Labor Showdown in Ohio

LABOR
How Progressives Won the Labor Rights Showdown in Ohio (By Amy B. Dean, United Steelworkers) “In Wisconsin the only means available to us [for opposing Gov. Scott Walker] were partisan elections,” Booth said. “In recall elections, you have to overcome the bias against recalling sitting officials. And because of the constitutional framework in Wisconsin, we could only run recalls in districts that had been won by the Republicans in 2008, not the swing districts they seized in 2010. So it was a heavier lift. In Wisconsin, a very high percentage of the people who voted for Walker voted against the recall of their state senators.” Ohio, Booth noted, presented a different situation: “Doing a ballot measure is a non-partisan exercise. So 30 percent of the people who voted for Kasich in 2010 voted ‘no’ on the referendum. While we split the independent voters in the Wisconsin recall elections, we got a solid majority of them against Senate Bill 5 [in Ohio].”

Roubini: Marx Was Right - Capitalism Can Destroy Itself

LAST WORD
Mainstream Economist: Marx Was Right. Capitalism May Be Destroying Itself (AlterNet) Wall Street Journal interview with Nouriel Roubini is a mainstream economist who teaches at New York University and may be best known as one of the early predictors of the '08 crash.  "Karl Marx had it right.  At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself.  You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand.  That's what has happened."