Most people who have seen the work of Adam Curtis, say his BBC series The Century of the Self, or The Trap, or All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, are struck by his ability to read how mass opinion has been shaped by media and the officialdom.
It would seem hard to convey much in the way of insight on the topic of Rupert Murdoch in a mere five minutes, yet Curtis pulls it off in this short film.
Read more...I tend to avoid the year end retrospective/forecast blizzard, although some of the more creative compilations can be fun.
However, some 2012 forecasts crossed my screen, and two were such striking outliers that I thought I’d call them to your attention and seeing if readers have come across other Extreme Predictions for the new year (aside from the Mayan end of the world sort).
Read more...By Dan Kervick, a PhD in Philosophy and an active independent scholar specializing in the philosophy of David Hume who also does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economics Perspectives.
I will conclude by proposing six social tasks for the rising generation – six challenging tasks whose successful pursuit will help us achieve a more just, equal and democratic society. It is my view that the resulting society will not only be fairer and more decent. It will also be more economically productive, and will better promote human happiness and flourishing by more effectively distributing the goods and services we produce. Most of us will be happier in such a society as well, because the practices of democratic equality do a better job satisfying the human desires for cooperation, solidarity, trust, stability and fellowship that are the foundation of the social life for which human beings are naturally framed.
Extreme laissez faire capitalism of the kind extolled off and on over the past two centuries, and increasingly preached by economists, financiers and conservative thinkers over the past four decades, is a perverse distortion of human nature, foisted upon us by cold and demented thinkers captivated by inhuman notions of efficiency and domination. In the end, it is a system that reduces each human being to an object whose value is nothing beyond what it is worth in the market. We need to restore a social balance, in which private property, entrepreneurialism and commercial activity do not dominate our lives and set all the rules for our existence, but function within a democratic social order framed by a politically coherent and effective commitment to the public good. In a democratic social order there exists an activist public sector controlling a substantial store of social goods, and channeling democratic energies and intelligence into the ambitious perfection of such goods.
The six proposed tasks are not intended to be in any way exhaustive. They all pertain to the economic sphere of life alone. But the realization of a genuinely democratic society will require efforts that transcend the economic sphere. We need to rejuvenate the democratic spirit in America, educate ourselves and our fellow citizens on the unfulfilled potentialities of democratic existence, recapture the salvageable institutions of our threatened but still existing democracy, and further expand the institutions and habits of democratic practice. There is much to be done, but the prospect of doing it is exciting.
Read more...As much as I’m fond of the name “Naked Capitalism,” I am beginning to wonder whether a more accurate description of this blog’s beat might be “Naked Corruption.” Our continuing discussion of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s foreclosure whitewash reviews serves as an object lesson.
This Real News Network interview with David Swanson, which focuses on Obama’s PR on the “end” of the war in Iraq, also underscores a theme in Matt Stoller’s post on Ron Paul yesterday: the deep commitment of both parties to a large and active military.
Read more...Time to redouble our efforts … the tide may be turning, and we have a chance of winning.
Read more...Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.
Over the past few months, the concept of “Financial Repression” has come into the lexicon and is increasingly used to describe a possible set of government strategies that constrains the financial sector. It has far more political significance than its users would have you believe.
Read more...By Dan Kervick, a PhD in Philosophy and an active independent scholar specializing in the philosophy of David Hume who also does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economics Perspectives
I have set out a simplified model of a monetarily sovereign government. But near the end of the previous section, I began to suggest that the United States government is indeed a monetary sovereign by this kind. The reader might now suspect that I have yielded my rational mind over to a simplistic fiction of my own creation. And by this point, the reader is probably thinking that however interesting it might be to imagine this fictional entity, the so-called monetary sovereign, such fictions have nothing to do with the complexities of the real world, because actual governments maintain accounts that are indeed constrained by the amount of money in those accounts and by the external sources of funding to which they have access. After all, can’t a government default on its debt? What about the recent debt ceiling debate in the US? What about what is happening in Europe with the sovereign debt crisis? Also, if a government like the United States government was a monetary sovereign of the kind I have described, the consequences would seem to be enormous. Surely if a democratic government possessed this kind of power, we would make much more use of it than we do. In short, monetary sovereignty as described seems both too simple to be real and too good to be true.
These skeptical intuitions are reasonable, so they need to be addressed.
Read more...By Dan Kervick, a PhD in Philosophy and an active independent scholar specializing in the philosophy of David Hume who also does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economics Perspectives
Reflections on Modern Money
Before considering what it would mean to make our monetary system more democratic, let’s begin by calling to mind a few familiar features of money and modern monetary systems in general, features we all intuitively understand as users of money in a modern monetary economy.
Read more...By Jake Romero, an economics student at Portland State University. You can reach him at jvc613 (at) gmail.com
Economics has always been something of a battleground, but in November a group of about seventy Harvard students opened a new front in the ongoing hostilities: its introductory pedagogy. In solidarity with the Occupy movement, the students staged a walkout of their principles course to protest what they called its “inherent bias.”
In his rebuttal in the New York Times, Greg Mankiw countered that his teaching is careful to avoid policy conclusions and that its subject matter falls squarely within the current mainstream of the discipline. Narrowly correct, he nonetheless profoundly missed the broader points that his students, to be fair, seemed unable to articulate fully.
Read more...Given that the Office of Bank Boosterism Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is the clear first among the highly competitive ranks of bank-friendly regulators, the fact that the OCC launched a program for borrowers to obtain restitution for financial harm suffered due to foreclosures seemed more than a bit sus.
Gretchen Morgenson does an admirable job of exposing the multiple shortcomings of this OCC program.
Read more...This is a very useful, as in jaundiced, discussion by Lawrence Wilkerson on Real News Network, of the US effort to “end” its engagement in Iraq. Wilkerson covers the bigger strategic game, including the perspective of Big Oil, other major states in the Middle East, and China.
Read more...By Dan Kervick. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
A new year is upon us. And even before its first hour has been rung in, 2012 is already taking shape before us as a pivotal year in global politics. We can all feel the awakening under way. A revived longing for equality, shared prosperity and democratic solidarity is inspiring a vibrant new politics around the world. This new activist spirit is quickened by the keen apprehension of young people on every continent that something is very, very wrong with the present economic and political order. The rising generation, heirs to sick and damaged societies that have been unbalanced by decades of plutocratic rule and antisocial cupidity, have now begun to rouse themselves – and in the process they have rallied the moral outrage of their fellow citizens.
Read more...While quite a few bloggers, prosecutors, economists, and other experts have taken the Administration to task on mortgage-related abuses, the mainstream media for the most part has not seriously challenged the mind-numbing Obama claim that the banksters did nothing illegal.
Reuters refreshingly opposed that bullshit assertion frontally yesterday. In a piece pointedly titled, “The Watchdogs That Didn’t Bark,” reporter Scot Paltrow shows that the mortgage arena is a target-rich environment:
The public keeps losing and losing and losing to big finance because financiers have made an art form of using complexity, opacity, and leverage to cover their tracks.
The last example comes in an anodyne-seeming article in the Financial Times about collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs.
Read more...