Episodes
Monday Dec 29, 2014
Monday Dec 29, 2014
Jack Rasmus dissects key provisions in the Republican Congress’s recently passed ‘Omnibus’ Appropriations bill earlier this month, that provides numerous big benefits to US Corporations while cutting deferred wages and pensions for US workers. Jack focuses on five key provisions of the Omnibus bill: return to banking deregulation and bank derivatives trading, continued business tax cuts, the gutting of the EPA and deals for the Coal and Agribusiness industries, US Defense Corps and new spending in middle east and Ukraine, and even more corporate money for politicians as the big freebies for business. In contrast, the Omnibus cuts workers’ defined benefit pensions in multiemployer plans, marking the beginning of a new general offensive by business and politicians to phase out employer negotiated pensions in the USA altogether. The USA Congress’s Omnibus bill represents, Jack argues, new forms of austerity for workers, focusing on deferred wage rollbacks (i.e. pensions), while more goodies continue to flow to corporate America. Jack concludes with a look at two other recently formed governments’ initiatives to accelerate austerity in their economies as well: the Ukraine’s newly formed government this past December, which is about to accelerate its austerity programs’ implementation, and Japan’s new Liberal Democratic Party government also elected in December, which is about to move to impose restructuring and ‘labor market reforms’ in the coming year. 2015 will not be a good year, Jack suggests, for workers as similar ‘restructuring’ of labor markets are scheduled for Europe, India, and elsewhere—but a continuing great year for business and investor incomes.
Saturday Dec 20, 2014
Oil Deflation, Russia’s Recession, and Ukraine’s Depression - 12.20.14
Saturday Dec 20, 2014
Saturday Dec 20, 2014
Jack Rasmus reviews the continuing collapse of global oil prices and its effect on the emerging recession in Russia, continuing economic stagnation in Europe, and the deepening Depression in the Ukraine economy. Rasmus discusses how the global oil price collapse may be entering a second phase soon, further impacting not only the major oil commodity producers (Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Norway, Mexico, etc.), but now, increasingly, the economies of other non-oil commodity producers (Brazil, Indonesia, India, Turkey, and others). Additional pressures appear to be building as well on global financial asset markets, especially US and European corporate junk bonds. How this is related to last week’s US Federal Reserve decision to put off raising US interest rates another 2-3 months, and the subsequent latest surge in the US stock market, is explained. Jack then discusses developments in the Russian economy as it clearly enters recession; the feedback effects of Russia’s recession on Germany and other eastern European economies; and the further feedback effects of both in turn on the deepening Depression in the Ukraine. Jack concludes with a detailed review of the negative effects of the IMF bailout on Ukraine, the recent installation of US and EU citizens as economics and finance ministers in Ukraine’s new government, Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk’s pleading for more aid from the west, and latest hard nose demands by the IMF and G7 for Ukraine to impose even more austerity on its people if it wants more loans in 2015.
Saturday Dec 13, 2014
Saturday Dec 13, 2014
Dr. Jack Rasmus discusses the current global oil price deflation that began in earnest last June and is now accelerating, driving global oil from a prior 2014 high of $115/barrel to a recent low of $59. Jack explains how the net effect on the global economy will likely prove to b significantly negative overall, and that the price decline could fall as low as $40/barrel in coming months. The impact on Emerging Market Economies, already seriously slowing or in recession, will also prove significant—causing their currencies to collapse even further and in turn generating capital flight, declining credit availability, slowing investment, rising inflation, and inability of emerging market businesses and governments to finance previous incurred debt. Oil price deflation will almost certainly push Europe and Japan into general deflation and further recession, and toward more QE money injections that will further generate asset price bubbles. Rasmus predicts China’s current economic slowdown will continue in turn as Europe, Japan and Emerging markets slow their purchases of China exports. The contrary popular USA notion that lower oil prices mean lower gasoline prices and therefore more spending by USA consumers and businesses is challenged. In conclusion, Jack discusses how oil deflation globally could set off another round of financial instability worldwide, and how it will likely mean the ‘shale gas/oil fracking’ boom in the USA will now stall and could potentially set off a ‘junk bond market’ crisis in the USA similar to the subprime market real estate bust of 2007-09. Will the global oil glut and deflation lead to another ‘Asian Meltdown’, this time even more geographically dispersed; and, in the USA, will it lead to another ‘oil patch’ crash that occurred in the US southwest in the 1980s—this time affecting North Dakota-Wyoming, Alaska, and Pennsylvania as well as Texas and the southwest? (Read Dr. Rasmus recent posting on the PRN website, ‘The Economic Consequences of Global Oil Deflation’, for further analyses).
Saturday Dec 06, 2014
Saturday Dec 06, 2014
Dr. Jack Rasmus interviews contingent faculty professors at several colleges in California, who are part of a growing wave in the USA of higher education professionals organizing themselves into unions in order to bargain collectively to change their current ‘second class’ employment citizenship as contingents. With talk of insufficient wage growth in the USA having become a common public topic of discussion in the USA in recent months, Dr. Rasmus focuses on one of the major causes: the explosive growth of contingent (i.e. part time, temporary) professional employment in US colleges and universities. Once only 22% of the entire professorial faculty at colleges, today contingent faculty constitute 70-75% of all professors teaching in higher education. With lower pay than tenured faculty, often with no benefits, and always no job security, contingent professors are beginning to organize themselves into unions to improve their working conditions. Dr. Rasmus interviews three contingent professors at California colleges that have just organized, or are organizing, into unions as part of the Service Employees International Union: at St. Marys College, Mills College, and California College of the Arts. The professors discuss why they and their colleagues chose to unionize, what the process was like, and what they are now doing as they prepare for bargaining with their respective administrations. Guests interviewed include Lain Hart from St. Marys College, Ben Browne from Mills College, and Hugh Behm-Steinberg at California College of the Arts all located in the San Francisco Bay area.
Interview Participants:
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts, where he teaches in the MFA Writing and Undergraduate Writing and Literature Programs. A recipient of Wallace Stegner and NEA creative writing fellowships, and the author of multiple books of poetry, he has taught as an adjunct at CCA for fifteen years. He is a member of the SEIU-CCA contract bargaining team.
Dr. R. Ben Brown has a PhD in History from the University of Michigan and a JD from Vanderbilt University. He teaches U.S. Legal and Constitutional history in the Legal Studies Department at UC Berkeley, where he has a continuing appointment protected by Union contract. He teaches in the History and Public Policy Departments at Mills college where he is a member of the interim bargaining team.
Lain Hart teaches in the Composition Department of Saint Mary's College of California and is the author of several academic publications, and lives in Oakland, California