you just had, two years ago, offshore Cuba, just north of Haiti, a giant—supergiant, actually, oil discovery, with several billion barrels of believed reserves of oil there that the Russians are helping the Cubans to exploit. So it stands to reason that the same geological fault line of these tectonic plates—the Caribbean plate, the North American plate, and the South American plate—they all converge north of Venezuela and in the area that's called Haiti.

That also makes Haiti ripe for other unusual minerals, such as uranium, gold, and so forth. And my own sense from talking with geophysicists on this whole Haiti question is that Haiti is probably one of the undeveloped treasures of mineral wealth on the planet...

The Real News Network - February 19, 2010
full transcript here

No fight in politics or culture is ever completely finished. Even the idea that no human should hold another in chattel slavery is still playing out in our society today. This idea of forever struggling for progress should be the core of anyone’s thinking if they want to label themselves progressive. Sadly, the Organized Labor movement and members seems to have lost this idea, if indeed they ever had it.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

It is easy to see how it happened. Labor and Trade Unions were formed first to combat the abuses of the industrialists. This was a fight for their actual lives as working conditions were so horrific we can hardly imagine them today. When that first fight, to be recognized as more than the machines who ran the machines was won, Labor went on to the second fight, wages and benefits.

This fight was won too. The Ozzie and Harriet middle class of the 1950’s and ‘60’s was created, in large part, by the wages and benefits Labor negotiated out with management. This is where the problem started. As these workers raised families they bought into the American dream, they wanted to better for their children. This is no shock, but what the materialistic, possession focused American dream leads to was bad for Labor.

           Read more... 

Wednesday's report from the Congressional Oversight Panel makes it very clear that while things may feel relatively stable right now on the commercial real estate front, the real bomb hits in 2011. Banks could lose $200 - $300 billion, and 'every American' could be affected:

The full force of the commercial real estate problem will be felt over the next three years and beyond, according to the panel's February assessment, which means it starts to get worse starting today.

           Read more... 

"Prophecy" is the title of a new play by Karen Malpede, and I'm here to attempt the unamerican task of telling you to see it without telling you it's a comedy. In fact, I'm going to confess that I had to take a break from it and recover before I could write about it. I felt like I'd taken a blow with an enormous sledge hammer, even though I knew that a whole orchestra of smaller instruments had produced what I was feeling.

It was not a bad feeling, not an undesirable feeling. The play is a thing of beauty, and not all beauty fits into that Hollywood sensation of wouldn't-such-a-thing-be-sweet-but-I-bet-they're-divorced-in-a-year-and-I-shouldn't-have-had-that-last-gallon-of-coke.

There was also comfort in the fact that someone had written this play and understood the grief that we all know is real even when we avoid it. And I merely read the play. If a group of actors can successfully perform something with this much emotional intensity (far more just in reading it than in any antiwar movie I've seen), I think there will be more comfort in that, and in the solidarity of feeling in the audience, many of whose members will probably go home without imagining the play to be at all political.

           Read more...