Category Archives: Social policy

Wolf Richter: Could 87% of the French Really Want A Strongman To Reestablish Order?

Americans are cynical about politicians. Congressional approval ratings were mired just above single-digit levels in 2012, hitting 10% twice. An expression of utter disdain. But the French—with their economy spiraling deeper into crisis—expressed disdain for their political class, as they call it, in another way: with a desire for authoritarian leadership, a “real leader” who would “reestablish order.”

Read more...

Republicans Backing Away from Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship, to Hold Line on Sequestration and Budget

A important shift in the Republicans’ negotiating stance over the austerity fight (do we go Dem lite or Republican high test?) was duly noted in the Financial Times a day ago, but a search in Google News (“debt ceiling”) suggests a lot of other commentators have not yet digested its significance, so it seemed worthy of a short recap here.

Read more...

Joe Firestone: Austerian Obama Kisses Platinum Coin Bargaining Chip Goodbye, but the Coin May Rise Again

By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He has taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone

Yesterday, Ezra Klein mouthpieced for Treasury and Fed reported in the Washington Post that:

The Treasury Department will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling. If they did, the Federal Reserve would not accept it.

Needless to say, it’s not surprising that a reading of the underlying statutes suggests Obama was free to use the platinum coin to circumvent the debt ceiling, and conveniently scapegoats the Fed to hide his own preference for imposing austerity.

Read more...

Untold History: The Coup Against Wallace and What Might Have Been

Real News Network has run an occasional series based on an interview with Peter Kuznick on what he calls “untold history,” which are important junctures in American history that are airbrushed out of the mainstream narrative. Here, Paul Jay and Kuznick continue their discussion of Roosevelt’s wildly popular vice president Henry Wallace and how he was shoved aside in favor of Harry Truman.

Read more...

Bill Black: Krugman and Obama’s Dangerous Austerity Myths

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 posted from http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/12/kill-the-fiscal-cliff-instead-of-the-economy.html“>New Economic Perspectives

Austerity in response to the Great Recession has proven to be an economic weapon of mass destruction.

Read more...

Wolf Richter: How Americans Stack Up In Dying From Violence, War, Suicide, And Accidents

Now some new fodder for the gun-control debate that the horrid events in Connecticut suddenly stirred into a frenzy, though it had been snoozing through the daily drumbeat of murders in Oakland, CA, a few miles across the Bay from me, or in Richmond to the north, or really in any other city. The fodder is inconvenient, however. For both sides of the debate.

Read more...

Philip Pilkington: The Origins of Neoliberalism, Part II – The Americanisation of Hayek’s Delusion

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

Shared psychotic disorder, or folie à deux, is a rare delusional disorder shared by two or, occasionally, more people with close emotional ties. An extensive review of the literature reveals cases of folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie à famille (all family members), and even a case involving a dog.

– Medscape Reference

Read more...

Bill Black: Why Neo-Liberals Need to Dismiss Latin Americans as “Idiots”

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 posted from Benzinga

Alvaro Vargas Llosa (AVL) co-authored the Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot with two other journalists. He revisited the subject with an article in 2007 entitled “The Return of the Idiot.”

AVL derides young Latin Americans as idiots, claiming that “they suppress the notion that predation and vindictiveness are wrong.” That claim fails because stopping “predation and vindictiveness” is what drives young Latin American progressives.

Read more...

Why Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill Matter: We Can Stop Corruption If We Understand It

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.

Three days ago, Naked Capitalism published a story, Eight Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill, From Goldman Sachs to Disney to NASCAR. Basically, when everyone else was focused on taxes for the wealthy or spending cuts, we actually looked at the underlying bill. And loh and behold, the corporate extenders were egregious and included cash for NASCAR, Hollywood, mining companies, GE, Citigroup, and so on. The reaction has been swift, and is useful to understand, because it points to an underlying political dynamic. And that is, change is possible, and “the system” isn’t inherently dirty. We can make a difference, if we try.

Read more...

Debunking (Yet Another) Scaremongering New York Times Op Ed on Social Security

Some readers were decidedly unhappy about a New York Times op-ed over the weekend by Gary King and Samir Soneji that argued the need to reform Social Security was even more urgent than the catfood futures sellers thought because people are going to live longer than the budget mavens assume. Given the op-ed space limits, the authors couldn’t supply much in the way of backup for their views, but the argument was that improvements in longevity due to the decline in smoking and improved cardiovascular health were not adequately reflected in the data.

It’s not clear that we should take this forecast all that seriously.

Read more...

Eric Zuesse: Understanding President Obama’s Strategy to Force Cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (Updated)

By Eric Zuesse, an investigative historian and the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

In order to be able to understand the current debt-limit battle in Washington, here is the essential historical background….

Read more...