Bankruptcies and Bailouts

Edited by Wayne Antony, Julie Guard

Recession? Depression? Market adjustment? Billion-dollar bailouts? Just what is happening to the economy? Like the rest of the industrialized world, Canada is in the midst of an economic crisis that is cleary of global proportions. Yet, Nobel Prize winning economists failed to see it coming. This is unsurprising since, in the words of the newly humble Alan Greenspan, the crisis revealed “a flaw in the model ... that defines the way the world works.” Bankruptcies and Bailouts explains the roots of this economic disaster. The essays in this book show, in clear and accessible language, that the global capitalist economy, dependent on hyper-extended credit, fuelled by systematic deregulation and rooted in the contradictions of a mad drive for unlimited profits, must inevitably end up in this predicament. The authors also demonstrate that there are ways out of this economic mess that do not involve simply bailing out the obscenely over-paid executives whose decisions led us to this chaos.

Contents

• Foreword–Cy Gonick
• Explaining the Economic Crisis: Class Warfare from Reagan to Obama–Robert Chernomas
• Inequality, the Profit System and the Global Crisis–David McNally
• From Deregulation to Crisis–Ian Hudson
• Hyper-Credit: The Financial Dimension of the Economic Crisis–John Loxley
• Canada and the Economic Crisis–Fletcher Baragar
• We’re All Keynesians–Again–Lynne Fernandez
• Keynes Redux: History Catches Up–Rahdika Desai
• Investing in Civilisation: What the State can do in a Crisis-Alan Freeman
• Biblography

About the Authors

Wayne Antony is a publisher at Fernwood Publishing. He is also a founding member of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives–Manitoba (CCPA-MB) and has been on the board of directors since its inception. Prior to becoming involved with the CCPA-MB, he worked with the Winnipeg political activist organizations, Socialist Education Centre and Thin Ice. Wayne also taught sociology at the University of Winnipeg for eighteen years. He is co-author of three reports on the state of public services in Manitoba (for CCAP-MB) and is co-editor (with Les Samuelson) of Power and Resistance: Critical Thinking about Canadian Social Issues  and Citizens or Consumers? Social Policy in a Market Society and Capitalism Rebooted? Work and Welfare in the New Economy (both with Dave Broad). He is also co-editor (with Julie Guard) of the up-coming book, Bankruptcies and Bailouts.

Julie Guard is an associate professor of labour studies at the University of Manitoba, a research associate for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba and a member of the CCPA Manitoba and National boards. She is active in the labour, peace and women’s movements, and her articles on gender, ethnicity and working-class identity have been published in Labour/le travail and the Journal of Women’s History.

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