Category Archives: Infrastructure

“What Then Must We Do?” Gar Alperovitz at The New Economy Summit

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Here’s something to listen to with your morning coffee; it’s a lecture on co-operatives, with Q&A following, by Gar Alperowitz at the New Economy Summit in Boone, NC, in April of this year. I like the title, because the agency in “What Then Must We Do” is explicit, in contrast (intentional or not) to [Anglophone usage of] Lenin’s famous “What Is To Be Done” (sez who?) where lack of agency signals the Bolshevik’s intent to tell people what was to be done. We know how that movie ended; there were a lot of movies that ended that way in the 20th Century. The video:

US Infrastructure Spending Plunges

I’m normally not big on “one chart says it all” posts, but this one is so striking I made an exception.

Taking the Rhetorical Bias Out of Economists’ Discussions of Income Taxation and Public Spending

Yves here. Mirabile dictu! A VoxEU article discusses, admittedly in suitably dense economese, how economists create and enforce biases against taxation by using terminology that presupposes that it’s bad. And as Lambert noted after he saw it went up here: “That post got Tyler Cowen really ticked off, so it must be good.”

Michael Hudson Shreds Obama’s Orwellian Speech on Middle Class Prosperity

Michael Hudson was so incensed by what he called a “Blairesque” speech by Obama on Wednesday that he took it upon himself to comment on its all-too-frequent sleights of hand and outright fabrications

Michael Hudson: From the Bubble Economy to Debt Deflation and Privatization

Michael Hudson looks at the implications of ending QE in the context of the past 30 years of bubble blowing.

Nathan Tankus: The Transit Coup – How Robber Barons got New York City to Bail Out Their Subway Lines.

By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus

Since the Reagan/Thatcher era, it is common to view politics over infrastructure as simply a battle between right wing forces attempting to privatize infrastructure and others trying to defend it (I covered the latest attack by President Obama on the TVA). However, this is only the recent history of United States infrastructure policy.

Obama Plans to Sacrifice Ordinary Americans Yet Again in “Public/Private Partnership” Infrastructure Scam

Apparently Obama’s idea of a Holy Week sacrifice is to feed American citizens to rapacious bankers, this time through the device of “public/private partnerships” to support infrastructure spending.

Pettis: China and the History of US Growth Models

Yves here. This is an important piece, in that it bucks conventional wisdom about growth and economic development in several ways.

Michael Hudson: My Take on Obama’s Big Win

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College,. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.”

The Democrats could not have won so handily without the Citizens United ruling. That is what enabled the Koch Brothers to spend their billions to support right-wing candidates that barked and growled like sheep dogs to give voters little civilized option but to vote for “the lesser evil.”

Continuing Sandy Aftermath, New Nor’Easter Underscore Complex System Fragility

Here we are, a mere nine days after Sandy, and what would ordinarily be a mere “sorta bad” winter storm is doing disproportionate harm by virtue of coming so close on the heels of the hurricane.

Sandy Aftermath and the Fragility of Complex Systems

Even though the news media are generally focusing on the “progress is being made” aspects of the Hurricane Sandy aftermath (in large measure because that’s what officials are pushing), there is still a great deal of distress, as well as probable long-lingering problems that are not being acknowledged.

Shock Doctrine, American-Style: Hurricane Sandy Devastation Used to Push for Sale of Public Infrastructure to Investors

As a result of fully warranted bad press for some privatization deals, such as the lease of Chicago’s parking meters, there has been a bit (stress only a bit) more critical scrutiny of the de facto sale of public assets to consortia of private investors. Nevertheless, major banks have been using the financial distress of states and municipalities to push these deals as a solution to budget woes, when it’s a short-term expedient that leaves the public worse off.