Category Archives: Social policy

Bill McKibben: Movements Without Leaders

Yves here. The 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is ten days away. Brace yourself for the reminisces, most of which will be genuine, heartfelt, and insightful, while others which will treat the occasion as an opportunity for brand identification.

McKibben, a well-known and effective climate change activist, raises the question of leadership in movements to promote social change. He argues that the charismatic chieftain is out, and the model now is that of distributed leadership, with lower level “leaders” being more critical to movement success than ever before.

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Yanis Varoufakis: Three Tales of Greeks Coping With Breakdown

By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog

As a child, I was fascinated by my mother’s, and her mother’s, tales from the 1940s, and in particular their stories about life under the Nazi occupation. Greece is in the grip of a calamity that those who lived through the 1940s had thought they would never have to live through again. But I must desist. For this is not the place for analysis and argumentation about our contemporary Greek catastrophe. This is a piece of brief summer tales. So, allow me to relate three such stories.

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Fixing Old Markets With New Markets: the Origins and Practice of Neoliberalism

Philip Mirowski is the Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science University of Notre Dame. Professor Mirowski’s latest book is Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown

The interview was conducted by Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Fields Institute

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Bill Moyers with Richard Wolff on Inequality, Wage Slavery, and Economic Justice

Bill Moyers has a wide ranging and lively chat with Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and author of many books including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. Wolff is a fierce advocate of the need for policies for fairer wages for workers and argues why better pay is salutary not just for the employees but the broader economy.

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Questioning the Underlying Structures of Property and Power is “Off the Table”

Yves here. The Real News Network interview below with Vijay Prashad, a professor of international studies at Trinity College, is part of a series that examines the power dynamics that undergird our economic system. Unlike most interviews, this one is more ruminative. Rather than trying to deliver some key observations to viewers, this one is more intended to help people recognize that they have blinkered views on some issues.

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Stephanie Kelton: Reading Between the Lines – A Memo from Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles

Stephanie Kelton does an important service in discussing a memo from the Fed chairman during the Roosevelt Administration, Marriner Eccles. I was reminded of Eccles’ a fine appreciation for how the real economy worked and how government actions affected business. This keen eye for the fundamentals is sorely absent among most macroeconomists and policy experts today.

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Ilargi: Capitalism, A Norwegian Rat And Some Cockroaches

Yves here. Ilargi takes up one of our favorite topics, how the fetishization of numbers and measurement is at best misguided and at worst profoundly dysfunctional, as we discussed in a 2006 article, Management’s Great Addiction.

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More Obama Big Lies: Touting Sweatshop Amazon Warehouse Jobs as “Middle Class”

Obama needed a visual to show that, no, really, truly, jobs really are being created somewhere in America for yet another one of his exercises in trying to pretend that he’s on the side of ordinary Americans. So Obama used as his backdrop an American success story, Amazon, which is opening a new a warehouse in Chattanooga and hiring 7,000 people. That choice tells you everything about what Obama’s “middle class” program is really about.

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The Decline and Fall of Detroit

The bankruptcy filing and underlying train wreck of the once prosperous city of Detroit carries so much symbolic and practical baggage as to be beyond the scope of a single post. So rather than attempt to do a deep dive, particularly since the media and various experts are still weighing in, I thought I’d offer some high level observations and let readers provide more information, observations, and links.

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My Game of Thrones Problem

I’m normally not victimized, particularly not by pop culture. But I’m feeling more than a bit victimized by Game of Thrones (the books) and was separately asked this week by a buddy for an explanation as to why the series has become a mass phenomenon. That question is more important than my frustration, but I’ll address both and hope that readers will also give their perspective on what the series says about the zeitgeist.

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Chris Hedges: “America is a Tinderbox”

A Real News Network interview with Chris Hedges precipitated a lively, thoughtful discussion of the mess we are in as a civilization and whether we can pull ourselves out of what looks like a nosedive.

I thought readers might enjoy continuing the exchange, and the latest release in this Real News Network series should provide ample grist for debate.

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