Gaius Publius: IRS is Using NSA Data Too. Who in Town Isn’t?
Your Google-collected, Verizon-collected data seems to very broadly available. How broadly? Way more than you thought. Read on for the grizzly details.
Read more...Yearly Archives: 2013
Bill Moyers with Richard Wolff on Inequality, Wage Slavery, and Economic Justice
Bill Moyers has a wide ranging and lively chat with Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and author of many books including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. Wolff is a fierce advocate of the need for policies for fairer wages for workers and argues why better pay is salutary not just for the employees but the broader economy.
Read more...Links 8/9/13
Are New York City “Feminist” Organizations Sock-Puppeting for Wall Street in Attacking Spitzer?
Yves here. Regular readers may notice that this article is a departure from normal NC fare, in that this site has steered clear of posts that address a particular demographic or ethnic group. But we’ve decided to go this route in response to the feint being used by the Wall Street and its Democratic party sock puppets to go after Eliot Spitzer’s campaign to become Comptroller of New York City.
Read more...Michael Klare: The Third Carbon Age – Drop the Fantasy of a Coming Era of Renewable Energy
Yves here. To put none too fine a point on it, the most important steps to reduce carbon emissions would be a Marshall plan level effort to reconfigure living and resourcing arrangements so as to reduce energy demands, and to go particularly aggressively after the worst polluters (for instance, the cars you see spewing fumes, are surprisingly large contributors to total emissions from automobiles). But it’s much easier to go the Easter Island route and keep carrying on more or less as before until you hit insurmountable constraints.
Read more...Questioning the Underlying Structures of Property and Power is “Off the Table”
Yves here. The Real News Network interview below with Vijay Prashad, a professor of international studies at Trinity College, is part of a series that examines the power dynamics that undergird our economic system. Unlike most interviews, this one is more ruminative. Rather than trying to deliver some key observations to viewers, this one is more intended to help people recognize that they have blinkered views on some issues.
Read more...Do You Trust the Police?
A question like the one in the headline might seem a bit far afield for a finance and economics blog, but with our government increasingly looking like a Mussolini-style corpocracy, the actions of local government increasingly interact in troubling ways with our financial system.
Read more...Links 8/8/13
So Why is the Administration Trying to Look a Smidge More Aggressive About Going After Banks?
In the last few days, the Department of Justice (as well as the SEC) filed a case against Bank of America over a 2008 prime mortgage securitization that takes breaks some new ground in fraud allegations and is also saber-rattling in the form of launching a criminal investigation into JP Morgan’s sale of mortgage backed securities.
So what’s with the new-found religion?
Read more...Calling All California Lawyers (and Others Who Want to Help Abused Homeowners)! Please Ask California Court of Appeal to Publish an Important Pro-Borrower Chain of Title Ruling
Your humble blogger is in no position to speculate how this curious set of circumstances came about, but we have a good news, bad news situation, and hope readers can help remedy the bad news part.
Read more...Beware Private Equity Guys Bearing Gifts: Eminent Domain Mortgage Scam Hit with Well-Deserved Lawsuit
The private equity firm Mortgage Resolution Partners looks to be well on its way to getting the good uses of eminent domain torpedoed by getting some not-too-swift municipalities to sign up for its self-serving scheme. One indicator of how dubious the MPR program is that investors who have been complacent in the face of all sorts of abuses by originators and servicers, have roused themselves to act in a unified manner and push back against the MRP plan, in the form of a suit filed in Federal court in California on Wednesday.
Read more...Obama’s Own Party Wages War on Energy Plans
Yves here. Since I watch energy and environment stories only from time to time, I’m not certain of the significance of pushback by some in the Democratic party against Obama’s deliberately mislabeled “clean energy” plans, which translate roughly as “all fracking all the time”. Is it that Obama is moving a tad early into lame duck status? Is it that Democratic party Congresscritters learned from 2010, in which the Blue Dog Democrats who were aligned with Obama took big losses, and the bona fide progressives did well?
Read more...Links 8/7/13
Stephanie Kelton: Reading Between the Lines – A Memo from Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles
Stephanie Kelton does an important service in discussing a memo from the Fed chairman during the Roosevelt Administration, Marriner Eccles. I was reminded of Eccles’ a fine appreciation for how the real economy worked and how government actions affected business. This keen eye for the fundamentals is sorely absent among most macroeconomists and policy experts today.
Read more...A Killer App for Google Glass?
Before readers start throwing brickbats at me, understand that I am no fan of the Google Glass project. But the killer app for Google Glass could be protecting citizens from authoritarian policing.
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