Copyright Infringement Is Being Treated as Terrorism
The REAL Reasons that National Security Powers are Being Used Against Copyright Infringers
Read more...Yearly Archives: 2013
Links 8/16/13
A Disturbance in the Force?
Perhaps I’m just having a bad month, but I wonder if other readers sense what I’m detecting. I fancy if someone did a Google frequency search on the right terms, they might pick up tangible indicators of what I’m sensing (as in I’m also a believer that what people attribute to gut feeling is actually pattern recognition).
The feeling I have is that of heightened generalized tension, the social/political equivalent of the sort of disturbance that animals detect in advance of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, of pressure building up along major fault lines.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Cisco CEO Reports Record Sales And “Lumpy” Demand, Just Like In November 2007, A Month Before Stocks Began To Crash
As Wolf Richter argues, Cisco has been a harbinger of market turns, and he describes an earnings call which struck him as eerily similar to another inflection point, that of fall 2007.
Read more...How the Pending Trans-Pacific Partnership and EU-US Trade Deals Will Gut National Regulations, Hurt Budgets, and Undermine Sovereignity
Yves here. We’ve written from time time about the latest plans underway to further degrade the lives of ordinary citizens in order to fatten the bottom lines of major multinationals, namely, two major US-led international trade pacts. Even though the US media has given these pending deals scant attention, they represent a far-reaching effort to restructure basic legal and regulatory frameworks.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Three Tales of Greeks Coping With Breakdown
By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog
As a child, I was fascinated by my mother’s, and her mother’s, tales from the 1940s, and in particular their stories about life under the Nazi occupation. Greece is in the grip of a calamity that those who lived through the 1940s had thought they would never have to live through again. But I must desist. For this is not the place for analysis and argumentation about our contemporary Greek catastrophe. This is a piece of brief summer tales. So, allow me to relate three such stories.
Read more...Links 8/15/13
US Mortgage Lending is Tumbling
Yves here. We had predicted that the sharp rise in mortgage rates precipitated by the Fed’s taper talk would put a damper on the housing “recovery” and could even send it into reverse if rates continued to increase. They’ve in fact fallen over the past few weeks but are still markedly higher than in the spring. The central bank has been sending mixed signals over the last week or so, on the one hand seeming more inclined to taper based on its cheery view of the fundamentals, but concerned over what a budget slugfest might do to the confidence fairy.
Read more...Bill Black: The FBI’s 2010 Mortgage Fraud Report Reveals Why the Banksters Love Holder
Yves here. Black has written the sort of post I particularly like. He’s given a close reading of the FBI’s latest (and tellingly, not all that recent) mortgage fraud report and parses what its use of language and its omissions say about its assumptions and priorities.
Read more...ObamaCare Rollout: Kaiser Explains to Poor People in Non-Medicaid Expansion States How to Game the System by Lying
By Lambert Strether. Originally published at Corrente.
Read more...Some of the millions of poor people expected to lose out on Obamacare coverage next year because their states are not expanding Medicaid might have a way to get help, but the strategy carries risk.
Experts say the key is for them to project their 2014[*] income to at least the federal poverty level, about $11,500 per person or $23,500 for a family of four.
Fixing Old Markets With New Markets: the Origins and Practice of Neoliberalism
Philip Mirowski is the Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science University of Notre Dame. Professor Mirowski’s latest book is Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
The interview was conducted by Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Fields Institute
Read more...Links 8/14/13
The Real Foreclosure Scandal: Why Have Virtually No Lawyers Been Disbarred?
Even now, years after the subprime market’s death in 2007, new stories of mortgage chicanery or accounts providing more evidence of known abuses keep surfacing.
Read more...Bill Black: Rajan Calls Krugman “Paranoid” for Criticizing Reinhart’s and Rogoff’s Research
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posed from New Economic Perspectives
This article discusses a simmering feud among five of the most prominent economists in the world (two of them Nobel Laureates).
Read more...Why is Obama So Keen to Appoint Larry Summers to the Fed?
Felix Salmon pointed out today that Larry Summers is now being touted as the odds-on favorite (65%, to be precise) to be Obama’s nominee as the next Fed chief. Felix stresses that Obama’s reason for favoring Summers is based on the sole criterion on which Summers could conceivably be depicted as preferable to the other widely-touted contender, Janet Yellen: he is believed to be better than Yellen would be in handling a crisis.
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