Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne recently unveiled Chrysler’s five-year operating plan. That a corporation should develop a strategic plan for the future seemed unsurprising and sensible to the reporters covering his press conference. How else could a large, complex organization function?
Economy and economic indicators
There’s this cartoon about two cows. The first cow has just figured out, to her horror and shock, how hamburgers are made.
“They only fatten us up,” she says, “so they can slaughter and eat us.”
The second cow scoffs at her: “You leftists and your crazy conspiracy theories!”
The next time someone says the “recession is over,” ask them exactly what they mean. Because it’s increasingly clear that it means different things to different people. And it’s equally clear it doesn’t usually mean that the unemployment crisis is over.
In this time of economic turmoil, living-wage policies are one way to stimulate our local economy. A living-wage policy is employed by at least 122 US cities and being considered by more than 70 other US cities. Many large corporations in Europe have adopted a living-wage policy. A living-wage is not the minimum wage which is the statutory minimum for wages. A living-wage allows families to live at a basic and decent level.
With the Financial Times lamenting the “end of the era of liberalization” and the “death of global free-market capitalism” and Newsweek declaring “we are all Socialists now,” one could be forgiven for believing that the worst excesses of neoliberalism have been relegated to the dustbin of history. But for all the talk of resurgent Keynesianism, reports of the death of neoliberalism - the pathological fear of all things public and the idolatrous worship of the market - are greatly exaggerated.
Last February, the New Anti-Capitalist Party (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, NPA) was founded in Paris with 10,000 members represented by 650 delegates. Almost overnight, the NPA drew 6% of the French electoral vote and its leader, Olivier Besancenot, a 35-year-old postal worker, became the second most popular left-wing politician in France after Ségolène Royal, the former head of the Socialist Party which is the official opposition. About 45% of the French electorate votes for leftist parties, and Besancenot has a 60% approval rating among French voters across the political spectrum.
Onward Stephen Harper! Lead us to the socialist Utopia! If you follow the right-wing punditry, you’d think comrades Harper, Obama, Brown and the like are leading us along that slippery slope to – gasp! -- socialism. Not that any of these leaders has a nice word to say about socialism; they don’t. But the more alarmist fringes of the right wing depict government response to the economic crisis as a Trojan horse. As the government becomes involved in forestalling economic calamity, they warn that opportunists will soon exploit the crisis to promote a creeping socialism.
HALIFAX, NS - Nova Scotia Child Poverty Report Cards have recorded changes in child poverty since 1999. Each annual card has tracked progress on the government of Canada’s 1989 promise to end child poverty. The report released today, by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Nova Scotia, is the tenth card, and is being released on the 20th anniversary of Canada’s promise to eliminate poverty by the year 2000.