It’s probably a bit late to be addressing this topic, but the use of romance and sexual insecurity as a hook for selling goods and services is so pervasive that it’s societal Muzak. Well, worse than Muzak, because it’s not hard to tune Muzak out, but the touting of romance keys into deep-seated emotional and physical needs, making it more challenging to ignore this type of hucksterism.
Read more...Wow, this is ugly, and these two videos help explain why.
Read more...By Jennifer Clapp, Professor in the Environment and Resource Studies Department and CIGI Chair in Global Environmental Governance, Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, Canada. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
NGOs have stepped up their critique of large investment banks’ involvement in agricultural commodity derivatives markets in recent months. Now, it appears that the banks are starting to fight back.
Read more...With public companies fixated on quarterly profits, which results in underinvestment and treatment of employees as disposables, companies who (gasp) pursue a long-term strategy and invest in their workforce should have a real competitive advantage. Thus worked owned enterprises aren’t simply a way to contend with the program to disempower labor; it’s also a way to take advantage of the inefficiencies of rentier capitalism.
Read more...One of the canards libertarians like to sell is that the state has a monopoly on violence.
Read more...Yves here. This is an important piece, in that it bucks conventional wisdom about growth and economic development in several ways.
Read more...Bethany McLean just released a piece at Reuters which presents a good overview of the Department of Justice case against rating agency Standard and Poor’s for its conduct in rating residential mortgage backed securities and CDOs.* The high level description of the case, in particular, why the government used FIRREA as its cause of action, is helpful.
I have mixed feeling about taking issue with McLean, since she generally does a fine job of reporting and analysis, but there were some things about her piece that were so surprising that I thought they really needed to be discussed.
Read more...The progressive blogosphere seems pleased with Elizabeth Warren’s initial foray in the Senate Banking Committee.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, senior editor at Alternet.
The GOP has plans for a comeback. But it may cost you a lot. The idea is to capitalize on recent Republican state takeovers to conduct an austerity experiment known as the new “red-state model” and prove that faulty policies can be turned into gold.
There will be smoke. There will be mirrors. And there will be a lot of ordinary people suffering needlessly in the wake of this ideological train wreck.
We already have a red-state model, and it’s called Mississippi. Or Texas. Or any number of states characterized by low public investment, worker abuse, environmental degradation, educational backwardness, high rates of unwanted pregnancy, poor health, and so on.
Read more...By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance. His Twitter is @ian_fraser. [An edited version of this article was published on pages 34-35 of the Sunday Herald on February 10th, 2013].
It has been described as the biggest banking felony in history … yet no-one has been prosecuted for the Libor fixing scandal. Ian Fraser looks at the RBS sacrificial lambs.
During Royal Bank of Scotland’s IT meltdown last summer, chief executive Stephen Hester referred to the risk “that you turn over rocks and find new things [that you have to clean up].” Last Wednesday, nearly five years on from the £45.5 billion taxpayer funded rescue of the Edinburgh based lender, a vast rock was hoisted aloft by three regulators. What lurked underneath was not a pleasant sight.
Read more...I’m obviously removed from the action, but I’m surprised at the complacency in DC and in the markets over the fact that the sequester is a comin’ soon. Next week Congress is out of session, and the media messaging from both sides at this point lacks the sense of urgency (in particular, front page reports of intense pow-wows) that I’d expect if a deal were to be done by the sequester deadline of early March.
So I have these questions for the NC commentariat:
Read more...Yves here. This is a pet topic of mine. Participants in public policy debates are often insensitive to how much ground they cede when they embrace the nomenclature used by their opponents. My personal bete noire is “free markets” which is actually an oxymoron. Another is “entitlements” which is code for “welfare”. Why don’t people who favor programs like Social Security call them “social insurance’? Or “economic stabilizers”?
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