It’s a sign of how well relentless propagandizing works that Joe Stiglitz has to devote a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times to debunking the idea that our income tax system, whose salient characteristic is low tax burdens for the rich, is good for anyone other than the rich.
Read more...Contributed by Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog, Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media.
Catalonia’s riot police unleashed the untamed fury of the state upon the protestors and cleared Barcelona’s Plaza Catalunya of all occupants. A dense ring of shell-shocked people gathered around the square. I was one of them. A child riding on his father’s shoulders held up a sign: “No soy anti sistema, el sistema es anti yo,” it said (I’m not anti-system; the system is anti-me).
Read more...News flash! Neurotics are conscientious team members and should be appreciated and used more effectively in organizations. Or so say Corinne Bendersky, an associate professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and Neha Parikh Shah, an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School, in The Downfall of Extraverts and the Rise of Neurotics: The Dynamic Process […]
Read more...Why Do People Claim that Nuclear Power is a Low-Carbon Source of Energy?
Read more...This Real News Network segment does a very nice, compact job of explaining why chained CPI is such a disastrously bad policy for older Americans. I’m featuring it with the hope that it might prove useful in educating friends and family members who might not be up to speed on this issue.
Read more...I’ve mentioned repeatedly that Germany wants contradictory things: it wants to stop financing its trade partners (the periphery countries in Europe) and yet wants to continue to run large trade surpluses. I took this to be a sign of German wishful thinking, or just politicians figuring the incoherent strategy can still be maintained for the duration of their time in office.
A post by Yanis Varoufakis show that the Germans at least have better delusions that I realized.
Read more...Nothing like dramatic proof that austerity is a failure
Read more...So, Facebook is good for something: A friend of mine posted on Christopher Alexander’s new book, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World Systems, and since I like beautiful books, I ordered a copy (Powells; Amazon). Alexander is doing the sort of architecture that a permaculturist would like: Site specific, but also do-able if we can’t get dry wall from China, lumber from Canada, hardwood flooring from Indonesia, and if petroleum products like Pex or fiberglass insulation have gotten very, very expensive, along with anything (meaning everything) that depends on a petroleum-fueled supply chain. Alexander’s method of building — he calls it “System A” — is, one might say, “collapse-ready,” in a way that conventional architecture (the Manichean “System B”) can never be. Like permaculture.
Read more...Michael Hudson, in a Real News Network interview, puts paid some of the key ideas used to sell catfood futures, um, Social Security and Medicare cuts, such as if we don’t Do Something, interest on government bonds will eat the economy. He also gives a good explanation of what “chained CPI” is really all about.
Read more...Wow, did I miss it? Didn’t we have a crisis just a bit over four years ago? And wasn’t one of the big drivers the fact that banks were overlevered and took on too much risk?
Well, not only do we seem to be rerunning that playbook, banks are using strategies right under regulators’s eyes last time around to create phony capital. Worse, are pulling the exact same tricks they did last time around. Worse, regulators seem to be doing nothing to stop it.
Read more...I’m so out of touch with popular culture that it’s only a lucky happenstance for someone to mention a mainstream phenomenon that I’m familiar with . What is striking about Game of Thrones is how restrictive a feudal, meaning highly class/role stratified society is, and how scheming his characters are.
Read more...
