By Lynn Parramore, a contributing editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
There’s a side of Lincoln that no Hollywood film shows clearly: He was extremely close to the railway barons, the most powerful corporate titans of the era.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a contributing editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
Trying to convince the public to cut America’s best-loved and most successful program requires a lot of creativity and persistence.
Read more...Today, the settlement monitor Joseph Smith released another PR piece, um, progress report.
Read more...The Australian press is giving raspberries to a plan by the University of Western Sydney to pretty much eliminate its economics department, which would result in Steve Keen and other instructors being fired. Keen is a well known and respected heterodox economist, so this move looks particularly misguided.
Read more...In a new column in the New York Times, Simon Johnson points out that Obama is likely to be appointing a new SEC chairman soon. He describes two alternatives: choosing a friend of the industry versus someone who might actually be willing and able to regulate it. Johnson believes that a tough-minded chairman should not only enforce the rules but “actively seek to change the conventional wisdom around finance.”
Read more...We took a very dim view of some of the Administration’s less-than-credible claims about its much-touted backdoor bank bailout, which was more popularly known as the mortgage settlement. And a rash of news reports tonight have caught the Administration out in its deceptions. From a March post, Memo to Shaun Donovan: Your Nose is Getting So Long You Need to Get a Hacksaw:
Read more...One of the reasons the public knows little about economics is that most economists are lousy speakers. Part of that is their reliance on jargon, which is often shamanistic, designed to obscure rather than communicate. But the other reason is that a lot of economists don’t bother to try to be engaging.
The remarks by Yanis Varoufakis and Marshall Auerback are informative and lively, if ultimately pretty grim. The comments at YouTube are extremely positive.
Read more...The CBO is resorting to such extreme measures to impede independent analysis of its scaremongering about the fiscal deficits that it’s hard not to conclude that it has something to hide.
Read more...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
Third Way, lobbyists for and from Wall Street who are leading the effort to enrich Wall Street by privatizing Social Security, was created by Wall Street to fool some of the people all of the time.
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at https://twitter.com/matthewstoller and he can be reached at stoller at gmail.com.
First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then they can actually just keep cycling through those, turns out. – James Adomian
This is a somewhat unusual post, because I’m going to explain why I think you should put a few dollars towards this site and Yves Smith. I’m plunking down $100 myself, just as Neil Barofsky has donated, because what this site, its readers, and this community mean to me and to the possibility of social change in this country. You can give here, or you can read on.
Read more...Yves here. This post by Delusional Economics continues with his cataloguing of the slide of the Eurozone into an economic and political abyss. What is striking is the contrast between his matter of fact tone (which at this point is fully warranted, these self destructive actions have become depressingly routine) and the horror of what is happening, that millions of people are faced with desperation and are prepared to take desperate measures in retaliation.
Read more...No matter how bad things seem to be, there are always ways for them to become worse. While the campaign against Medicare and Social Security is being couched in the sort of faux inevitability that has become familiar via European austerity measures, other pernicious lame duck session measures are moving forward in the hope no one will notice.
Dave Dayen wrote up a remarkably ugly one last Friday.
Read more...By Neil Barofsky, Adjunct Professor of Law and Senior Research Fellow at NYU Law School, former Special Inspector General of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, and author of Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street
I first became acquainted with Naked Capitalism while I was still at Treasury as the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Read more...As regular readers may recall, last Monday, we put up a post titled “Fed Budgetary Experts Demolish CBO Health Cost Model, the Lynchpin of Budget Hysteria.” We received a voicemail and a related e-mail Wednesday morning. This is the text of the e-mail:
Read more...This Real News Network interview with Bill Black provides an overview of why Wall Street and the Administration are so keen to gut well loved and socially valuable safety nets for the elderly, in particular, Social Security. This talk is a good introduction for people who may not understand how high the stakes in the budget fight are and why the economic arguments used to justify it are bogus.
Read more...