John Helmer: Putin’s Supper for the Oligarchs – Who’s in the Family, Who’s Out?
What Putin’s annual dinner says about his “almost family”.
Read more...Category Archives: Banana republic
5 of the Worst Examples of Biased and Distorted Media Coverage of Education in 2015
It’s not hard to see that the effort to loot, um, privatize education has an attack on teachers as a big part of its strategy…which undermines support for education.
Read more...Ilargi: 2016 Is An Easy Year To Predict
Deflation will become an even more powerful and destructive force in 2016.
Read more...“Summer” Rerun: “Why America Will Need Some Elements of a Welfare State”
In 2007, the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf Wolf concluded that America needed some form of a welfare state. His argument is as valid now as then. Yet it is hard to imagine that anyone would make it now, particularly in light of the effort of soi-disant liberals to pretend that Obamacare insurance policies bear any resemblance to “universal health care”.
Read more...Randy Wray: Debt-Free Money and Banana Republics, Part II
More discussion of the problems with the “debt-free money” construct, to the extent that it can even be called a construct.
Read more...Bill Moyers: The Plutocrats Are Winning. Don’t Let Them!
How citizens must fight plutocrats if they are to have any hope of preserving rule by the people.
Read more...Capitalism – Not China – Is to Blame for the Current Global Economic Decline
Capitalism’s “recovery” now proceeds like another speeding train headed toward contradiction and catastrophe.
Read more...U.S. Corporations Don’t Need Tax Breaks on Foreign Profits
Why a proposal to lower the tax rate on corporate funds that are “offshore” only from a tax perspective is just another corporate gimmie.
Read more...America’s Double Standard on Trade
Quelle surprise! The US fell all over itself to give Japan breaks on agricultural trade to cinch a TPP deal. But developing countries? Fuggedaboudit.
Read more...How Prefunding Retiree Health Benefits Impacts the Postal Service’s Bottom Line – and How Brookings Got it Wrong
Exposing the serious numerical and conceptual flaws of yet another study that uses the trumped-up claim that the Postal Service is trouble to justify dismembering it.
Read more...The Scientific Limits of Understanding Complex Social Phenomena
Economists, for the most part, resist the idea that economics can never be a scientific enterprise. Sadly, that posture has proven profitable for them.
Read more...The Logic of the Police State in America
How police forces are openly taking the position that they are not accountable to democratic processes and how that attitude is translating into policies and actions.
Read more...Randy Wray: Debt-Free Money and Banana Republics
Objections to the notion of debt-free money.
Read more...The Predictability of Political Extremism
What’s at stake: The rise of the extreme right in the latest French election has mostly been treated as surprising or reflecting special circumstances like the November 13 Paris attacks. But a large literature linking extreme right votes to persisting depressed economic conditions suggests that longer run factors are at play.
Read more...Michael Hudson: The IMF Changes its Rules to Isolate China and Russia
How the West is deploying the IMF to fight the nightmare scenario of US geopolitical strategists: foreign economic independence from the US.
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