Yearly Archives: 2013

Joe Firestone: Stop the Kabuki: It’s About “the Great Betrayal”

By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

MSNBC continues on with its campaign to cast the Tea Party Republicans in the role of principal villains in the imminent Government budget/ government shutdown crisis and the likely coming debt ceiling crisis. The teabots, you see, are using the Republican majority in the House to demand more austerity in government and defunding of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). They’re using their bloc of votes in the House, along with the Hastert rule requiring a majority of the majority Republican caucus to veto any possible compromise vote of the whole House on a budget or a continuing resolution that would get bipartisan majority support keeping the government open past October 1.

How Private Equity Executives Like Blackstone’s Tony James Engage in Dubious Side Deals

Today, we’ll examine conflicts of interest involving principals at the private equity firms themselves. Here our object lesson is private equity kingpin Blackstone Group.

Links 9/22/13

Permaculture Blitz with the Micmacs up in the County

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Since today, September 22, is the Autumnal Equinox, when the earth begins its tilt toward winter, I thought I’d write about an event from summer’s past: A permaculture blitz in partnership with a band of Micmacs up in Aroostook County; details of the project can be found here. So this is a trip report. I’ll start with some garden geekery on the blitz, and end with a small but surprising political twist. But first, the video:

Income, Poverty, and Healthcare 2012: The Patient Did Not Get Worse But Remains Seriously Ill

By Hugh, who is a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at Corrente.

The Census Report “Income, Poverty, and Healthcare” covering the year 2012 came out on Tuesday. Overall, the picture was little changed from 2011, which is to say that the recovery which did not happen for most Americans in 2011 continued not to happen for them in 2012. The situation for women remained poor. (All amounts are expressed in 2012 dollars. Incomes and earnings are pre-tax.)

Links 9/21/13

Robert Prasch: The “Lessons” that Wall Street, Treasury, and the White House Need You to Believe About the Lehman Collapse

Five long years have passed since the demise of the once venerable firm of Lehman Brothers. To mark the occasion, Wall Street, the United States Treasury Department, the White House, and their several political proxies and spokespersons have taken to the mass media to instruct the public in the “lessons” to be drawn from the financial crisis of 2007-09. Regrettably, we are witnessing the propagation of several self-serving falsehoods in the hope that the public can be induced to embrace them now that the immediacy of the events in question is in the past. Some of the lessons are so flagrantly false that they demand immediate correction.

Links 9/20/13

Senator Diane Feinstein’s Husband Selling Post Offices to Cronies on the Cheap

To quote famed short seller David Einhorn: “No matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.” On the “corruption among what passes for our elites” front, this story about self-dealing in the privatization of the Postal Service gives an indication of how bad things really are.

When Too Much Housing is Bad for Our Health

Yves here. It’s intriguing that “our economic model is based too much on the housing market” is becoming a meme a mere six years after housing bubbles in most advanced economics were a major driver of the global financial crisis.