Nuriel Roubini, interviewed by the WSJ, suggests that Marx might be right after all. In addition to being a professor of economics at New York University he is chairman of Roubini Global Economics a, consulting firm. Known on Wall Street as ‘Dr.Doom’ and the ‘Permabear,’ he successfully predicted the 2008 economic collapse.

Roubini began academic research and policy making by teaching at Yale while also spending time at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and Bank of Israel. Much of his early studies focused on emerging markets. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, he was a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, later moving to the United States Treasury Department as a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner, who is now Treasury Secretary. —sourced from Wikipedia

Here is a transcript of a portion of that interview posted byh goinsouth at DailyKos:

WSJ:  So you painted a bleak picture of sub-par economic growth going forward, with an increased risk of another recession in the near future.  That sounds awful.  What can government and what can businesses do to get the economy going again or is it just sit and wait and gut it out?

Roubini:  Businesses are not doing anything.  They’re not actually helping.  All this risk made them more nervous.  There’s a value in waiting.  They claim they’re doing cutbacks because there’s excess capacity and not adding workers because there’s not enough final demand, but there’s a paradox, a Catch-22.  If you’re not hiring workers, there’s not enough labor income, enough consumer confidence, enough consumption, not enough final demand.  In the last two or three years, we’ve actually had a worsening because we’ve had a massive redistribution of income from labor to capital, from wages to profits, and the inequality of income has increased and the marginal propensity to spend of a household is greater than the marginal propensity of a firm because they have a greater propensity to save, that is firms compared to households.  So the redistribution of income and wealth makes the problem of inadequate aggregate demand even worse.

Karl Marx had it right.  At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself.  You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand.  That’s what has happened.  We thought that markets worked.  They’re not working.  The individual can be rational.  The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else’s income and consumption.  That’s why it’s a self-destructive process.

 

The full interview is here.

Michael Moore, in his recent post about the Republican attack on the air traffic controllers union thirty years ago, finishes with the  suggestion that internet petitions and tweets are not going to fight the continuing attacks on the poor by an increasingly corporatist state.

Have we all just given up? What are we waiting for? Forget about the 20% who support the Tea Party — we are the other 80%! This decline will only end when we demand it. And not through an online petition or a tweet. We are going to have to turn the TV and the computer and the video games off and get out in the streets (like they’ve done in Wisconsin). Some of you need to run for local office next year. We need to demand that the Democrats either get a spine and stop taking corporate money — or step aside.

Italics mine. Get out in the streets. Are we finally angry enough for massed civil disobedience, general strikes, and non-violent occupation of corporations that either don’t pay their taxes, or are significantly under-taxed?

I don’t really know, but the impulse to such actions seems to be growing. If you’re interested in taking direct action Moore suggests you look at two groups.

The first of these is the October 2011 organization, which is calling for a mass gathering October 6th in Washington DC’s Freedom Plaza.

A Call to Action – Oct. 6, 2011 and onward

October 2011 is the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of the 2012 federal austerity budget. It is time to light the spark that sets off a true democratic, nonviolent transition to a world in which people are freed to create just and sustainable solutions.

We call on people of conscience and courage—all who seek peace, economic justice, human rights and a healthy environment—to join together in Washington, D.C., beginning on Oct. 6, 2011, in nonviolent resistance similar to the Arab Spring and the Midwest awakening.

The details are available on the website October2011.org.

Another of Moore’s suggestions is that you might want to look in on a move to occupy Wall Street. This strikes me as a rather more quixotic undertaking,  more like conceptual art, than realizable street protest. Nevertheless the idea of trying to get 20,000 people to set up a mass camp with tents and kitchens in Wall Street tickles me.

Even if this is no more than a satyrical send-up the very threat would shiver the conservative peace of mind. (Their capacity for believing in spooks  and goblins is almost unlimited.)

You may visit www.occupywallst or get the picture at the Ad Busters web site.

Related Post: Tucson Progressive, “Poverty, unemployment, unions, the ‘beast’ … and you.”

It is too soon after the resolution of the great debt crisis “compromise” to predict its consequences. It might after all turn out that money and jobs trickle down from the coffers of the protected banks, corporations and ultra rich.

Perhaps in the new America of fiscal responsibility the working class will be inspired to hitch up its collective britches and realize the American dream unhampered by the cost of compulsory of health insurance; unsnarled in safety nets; and freed of the cruel domination of labor unions. And all at the minimum wage.

In other words we might actually realize, and come to adore, the great conservative heaven

Of course there is always the chance that we will watch a process of slow decay as we produce a permanent under-class of the unemployed, and underemployed, whose lack of buying power eats away at small business, by denying those businesses customers.

Keith Olbermann has offered an excellent analysis of what the nation has been put through. He doesn’t think polite letters to  our congressmen are going to turn things around.

… the only response is to be organized and unified and hell-bent in return. We must find again the energy and the purpose of the 1960′s and early 1970′s and we must protest this deal and all the God damn deals to come, in the streets. We must arise, non-violently but insistently. General strikes, boycotts, protests, sit-ins, non-cooperation take-overs – but modern versions of that resistance, facilitated and amplified, by a weapon our predecessors did not have: the glory that is instantaneous communication.