Episodes
Wednesday Dec 18, 2013
Alternative Visions - Are US Unions at a Strategic Impasse, Part 3? - 12/18/13
Wednesday Dec 18, 2013
Wednesday Dec 18, 2013
Jack Rasmus continues the discussion series on the topic ‘Are US Unions At a Strategic Impasse’, interviewing long time, experienced grass roots union leaders on the state of union strategy today. Topics raised include unions ‘Organizing’, ‘Industrial-Bargaining’, ‘Political’, and ‘Community Alliances’ strategies. Jack welcomes today, as his latest guest in the on-going discussion, Ray Rogers, originator of the ‘Corporate Campaign’ strategy approach developed first in the 1980s in organizing and industrial-bargaining fights with corporate giants, J.P. Stevens and Hormel & Co. foods—as well as in corporate campaigns that continue today against Coca-Cola and other corporate behemoths. Jack and Ray discuss how a ‘corporate campaign’ strategy approach challenges current union approaches—and how a corporate campaign might be implemented today in current union worker struggles at Boeing Corp. and Verizon.’
‘Ray Rogers is a union activist and lead organizer for dozens of corporate campaigns since the 1970s, across many industries in the food, insurance, airlines, paper, textiles, and various New York City public sectors, including Coca Cola, RJ Reynolds, International Paper, Hormel, JP Stevens, American Airlines, NY city transit authority, Brooklyn Gas and others. For more on the corporate campaign strategy as alternative to current union organizing-industrial/bargaining strategies, see his website at corporatecampaign.org
Wednesday Dec 11, 2013
Alternative Visions - Are US Unions Today at a Strategic Impasse, Part 2 - 12/11/13
Wednesday Dec 11, 2013
Wednesday Dec 11, 2013
Wednesday Dec 04, 2013
Alternative Visions - What’s Wrong With Economists, Part 2 - 12/04/13
Wednesday Dec 04, 2013
Wednesday Dec 04, 2013
Dr. Jack Rasmus continues his discussion and critique of the fundamental errors of analysis shared by the two wings of contemporary academic economics: the ‘Retro Classicalists’ and ‘Hybrid Keynesians’, focusing on their fetish attachment to money supply, interest rates, and their inadequate shared, misunderstanding of the relationships between money and credit, real and financial asset investment, and the growing role of Finance Capital in the 21stcentury global capitalist economy. Dr. Rasmus then takes on what he calls the ‘Neo-Marxist’ wing of contemporary Marxist economic analysis, explaining how and why their fixation on the idea of a ‘Falling Rate of Profit’ in real production leads to wrong conclusions that are not even shared by Marx himself. The neo-marxist notion that falling profits (not supported in fact) are why capitalists have been turning toward finance is shown as logically incorrect, as well as not supportable by either definitions of profits or global data on profits. Rasmus argues the central concept in Marx is not falling rate of profit, but capital accumulation—that is investment—and that Marx himself began to explore, but did not complete, his analysis of the proper role of finance in capitalist investment and capital accumulation.