“Success is relative” wrote T. S. Eliot in his play The Family Reunion, “It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.” This is an apposite description of the current “success” in the EU. A financial and political disaster has been transformed into a permanent calamity.
Read more...Yves here. Das makes some statements in this post that I am certain will provide grist for reader discussion. But even if you quibble on some of the particulars, I anticipate you’ll agree on the extent of the damage done to trust at various levels of society and how costly it is proving to be.
Read more...Michael Hudson sent this short video which explains the history of debt jubilees and the role of private debt in the rise of oligarchies.
Read more...On Bill Moyers last week, Henry Giroux talked about how our political system is willing to throw young people on the trash heap, and indifference to rising homelessness among students is an ugly example.
Read more...While Pete Peterson and Bob Rubin have couched their campaign against Social Security and Medicare in the moral vestments of “fiscal responsibility”, they gloss over the macroeconomic financial reality of government and the requirement for deficit spending to maintain growth of the national and world economies. The moral fervor that they apply is inapplicable to government programs: while it may seem real to them or the gullible politicians they influence, the moral outrage they hope to play on is based on false and inhumane premises.
Read more...Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix
Read more...I have to confess I find stereotyping annoying, and in almost all cases, it’s a poor substitute for more careful analysis and characterization. Yet it is marvelously effective in politics, as Karl Rove proved.
Read more...Several bellwether software initiatives have gone off the rails over the last five years. I am going to focus on one, because I learned about it on Naked Capitalism, and is where I first saw the expression “Code is Law”. I hope when history is written, this example will stand out on how the anarchist nerds that we call software engineers inadvertently started to hijack public institutions.
Read more...The best political system that money can buy is doing a great job for its customers and a lousy job for the rest of us.
Read more...This is the first segment of an ongoing project, Eurowinter, to record the human toll of austerity policies in Europe. It focuses on the suffering Greece, as told by Greeks themselves.
Read more...After five weeks healthcare.gov presented insurance policies for my family to purchase. No wonder the website was dark for so long: the plans are expensive, atrocious, and the insurance companies look like they are cheating.
Read more...If a bad job market wasn’t damaging enough, the cost of paying off student loans does much more harm to the long-term prospects of young people than is commonly realized.
Read more...Yves here. The headline is hardly news, at least if you’ve been paying attention, but this post does a great job of debunking arguments against Social Security, particularly ones designed to stoke generational warfare.
Read more...I’m generally very taken with Ian Welsh’s work, particularly two recent posts, A New Ideology and How to Create a Viable Ideology. He then continued with 44 Explicit Points on Creating a Better World. And I hate to say it, but the last piece was no where near as well thought out as the preceding pieces. What troubled me about his latest piece was its combination of confidence (as opposed to modesty and soliciting reactions and input) in combination with it having internal contractions and a lack of precision of language. But perhaps the biggest shortcoming was trying to finesse the question of governance.
Read more...Yves here. This article focuses on the critically important of how the real danger to the economic welfare of young people is not the cost of retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare but the failure to generate enough jobs now and invest in infrastructure and education.
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