Adam Davidson Parrots Disinformation as He Extols Rule by the Top 0.1%
Adam Davidson is moving up in the world. He has gone from fellating the 1% to the top 0.1%.
Read more...Category Archives: Income disparity
New York Times Yet Again Demonstrates Its Fealty to the 1%
I got a message from a regular reader:
Read more...Big Employers Extorting States, Pocketing Employee Income Tax Withholding
Wonder why states are broke? It isn’t just the global financial crisis induced knock-on effects of a plunge in tax receipts and a rise in social safety net payments. Nor is it just pension fund time bombs (note that despite the press hysteria, the problem is unmanageable only in a comparatively small number of states, with New Jersey way out in front, thanks to 15 years of the state stealing from the workers’ kitty, plus a decision to take big risk at exactly the wrong moment, in 2007, which resulted in large losses). A significant unrecognized culprit is companies managing to divert tax revenue from stressed states to their coffers.
Read more...Occupy Wall Street Sues New York City, JP Morgan #OWS
One of the continuing and largely unrecognized aspects of the ongoing media coverage of Occupy Wall Street is that police brutality and lesser abuses have been airbrushed out.
Read more...Reining in Finance and the Effort to Silence a Critical UN Agency
This Real News Network segment gives a window into the efforts to squash criticism of the neoliberal orthodoxy in the world of international agencies. Even though the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) gets very little attention in the major media, its well researched and often prescient reports are enough of a threat to the orthodoxy to produce efforts by the advanced economy block in the UN to try to clip the wings of the agency. The start of this interview may seem like a bit of inside baseball, but it shortly gets to issues that are critically important.
Read more...Jamie Galbraith on Changes in Finance as the Driver of Inequality
I’m working my way around to the INET talks that I missed, and this one by Jamie Galbraith is very much worth viewing. It takes a while to build up steam, so be patient.
Galbraith has marshaled a great deal of cross country data over time, and shows how changes in equality happened in a very large number of economies in parallel. He explains, persuasively, that the most plausible culprit is changes in the financial regime.
Read more...Jamie Galbraith on Inequality and Instability
Real News Network interviewed Jamie Galbraith on his new book, Inequality and Instability, in which he argues the two phenomena are linked.
Read more...Yasha Levine: Recovered Economic History – “Everyone But an Idiot Knows That The Lower Classes Must Be Kept Poor, or They Will Never Be Industrious”
Yves here. This post by Yasha Levine ran last week, but it is sufficiently important that I thought it was worth featuring on NC. The conventional thinking on the so-called “lower orders” usually depicts them as deserving their fate (either due to lack of self-discipline and motivation, or in other ages, as genetically inferior), or as victims of circumstance. But Levine, citing a recent book by economic historian Michael Perelmen, points to another strain of thought: that self-sufficient peasants were indolent, and it would be better for them to reduce their income so as to force them to work harder. God forbid that anyone other that the aristocrats have the luxury of a lot of leisure time!
By Yasha Levine, an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.. Cross posted from The eXiled
…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.
—Arthur Young; 1771
By Yasha Levine, an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.. Cross posted from The eXiled
…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.
—Arthur Young; 1771
Read more...Three Corporate Myths that Threaten the Wealth of the Nation
Corporations are not working for the 99%. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special 5-part AlterNet series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and one of the leading expert on the American corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history, and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?
Read more...Finance as Wealth Transfer Mechanism: An Interview with James Galbraith
James Kenneth Galbraith is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and at the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is ‘Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis’ (also available on Kindle).
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington.
Philip Pilkington: Let’s start with the obvious question that the book raises. Namely, why studies on inequality have, until this point, been so poor. You point out in the book that the studies that have been done have been competently researched but that they simply don’t have access to the correct types of data etc. Could you talk a little about this (without getting too technical, of course) and maybe speculate a little about why this important issue has been sidetracked by the economic profession?
Read more...Ken Jacobson: Whose Corporations? Our Corporations!
Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?
Read more...William Lazonick: How High CEO Pay Hurts the 99 Percent
Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?
Read more...How American Corporations Transformed from Producers to Predators
Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?
Read more...Adam Davidson Presents the Trophy Nanny as 1% Status Symbol
In his role as the Lord Haw-Haw of yawning income disparity, Adam Davidson reports on the world of elite nannies in his latest New York Times piece, “The Best Nanny Money Can Buy.” Child caregivers perceived to be good enough for the superrich (which means they might need to possess other skills, like speaking Mandarin, cooking restaurnt-level meals, being able to ride and groom horses or sailing) make big bucks!
Read more...China’s Real Choices for Growth
Yves here. I particularly like this post because Michael Pettis takes some boundary conditions about China and works through their implications. One quibble I have is that he talks of “debt capacity limits.” That depends who the issuer is. The national government could in theory “print,” it has no need to issue debt to fund its activities. But the constraint on that sort of approach is inflation, and China is trying to cool off inflation without crimping growth too much. So China is pretty much in the conundrum Pettis describes, but for slightly more complicated reasons.
Cross posted from MacroBusiness
An exclusive excerpt from Michael Pettis’ most recent newsletter:
Last week’s news was dominated by the sudden but not wholly unexpected removal of Bo Xilai as mayor of Chongqing.
After the initial shock wore off, much of the speculation within China has moved on to what his ousting says about the evolution of power and, for economists, how it will affect the reform and rebalancing of the Chinese economy. More importantly, it seems to me that too many analysts over emphasize the intentions of the Chinese leadership when projecting China’s future.
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