So what is the difference between what I call a “liberal” and you call a “pragmatic progressive”??? The point still stands that opening a post with the trope that Obama is dummy and scores own goals is a fundamental mischaracterization of Obama. One that makes our task more difficult.

“President Barack Obama has once again started his negotiations by scoring into his own net.”

NO! After 4 years only the mentally disabled (i.e. liberals) still believe that Obama is a liberal. The US has one far-right and one center-right party. There are only a handful of liberals in congress and we haven’t had a Keynesian President since Gerald Ford. If you stop imagining that Obama is on the side of the 99% his policies become much easier to understand, analyze and organize against.

For good or ill, the 2000s were most certainly not Keynesian, and certainly not the most Keynesian in “world history.” One simple piece of evidence against your “thesis” is that these have been times of low inflation. The downside of Keynesian high employment, high wage, monetary pump priming, is supposedly high inflation. So where is the high inflation that your side has been prattling about since the early 90s? Also, Glass Steagell was a core component of Keynesian approach to finance capital. Deregulation and bringing down the G-S firewalls drove the financial crisis of 08 far more than low interest rate mortgages.

Wray is a top notch Left-Keynesian with much to offer. As much as I wanted to like Graeber’s book on debt, it is too simplistic and marred by a quasi libertarian (individualistic and small-is-beautiful) understanding of how capital, class and the state actually operate.

Here is a useful, generally sympathetic but specifically critical review of Graeber.

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/

On the wider point, the US is so far from broke it is absurdly funny. There is plenty of room to renew a rational policy of appropriating revenues from economic elites in order to fund a robust public sector.

The current phase of cannibal capitalism is entirely self inflicted. But here is the thing, the problem is political, not technical. No one with the power to save capitalism from itself, has an interest in doing so.

And per capita Americans consume 25% more gasoline than Canadians and twice as much per capita gasoline than Germans and Japanese. American cars are changing the earth’s atmosphere. Trains are the future.

Yunis is a libertarian and grifter playing on the fantasies of white western liberals.

Yunis says:
‘I believe that “government”, as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a “Grameenized private sector”, a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions.’

Some actual facts about how microcredit works and what its effects are

http://ukzn.academia.edu/PatrickBond/Papers/486980/Microcredit_Evangelism_Health_and_Social_Policy

Yeah, because the Trib is always accurate and never has an ideological axe to grind???

Two weeks ago the Trib was hoping to have a headline that reads “CTU Busted” but since the strike was a win for CTU it has to settled for claiming that the strike will spur the growth of charters.

Go read what the Trib said when SB7 was passed and (like all of the pundits) thought CTU could never win a strike vote, let alone get on the picket line, or force real concessions or win the strike and go back in more unified and organized than ever.

This strike is a victory for CTU. People who can’t see this are either dumb or dishonest.

Eric @ 3 and WSWS are ultra-left posuers. The evaluation system was going to happen no matter what. It is literally Illinois law. The CTU got the % of evaluation via high stakes testing as low as allowed by law. Principal power to hire and fire is actually curbed under the contract, not expanded. And CTU isn’t allowed by law to win a contract that prohibits turnaround schools, or contract schools or charter schools. The delegates in CTU are not more conservative than the rank-n-file. That does happen in some unions, but not this one since 2010. Your point about the coordinating class is so Barbara Ehrenreich and E. O. Wright circa 1983. That middle strata (especially CPS teachers) are being proletarianized in a hurry. Climb down off your hobby horse, remove the tin pot from your head and deal with the actual concrete class struggle in the real world, not the imaginary one in your head.

Yes. and the CTU doesn’t call for a worker’s party. And they don’t call for an armed wing. And they don’t call for barricades in the street. And they don’t build the barricades high enough.

CORE/CTU are doing a brilliant job of bringing a union from the brink of collapse back to being one of (if not the most) militant and democratic large union in the country. But since the barricades aren’t built high enough, we should all condemn them?

Even if the offer should be rejected, why don’t you applaud the delegates and respect the leadership for not frog marching the membership into a deal they don’t support?

You are looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Until today, the CTU by a long shot. National media are mostly totally negative. Local media have to be at least a bit mixed because survey research shows deep and wide support for the teachers. I think this might dip a bit in the next few days as people don’t understand the necessity of getting all the details and discussing them thoroughly before agreeing to the new contract. American short attention span ADHD culture will blame the teachers for being slow, and not recognize that this is inevitable in a genuinely democratic union.

“The same for the idea that teacher evaluations from high-stakes testing was the main stumbling block.”

This was in fact a major stumbling block. Illinois law requires High Stakes testing. The stumbling block was what % of teacher evaluation would be determined by these tests. By striking the CTU got the high stakes % down to 30%, the lowest allowed by Illinois law.