Don Quijones: “Uncreative” Destruction – The Troika’s Hostile Takeover of Europe
How the Troika is overriding national constitutions and popular will to strip-mine Europe’s periphery countries on behalf of banks.
Read more...Category Archives: Infrastructure
Who In Ukraine Will Benefit From An IMF Bailout?
Economists Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson discuss how oligarchs and the Russians will be the true beneficiaries of an IMF bailout of Ukraine.
Read more...J.D. Alt: Forget the 1%
All this talk about the 99% versus the 1%? I say the easiest—and likely the most useful—thing to do is just forget the 1%.
Read more...“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:
Read more...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.
Read more...Attention: Deficit Disorder and the Real Crisis Ahead
Yves here. This article focuses on the critically important of how the real danger to the economic welfare of young people is not the cost of retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare but the failure to generate enough jobs now and invest in infrastructure and education.
Read more...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.”
Read more...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
Read more...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.
Read more...Nathan Tankus: New York City Public Libraries Attack Alert – Privatizing Prized Locations and Cutting Budget by 35%
By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Now that pubic libraries have “done their jobs” (in FIRE sector terms) they can do one more thing for finance and real estate: be killed for private sector fun and profit.
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...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.”
Read more...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.
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