Archive (Page 7) • Schooling in Socialist America • Buttondown

Towards a socialist finance

From the article “Concrete Utopia,” on Yugoslavian Architecture.I’m trying to understand finance as a socialist. The pandemic is a good opportunity because...

What the Fed did on Thursday

It was a pesach miracle. The Fed decided to initiate another program of $2.3 trillion, boldly buying credit it has never bought before (specifically junk...

'Green' Bonds Now

We know that carbon emissions are an emergency. They need to go down a lot and fast. We all know the Green New Deal and the Green Stimulus and other...

Poop back and forth, forever

Remember that scene from Me, You, and Everyone We Know where the little boy says I want to poop back and forth. Like, I'll poop into her butt hole... and...

The Wizard of Oz Effect

This strangely formatted article has so much important information about the financial terrain in this moment. What I’m getting from it is that there was a...

Corporate debt spreads, here I come. This weekend I set myself the task of trying to understand this short piece at Econospeak on corporate credit spreads...

People before corporations?

This may be a dumb or unpopular question for a socialist to ask, but I’m interested in thinking it through: should our slogan be “people before...

The online news show Rising is a new favorite source for left news/analysis. I listen to it almost every day. One of the strangest and most interesting...

There’s a good piece on the difference between furloughs and layoffs in the Philly Inquirer today. The lines are fuzzy at best. Furloughed workers ‘maybe’...

Joblessness and suicide

(CW: suicide.) Joblessness claims went up again last week, making the total 6.6 million claims in the last month. In searching around for the impacts of...

Leverage: an assignment

A friend on Facebook who studies economics posted a challenge: try to read this semi-insidery article about what’s going on in finance right now and post a...

Black hole, not black swan

Finance people call this pandemic production crisis a black swan, but I don’t like that term. Of course it’s accurate from a ruling class point of view: it’s...

We need working class data collection

I think socialists need our own data collection that takes measurements from a working class perspective. For example: yesterday, US consumer confidence...

Remarkable, contentious leverage

I know you're dying to know about some sneaky leverage in the pandemic relief package signed last week! Apparently there's $454 billion of this package that...

I’ve been reading about the Federal Reserve. It just spent $6 trillion dollars to rescue capitalism from the pandemic. It’s a main character in the story of...

The Imperiali$m of Relief

American imperialism manifests in a lot of ways. But in this pandemic crisis, one way that’s getting my attention is in terms of protection against...

Interest rates like beer for a dime

Two big questions about the crisis are: what was the state of capitalism before coronavirus, and what’ll its future be?I rarely hear socialists talking about...

The (socialist) thing about buybacks

Everyone’s bashing buybacks. Bailouts and relief packages for Wall Street are so bad, critics say, because corporations just buy their own stocks and enrich...

$6 trillion isn't enough.

The big item in the news this morning is the CARES Act, passed in the Senate last night. It features a $2 trillion of fiscal programs including:$1200 of...

Bond with the wind

Like I’ve said before, I’m an education researcher. Why would I be compulsively blogging about the capitalist mode of production in this moment (other than...

Precision Crisis

The pandemic is causing an economic crisis, but we should be precise. When I see socialist analysis and others on the left say that the problem is...

Socialist approaches to the crisis?

Ever hear those annoying ethics hypotheticals where you have to choose between two awful situations to figure out what your ethical theory is? That’s sort of...

Prediction: Yellow Vests. In the US.

Get ready to be angry. Two very different economic experiences are emerging in our fair mode of production. If you didn't believe in a struggle between...

Recovering from capitalist pandemic

We obviously want people to recover from COVID-19, but when it comes to society as a whole there's going to be a bigger recovery from the structural impact...

Thoughts on education, capitalism, policy.

Welcome to Schooling in Socialist America by me, David I. Backer. education, ideology, policy, socialism (@lilacphilly + @phillysocfem), puns, etc. he/him....