Yves here. Van Buren continues his examination of what he calls the “post-Constitutional era”. This post focuses on the loss of privacy, a presumption enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Van Buren describes how Fourth Amendment rights have been eviscerated in the post 9/11 era, such as by permitting the surveillance state to pour through millions of records using subpoenas rather than search warrants.
Read more...Yves here. Former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin famously said that the job of the central bank was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.” That line of thinking went out of fashion under Alan Greenspan. Now we have the perverse spectacle of the most bank-cronyistic regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, berating the Fed for spiking the punch via overly accommodative monetary policy.
Read more...Yves here. I’ve taken the liberty of editing down Bill Black’s post slightly to bring readers more quickly to his correctly outraged discussion of the latest Wikileaks expose on a trade deal that has managed to go completely under the radar: the Trade in Services Agreement, otherwise known as TISA. We wrote about this troubling news when the story broke. Astonishingly, the mainstream media has taken no notice of this release. Black’s discussion is accessible to lay readers, and I hope you’ll circulate it in the interest of raising awareness of how the Administration intends to sell out the US to banks, Big Pharma, and other multinationals.
Black explains how TISA is designed to replicate, indeed, optimize the criminogenic environment that made fraudulent financial CEOs wealthy by “looting” “their” banks.
Read more...Yesterday, the New York Fed released a new report by Jaison R. Abel and Richard Dietz, Do the Benefits of College Still Outweigh the Costs? which is getting good coverage in the mainstream media. Its major finding is that despite the fall in wages to college graduates due to the crappy economy, a college degree is still worth the expense because wages of high-school graduates have fallen too, keeping the wage premium of a college education high while reducing the opportunity cost of staying in school.
But while the media is repeating the findings of this report uncritically, in fact it relies on a discredited methodology for calculating returns, and also promotes the view that the only reason to get a higher education is to get a better job.
Read more...The New York Times has provided us with an invaluable column about the interactions of the EU’s rightist and ultra-rightest parties. It is invaluable because it is (unintentionally) so revealing about the EU’s right and ultra-right parties and the NYT’s inability to understand either the EU economic or political crises. The NYT article illustrates its points by presenting a tale entitled “A German Voice, Hans-Olaf Henkel, Calls for Euro’s Abolition.” It treats Henkel, an open racist and austerian, as a reputable figure, apparently because he is wealthy.
Read more...I was naive enough to think that the New York Times’ vendetta against former SIGTARP prosecutor Neil Barofsky was limited to bank propagandist Andrew Ross Sorkin and Administration mouthpiece Jackie Calmes, who penned a particularly ham-handed hit piece on Barofsky’s book Bailout.
It turns out the depth of loyalty of reporters at the New York Times is much deeper than I imagined. Ben Protess and Jessica Silver-Greenberg work hard to snigger and finger-wag at Barofsky for being about to land a plum assignment that will again make him a big bank nemesis: that of serving as monitor to miscreant Credit Suisse.
Read more...While it is refreshing to see the authorities man up a bit in dealing with a miscreant bank, it’s also critical to recognize that the US show of spine with BNP is all about the US tightening control over international payments. In other words, the harsh settlement is all about the US projecting its power overseas via financial services. It is not a precedent for how the authorities will deal with other types of bank
Read more...Andrew Bacevich discusses how America’s failed policies in Iraq reflect a deluded view of our role and history.
Read more...A set of articles in the Financial Times puts a nasty spotlight on what mission creep, or more accurately, mission leap, at the Fed. The central bank is moving unabashedly into price-setting, and stealth or formally backstopping, of more and more markets
Read more...Rob Johnson, political insider and executive director of INET, discusses the role of Big Finance in state and local budget woes.
Read more...The Treasurer of North Carolina has reacted to pending legislation designed to shed more light on the murky world of private equity investments by having allies sponsor their own “transparency” bill that is a big step backwards.
Read more...Van Buren continues his examination of what he calls the “post-Constitutional era”. He focuses on the steady erosion of freedom of speech, particularly in the media, including limits on the ability of journalists to protect sources to more self-censorship and increased antipathy towards reporting that involves the use of confidential material.
Read more...Libertarians are profoundly anti-democratic. The folks at Cato that I debate make no bones about their disdain for and fear of democracy. Friedrich von Hayek is so popular among libertarians because of his denial of the legitimacy of democratic government and his claims that it is inherently monstrous and murderous to its own citizens.
Read more...Defund, claim crisis, call for privatization… Profit! [ka-ching!]
Read more...Larry Summers, like Tim Geithner, wants the public to believe that rescuing banks and leaving citizens to rot was the right crisis response. But neither experts, nor people who followed the crisis, nor voters at large are buying what Team Obama is trying to sell.
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