Linchpin Pro-Austerity Paper Rife with Errors; Recomputed Results Show No Growth Hit from High Government Debt
There appears to be no intellectually honest defense of austerity left standing.
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Obama: The Buckraking Starts Here
It has become depressingly normal to hear of senior Administration officials going immediately for the golden ring when they leave public service. But for every Mary Shapiro joining Promontory and Lanny Breuer returning to Covington & Burling for $4 million a year, there are even more operatives at similar or lower levels who make a very juicy return on their association with Obama but don’t get the same level of attention in the mainstream media.
Norm Scheiber, in a must-read article in The New Republic, “Get Rich or Deny Trying:
How to make millions off Obama,” chronicles how this process works. It’s even uglier than you might imagine.
Foreclosure Review Hearings Show It’s Time to Burn Down the OCC
There has already been a lot of good commentary on the Senate hearings on the misnamed Independent Foreclosure Reviews, notably by Pam Martens. I’ve finally gotten a transcript (it will be going up shortly at Corrente) which helps in reviewing it more carefully. Since Part 2 of the hearings take place this week, I’ll focus on some key issues that haven’t gotten the attention they warrant.
Read more...Obama Honors Thatcher with TVA “Privatization” Plan, Kicks Ordinary People in the Stomach Again
Nathan Tankus is a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
President Obama adopted a reflective tone to mark the passing of Maggie Thatcher. Commenting on her death, he stated “the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty.” In Obama’s proposed budget, we found out what the terms “freedom” and “liberty” mean: the freedom for the old to go hungry and the freedom of the poor to go cold.
Read more...Joe Stiglitz Blasts Our Wealthy-Coddling Tax System for Increasing the Returns on Rent-Seeking
It’s a sign of how well relentless propagandizing works that Joe Stiglitz has to devote a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times to debunking the idea that our income tax system, whose salient characteristic is low tax burdens for the rich, is good for anyone other than the rich.
Read more...Europe’s Stark Choice: Resignation or Revolution
Contributed by Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog, Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media.
Catalonia’s riot police unleashed the untamed fury of the state upon the protestors and cleared Barcelona’s Plaza Catalunya of all occupants. A dense ring of shell-shocked people gathered around the square. I was one of them. A child riding on his father’s shoulders held up a sign: “No soy anti sistema, el sistema es anti yo,” it said (I’m not anti-system; the system is anti-me).
Read more...Obama Social Security Reform Ignores Data on Actual Living Standards of Seniors
This Real News Network segment does a very nice, compact job of explaining why chained CPI is such a disastrously bad policy for older Americans. I’m featuring it with the hope that it might prove useful in educating friends and family members who might not be up to speed on this issue.
Read more...Why Germany (Mistakenly) Thinks it Can Kill Its Export Markets Through Austerity and Still Prosper
I’ve mentioned repeatedly that Germany wants contradictory things: it wants to stop financing its trade partners (the periphery countries in Europe) and yet wants to continue to run large trade surpluses. I took this to be a sign of German wishful thinking, or just politicians figuring the incoherent strategy can still be maintained for the duration of their time in office.
A post by Yanis Varoufakis show that the Germans at least have better delusions that I realized.
Read more...Troika Demands Another €6 Billion from Cyprus, Making “Rescue” Bigger Than GDP
Nothing like dramatic proof that austerity is a failure
Read more...Michael Hudson on Obama’s “Catfood” Social Security Reform
Michael Hudson, in a Real News Network interview, puts paid some of the key ideas used to sell catfood futures, um, Social Security and Medicare cuts, such as if we don’t Do Something, interest on government bonds will eat the economy. He also gives a good explanation of what “chained CPI” is really all about.
Read more...Debunking the Idea that Americans are Overtaxed
One of those cases where a picture is worth a thousand words.
Read more...Fed Argues that Mortgage Abuses are Trade Secrets, Meaning Institutionalized Fraud
When the media discusses how banks have ridden like a steamroller over borrowers and investors, the typical response is a combination of minimization and distancing: that the offense wasn’t such a big deal and that it was a mistake. Recall the PR barrage in the wake of the robosigning scandal: its was “sloppiness,” “paperwork errors”.
Two major government settlements later, this position is looking awfully strained. And the Fed, in stonewalling Elizabeth Warren’s and Elijah Cumming’s efforts to get more information about the Independent Foreclosure Reviews, presented the bad practices as servicer policies, which means that they were deliberate, hence, fraudulent.
Read more...Obama Moves Forward with Cutting Social Security and Medicare as We Lecture Europe Otherwise
It must be really hard to be an Obama defender these days, at least if you are not on a big corporate payroll.
Read more...OCC Releases Embarrassing List of Foreclosure Review Payouts on Eve of Senate Hearings
As much as people who were watching the shutdown of the foreclosure reviews expected the payouts to be grotesquely low, seeing the actual numbers is….revolting.
Read more...Bill Black: The New York Times Thinks Bleeding Cyprus is “Strong Medicine”
Yves here. I’m overdue for a post on the propagandizing against Cyprus. Black describes one element of this barrage.
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posed from Benzinga
I’m announcing the New York Times award for incompetence in macroeconomic reporting (IMR, pronounced like “screamer”).
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