How did Quebec Students Mobilize Hundreds of Thousands for Strike?
It’s telling that the fact that hundreds of thousands of people in Quebec have been striking for over two months has gone virtually unreported in the US.
Read more...Category Archives: Social policy
Exclusive: How Obama’s Early Career Success Was Built on Fronting for Chicago Real Estate and Finance
Barack Obama remains an icon to many on what passes for the left in America despite incontrovertible evidence that he does not represent their interests. There are many contributing factors, including his considerable skills as a speaker and his programmatic effort to neuter liberal critics by getting their funding cut.
A central component of the seemingly impenetrable Obama mythology is his personal history: a black man, son of a broken home, who nevertheless got on the fast track to financial success by becoming editor of the Harvard Law Review, but turned instead to working with and later representing a particularly disadvantaged community, the South Side of Chicago.
Even so, this story does not quite add up.
Read more...David Graeber: New Police Strategy in New York – Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protestors
By David Graeber, a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and an author and activist currently based in New York
A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
Read more...Adam Davidson Parrots Disinformation as He Extols Rule by the Top 0.1%
Adam Davidson is moving up in the world. He has gone from fellating the 1% to the top 0.1%.
Read more...Charlotte to Suspend Constitutional Free Speech and Assembly Protections to Help Bank of America, Duke Shareholder Meetings
It has become pretty routine for local police to engage in thuggery and run roughshod over Constitutional protections in the name of maintaining order, which increasingly means not annoying big companies.
Read more...Occupy Wall Street Sues New York City, JP Morgan #OWS
One of the continuing and largely unrecognized aspects of the ongoing media coverage of Occupy Wall Street is that police brutality and lesser abuses have been airbrushed out.
Read more...Reining in Finance and the Effort to Silence a Critical UN Agency
This Real News Network segment gives a window into the efforts to squash criticism of the neoliberal orthodoxy in the world of international agencies. Even though the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) gets very little attention in the major media, its well researched and often prescient reports are enough of a threat to the orthodoxy to produce efforts by the advanced economy block in the UN to try to clip the wings of the agency. The start of this interview may seem like a bit of inside baseball, but it shortly gets to issues that are critically important.
Read more...Jamie Galbraith on Changes in Finance as the Driver of Inequality
I’m working my way around to the INET talks that I missed, and this one by Jamie Galbraith is very much worth viewing. It takes a while to build up steam, so be patient.
Galbraith has marshaled a great deal of cross country data over time, and shows how changes in equality happened in a very large number of economies in parallel. He explains, persuasively, that the most plausible culprit is changes in the financial regime.
Read more...Randy Wray: The Job Guarantee and Real World Experience
By Randy Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City
There have been many job creation programs implemented around the world, some of which were narrowly targeted while others were broad-based. The American New Deal included several moderately inclusive programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corp and the Works Progress Administration. Sweden developed broad based employment programs that virtually guaranteed access to jobs.
Read more...The Trust Deficit
This weekend, the National Journal published, “In Nothing We Trust,” using Muncie, Indiana to illustrate the distrust that is eating away at the American social fabric.
Read more...Michael Hudson: Productivity, The Miracle of Compound Interest, and Poverty
Suppose you were alive back in 1945 and were told about all the new technology that would be invented between then and now: the computers and internet, mobile phones and other consumer electronics, faster and cheaper air travel, super trains and even outer space exploration, higher gas mileage on the ground, plastics, medical breakthroughs and science in general. You would have imagined what nearly all futurists expected: that we would be living in a life of leisure society by this time. Rising productivity would raise wages and living standards, enabling people to work shorter hours under more relaxed and less pressured workplace conditions.
Why hasn’t this occurred in recent years?
Read more...The Burgeoning Student Debt Problem
Even though other consumer debt-bombs have done more damage, student debt is producing significant social and economic distortions.
Read more...Sequoia Fund Manager Campaigns Against Goldman Board Member, Former Fannie CEO Jim Johnson
A telling taboo in elite circles is the issue of corruption.
Read more...From Financial Crisis to Stagnation: An Interview with Thomas Palley
Thomas Palley is has served as the chief economist for the US – China Economic and Security Review Commission. He is currently Schwartz Economic Growth Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book From Financial Crisis to Stagnation is available at a 20% discount here [Select country location (top right hand corner) & enter code “palley2012” at checkout]
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington
Philip Pilkington: At the beginning of your book From Financial Crisis to Stagnation you refer to the 2008 crisis as a ‘crisis of bad ideas’. Could you please briefly explain why you refer to the crisis in this way?
Read more...Yasha Levine: Recovered Economic History – “Everyone But an Idiot Knows That The Lower Classes Must Be Kept Poor, or They Will Never Be Industrious”
Yves here. This post by Yasha Levine ran last week, but it is sufficiently important that I thought it was worth featuring on NC. The conventional thinking on the so-called “lower orders” usually depicts them as deserving their fate (either due to lack of self-discipline and motivation, or in other ages, as genetically inferior), or as victims of circumstance. But Levine, citing a recent book by economic historian Michael Perelmen, points to another strain of thought: that self-sufficient peasants were indolent, and it would be better for them to reduce their income so as to force them to work harder. God forbid that anyone other that the aristocrats have the luxury of a lot of leisure time!
By Yasha Levine, an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.. Cross posted from The eXiled
…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.
—Arthur Young; 1771
By Yasha Levine, an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.. Cross posted from The eXiled
…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.
—Arthur Young; 1771
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