Sanciones punitivas contra el pueblo de Venezuela

• Lo que busca esta guerra es castigar a la población para doblegar al gobierno.
• Una pregunta clave: ¿son legales las sanciones impuestas por Estados Unidos contra el gobierno de Venezuela? La respuesta es negativa. 

Alejandro Nadal

La Jornada

Los medios televisivos del mundo transmiten el mensaje de que el gobierno de Nicolás Maduro ha provocado una crisis humanitaria. La narrativa es que la mala gestión de la economía que acompaña cualquier proyecto socialista conduce al caos. En muy pocas ocasiones se habla de la historia del régimen que comenzó con Hugo Chávez y de la larga lista de intentos para sabotearlo y derribarlo, comenzando con el frustrado golpe militar de 2002, apoyado por el gobierno estadunidense, como revelan muchos estudios bien documentados.Venezuela tiene hoy las reservas probadas de petróleo más importantes del planeta: más de 300 mil millones de barriles. Es un crudo pesado, caro de extraer y refinar, pero Estados Unidos no le quita la vista de encima a este recurso. Las exportaciones de crudo generan 98 por ciento de las divisas extranjeras utilizadas por esa economía.

Progressive capitalism – an oxymoron — Michael Roberts Blog

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel (Riksbank) prize winner in economics and former chief economist at the World Bank, as well as an adviser to the leftist Labour leadership in the UK. He stands to the left in the spectrum of mainstream economics. He has just published a new book called People, Power, and Profits: Progressive […]

a través de Progressive capitalism – an oxymoron — Michael Roberts Blog

En deuda con Assange

Pedro Miguel

El fundador de Wikileaks sabe perfectamente lo que hace y a lo que se expone: confrontar a la máxima potencia mundial y sus principales aliados –que son potencias por derecho propio– en condiciones de desventaja brutal: una pequeña organización, limitada en recursos con muy pocos integrantes, ha sido capaz, sin embargo, de poner en jaque al gobierno de Estados Unidos y a muchos otros, de cimbrar la complejísima red de relaciones mundiales de Washington y de modificar de esa manera las relaciones de poder del mundo contemporáneo. La difusión de los Papeles de Afganistán, de los Papeles de Irak y de los cables del Departamento de Estado, nueve años más tarde, marcó un parteaguas para los gobernantes, las sociedades y los medios de todo el planeta. Para llevar a cabo tal hazaña es necesario tener una excepcional comprensión del mundo, un propósito claro y un programa de acción definido, y Julian Assange los tiene y supo transmitirlos a su organización. Su historia no es la de un travieso desorientado ni la de un enfant terrible de la informática, como lo han querido presentar a posteriori los medios occidentales que engordaron su circulación y su tráfico gracias a los materiales informativos que Wikileaks les entregó de manera gratuita; ahora se refieren a Assange como “el hacker australiano” y le niegan las facetas de periodista, de pensador y de activista que conviven en este perseguido planetario.

A fines de 2010 Wikileaks decidió suspender su colaboración con grandes diarios para enfocarse en medios independientes y más pequeños y agrupar aquella información en conjuntos nacionales.

Getting longer but lower — Michael Roberts Blog

The first three months of 2019 have shown a significant slowing in global economic activity. Global manufacturing output (as measured by JP Morgan economists) is actually falling. So too is global trade for the first two months of this year. And just today US retail sales for February also showed a slowdown. We’ve had falling […]

a través de Getting longer but lower — Michael Roberts Blog

Invisible Leviathan – Marx’s law of value in the twilight of capitalism — Michael Roberts Blog

My foreword to Invisible Leviathan, by Professor Murray Smith of Brock University, Ontario, Canada, published by Brill in November 2018. Relevant, I think, to my recent presentation on the contribution of Marx to economics made at the Rethinking Economics conference at Greenwich University, London. The message of Murray Smith’s book is aptly portrayed by its […]

a través de Invisible Leviathan – Marx’s law of value in the twilight of capitalism — Michael Roberts Blog

The fantasy world of the Long Depression — Michael Roberts Blog

This week, the US Federal Reserve Bank decided to stop raising its policy interest rate for the rest of 2019. The Fed started hiking rates from near zero back in late 2016 on the grounds that the Long Depression (in economic growth, investment and employment in the US and in other major economies) was over. […]

a través de The fantasy world of the Long Depression — Michael Roberts Blog

Yes, a Planned Economy Can Actually Work

By

Leigh Phillips

Michal Rozworski

Mega-companies like Amazon and Walmart are already using large-scale central planning. We can wield that tool for good. Socialists need to renew our embrace of democratic planning and fight for a real alternative to capitalism.

A Walmart associate sorts merchandise in the back room at a Walmart Supercenter during the annual shareholders meeting event on May 31, 2018 in Rogers, Arkansas. Rick T. Wilking / Getty

The latest book in our Jacobin Books series with Verso, The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism, is out now. In the following editorial, its two authors lay out a key argument in the book. All series titles are 40 percent off this week.

A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, a specter is haunting the West — the specter of what the Economist newspaper recently christened millennial socialism.

But what exactly is meant by socialism this time around? Is it just a return of New Deal liberalism or Scandinavian social democracy? Is it public health care and strong unions? Is it a flowering of cooperatives — as Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell wants?

And above all, what is the role of the market versus economic planning in our alternative? This surely is where the workers’-council-manufactured rubber hits the state-built road?

As Friedrich Engels wrote, “the government doing stuff” is definitely not a good definition of socialism: “Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism.” Today that would make the statist leviathan known as the Pentagon practically full communism.

Luckily, a new, more interesting conversation about the role of markets and economic planning is emerging, from an unexpected place.

Jack Ma, the founder of China’s Alibaba Group — one of the largest and most valuable companies in the world — argues that previous state planners in the Soviet Union and the early People’s Republic of China failed due to insufficient information. He has predicted that over the next three decades thanks to artificial intelligence and the sheer volume of data to which we now have access, we will finally be able to achieve a planned economy.