Loyal Dems were over the moon with reports from California that the costs provided by insurers of various levels of plans on state exchanges were coming in under CBO estimates, as well as below prices on the current small-group market.. But early reports from other states give a more mixed picture.
Read more...Yves here. The consensus view among experts, despite considerable public opposition in Germany, is that the German Constitutional Court will not upend the Eurozone bailout mechanisms by ruling in favor of challenges to their legality. This confirms the policy issue that Dani Rodrik flagged in 2007: you can’t have national sovereignity, democracy, and deep integration of markets at the same time. You can have at most two of the three. Sadly, Europe looks ready to settle on only one on that list.
Read more...Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.
Read more...Apparently, the most important criterion for getting an important post in the Obama Administration is telling Big Lies, better yet with data. Jason Furman claims Walmart is a “progressive success story.”
Read more...Yves here. Reader From Mexico often chides readers in comments who like try to depict Argentina and other Latin American states as failures, when the ones who have distanced themselves from American/neoliberal policies have made solid social and economic progress.
This piece highlights a tangible indicator of the wane of US influence in the Americas.
Read more...Former CIA employee, most recently Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden was already the intel community’s biggest nightmare, and now this:
Read more...The Financial Times has caught a significant revolving door that its business press peers have largely overlooked.
Read more...The NC commentariat has already done a deep dive into the IT and practical issues surrounding the NSA surveillance program leaks from Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian. This Real News Network interview with Paul Jay looks at the Administration’s initial response to those revelations. It’s a useful piece to circulate to friends and colleagues who might be unduly receptive to the “this is all done for your safety” claims. I suppose it’s useful to have Obama make it explicit he thinks that his interpretation of security needs comes before upholding the Constitution.
Read more...By Patrick Durusau, who consults on semantic integration and edits standards. Durusau is convener of JTC 1 SC 34/WG 3, co-editor of 13250-1 and 13250-5 (Topic Maps Introduction and Reference Model, respectively), and editor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard at OASIS and ISO (ISO/IEC 26300). Originally published at Another Word for It.
Why Verizon?
The first question that came to mind when the Guardian broke the news on NSA-Verizon phone record metadata collection.
Here’s why I ask:
Read more...The Grey Lady roused itself to profile Glenn Greenwald after his blockbuster stories of the last two days: the first on a secret court order now in effect for Verizon to provide the NSA on all telephone records in its systems, the second on the PRISM program, which has given the NSA direct access to servers of information giants including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, since 2007. But the piece is mean-spirited, underplaying Greenwald’s credentials and coming too close for comfort to character sniping.
Read more...Now before anyone gets excited about the specter of bankers doing a perp walk, the early word in a Wall Street Journal story on criminal charges being readied against former Barclays bankers says that the prosecutions will target “midlevel traders.” This exercise thus continues the established pattern of small fry serving as human shields for managers and executives.
Read more...Dave Dayen’s latest article at Salon makes a critical point about student debt, that is it fundamentally misleading to call it a loan.
Read more...It’s puzzling to see Elizabeth Warren pull her punches on a pressing issue for middle class families, that of student debt.
Read more...Yves here. Note how the need to pretend Deutsche Bank is not undercapitalized, mentioned in passing in this post, is playing into policy.
An interview by Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, with Tomas Hirst of Pieria. Cross posted from Yanis Varoufakis’ blog.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil
Some decades ago the British economist Joan Robinson – one of John Maynard Keynes’ most brilliant students who helped him with the original draft of his General Theory – half-jokingly referred to some of her colleagues as “Bastard Keynesians”. These colleagues were mostly American Keynesians, but there were a few British Bastard Keynesians too – such as John Hicks, who invented the now famous ISLM diagram. What Robinson was trying to say was that these so-called Keynesians were fatherless in the sense that they should not be recognised as legitimately belonging to the Keynesian family. The Bastard Keynesians, in turn, generally assumed that this criticism implied some sort of Keynesian fundamentalism on the part of the British school.
Such a misinterpretation exists to this day. The second and third generation Bastard Keynesians – which include many of those who generally collect under the title “New Keynesian” – have reinforced this criticism.
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