Reader EmilianoZ pointed to a key section of a review of the documentary, “Page One: Inside the New York Times,” by Chris Hedges, who worked at the Times for 15 years. This is one of the best short summaries I’ve seen of the Faustian pact elite organizations (at least American ones) expect their members to enter into. From TruthDig:
Read more...By Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The Exiled.
I’ve often wondered why the American Right has been so quiet about V.S. Naipaul. He’s easily the most talented reactionary writer in the English language–maybe the only living talent left in the right-wing zombiesphere. The American Right devotes an insane amount of resources into manufacturing hagiographies on anyone whom they believe makes them look good–even the Soviets couldn’t compete with today’s American Right when it comes to glorifying their pantheon of degenerate cretins like Ayn Rand, Phyllis Schlafly, Friedrich von Hayek…
I found a few passages that I think explain why they never liked Naipaul much.
Read more...Yves here. This issue may seem a bit off topic to NC readers, but this subsidy to a state we treat as a mortal danger, and at a time of severe expenditure-cutting, illustrates the degree to which business interests drive American policy.
By Jane Hamsher. Cross posted from FireDogLake.
Yesterday the White House took the last step to owning all three leftover Bush NAFTA-expansion deals with Korea, Colombia and Panama by
. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that we’ll lose 159,000 jobs with the Korea deal alone.
At a time of high unemployment, it’s difficult to fathom why the President would be fighting to increase our trade deficit and ship tens of thousands of jobs overseas.
Even more stunning, however, is the loophole in the Obama deal that will hand billions over to North Korea to spend on their nuclear weapons program (PDF).
Read more...By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
The fight for Europe’s future is being waged in Athens and other Greek cities to resist financial demands that are the 21st century’s version of an outright military attack. The threat of bank overlordship is not the kind of economy-killing policy that affords opportunities for heroism in armed battle, to be sure. Destructive financial policies are more like an exercise in the banality of evil – in this case, the pro-creditor assumptions of the European Central Bank (ECB), EU and IMF (egged on by the U.S. Treasury).
As Vladimir Putin pointed out some years ago, the neoliberal reforms put in Boris Yeltsin’s hands by the Harvard Boys in the 1990s caused Russia to suffer lower birth rates, shortening life spans and emigration – the greatest loss in population growth since World War II. Capital flight is another consequence of financial austerity. The ECB’s proposed “solution” to Greece’s debt problem is thus self-defeating. It only buys time for the ECB to take on yet more Greek government debt, leaving all EU taxpayers to get the bill. It is to avoid this shift of bank losses onto taxpayers that Angela Merkel in Germany has insisted that private bondholders must absorb some of the loss resulting from their bad investments.
The bankers are trying to get a windfall by using the debt hammer to achieve what warfare did in times past.
Read more...Yves here. I’ve long been interested in the German approach to housing, since it has two noteworthy features: very high rates of rentals and reasonable costs. This post from MacroBusiness provides a short but very instructive overview. I’m intrigued to see this article highlight an issue that I have stressed as a New York City resident, where tenants have much stronger rights than almost anywhere in the US: that strong tenant protections actually help landlords. The result is that people rent not because they can’t afford to own (which means they are financially less stable) but because they prefer not to (for instance, they prefer the flexibility, or decided to put their money in a second home or in investments). And tenants who have property rights (as in the landlord cannot deny them a lease renewal if they are current on their rent) not only take better care of their unit, but I’ve seen them actually make meaningful investments in them (this happens a lot in my building).
From MacroBusiness:
A few months ago, after posting numerous articles advocating the Texan approach to land-use planning, I promised fellow MacroBusiness blogger, The Prince, that I would undertake an analysis of the German housing system, which is regarded as amongst the most affordable and liberal in Europe.
Read more...If you had any doubts that the US has become a corpocracy, two fresh rulings by the Supreme Court should seal any doubt. They are stunningly bad, in that they reduce or gut the reach of well-settled law over large companies, to the degree that it will take very little in the way of effort for companies to organize their affairs so as to escape liability for their actions in areas that affect large numbers of citizens.
The through line in both rulings is the creative and selective use of the notion of corporate “personhood”. That personhood has been the basis for the extension of a whole raft of rights to corporations, including, perversely, the Constitutional right of free speech. Yet the same notion which has been used to confer privileges that companies lack in other countries is at the same time being construed so as to vitiate accountability, when ordinary people find it mighty hard to escape the consequences of their actions. I’m certain the Founding Fathers, who were wary of concentrated power, would be spinning in their graves at the logic and effect of recent decisions on this front.
Read more...By Alex Andreou, a successful lawyer turned actor living in London. Cross posted from SturdyBlog
I have never been more desperate to explain and more hopeful for your understanding of any single fact than this: The protests in Greece concern all of you directly.
What is going on in Athens at the moment is resistance against an invasion; an invasion as brutal as that against Poland in 1939. The invading army wears suits instead of uniforms and holds laptops instead of guns, but make no mistake – the attack on our sovereignty is as violent and thorough. Private wealth interests are dictating policy to a sovereign nation, which is expressly and directly against its national interest. Ignore it at your peril. Say to yourselves, if you wish, that perhaps it will stop there. That perhaps the bailiffs will not go after the Portugal and Ireland next. And then Spain and the UK. But it is already beginning to happen. This is why you cannot afford to ignore these events.
Read more...It’s a sign of the times that your humble blogger is having to create finely stratified typologies for the various types of propaganda dubious research being deployed to promote the idea that rule by our new financial overlords, despite the considerable evidence to the contrary, really is for our own good.
We’ve already instituted the Frederic Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity for special-interest-group- favoring PR masquerading as research.
However, Mishkin is a Respected Personage, and the initial Mishkin Iceland Prize recipients, Charles Calomiris, Eric Higgins, and Joe Mason, presumably knew they were writing utter bunk and were handsomely compensated for attaching their names to less than credible arguments. That suggests we need a separate category for the more mundane, bread-and-butter shilldom that is dressed up to look like serious academic work. Let’s call it the Lobsters Really Want to be Your Dinner Prize.
Read more...By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
Financial crashes were well understood for a hundred years after they became a normal financial phenomenon in the mid-19th century. Much like the buildup of plaque deposits in human veins and arteries, an accumulation of debt gained momentum exponentially until the economy crashed, wiping out bad debts – along with savings on the other side of the balance sheet. Physical property remained intact, although much was transferred from debtors to creditors. But clearing away the debt overhead from the economy’s circulatory system freed it to resume its upswing. That was the positive role of crashes: They minimized the cost of debt service, bringing prices and income back in line with actual “real” costs of production. Debt claims were replaced by equity ownership. Housing prices were lower – and more affordable, being brought back in line with their actual rental value. Goods and services no longer had to incorporate the debt charges that the financial upswing had built into the system.
Financial crashes came suddenly. They often were triggered by a crop failure causing farmers to default, or “the autumnal drain” drew down bank liquidity when funds were needed to move the crops. Crashes often also revealed large financial fraud and “excesses.”
This was not really a “cycle.” It was a scallop-shaped a ratchet pattern: an ascending curve, ending in a vertical plunge. But popular terminology called it a cycle because the pattern was similar again and again, every eleven years or so. When loans by banks and debt claims by other creditors could not be paid, they were wiped out in a convulsion of bankruptcy.
Read more...A rising tide did not lift all boats even when the economy looked a lot better than it does now. As Francois T, an MD and medical researcher, wrote:
If you need ONE Indicator of how a nation is doing, it ought to be female life expectancy at birth. It is a tell tale sign that a lot of good things, (or bad things) are happening in the nation under study. Hence, forget about CDOs, CDS, RMBS, Pure BS, Official BS and what have you. Female LEAB will tell you something much more fundamental. It will also be a proof that everything you wrote about the deleterious societal impacts of financial high crimes is correct. As a matter of fact, people severely underestimate the real repercussions and total costs of a decrease in female life expectancy at birth.
He pointed to a just-released study, Falling behind: life expectancy in US counties from 2000 to 2007 in an international context. Some of its major findings:
Read more...Yves here. I’ve been looking for simple, practical ideas on what can be done to stem what seems to be a hopeless slide downward in our standards of conduct. I’d be interested to get reader reactions, particularly if any of you were in organizations that had sanctions that were implemented along these lines.
By James Andreoni, Professor of Economics, University of California, San Diego and Laura Katherine Gee, graduate student in Economics, University of California San Diego. Cross posted from VoxEU
How should a small organisation – a firm, a university, a sports team – encourage good behaviour? While punishment can often make things worse, this column proposes and tests a method the authors call the “hired gun”. By punishing only the worst offender, everyone is given an incentive to be the second-worst offender. If everyone follows that strategy, good behaviour soon follows.
Read more...By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Cross posted from CounterPunch.
Financial strategists do not intend to let today’s debt crisis go to waste. Foreclosure time has arrived. That means revolution – or more accurately, a counter-revolution to roll back the 20th century’s gains made by social democracy: pensions and social security, public health care and other infrastructure providing essential services at subsidized prices or for free. The basic model follows the former Soviet Union’s post-1991 neoliberal reforms: privatization of public enterprises, a high flat tax on labor but only nominal taxes on real estate and finance, and deregulation of the economy’s prices, working conditions and credit terms.
Read more...Matt Stoller, the former senior policy aide to Alan Grayson, wrote an op ed for Politico, “Public pays price for privatization,” on infrastructure transactions. We’ve depicted this troubling trend as “tantamount to selling the family china only to have to rent it back in order to eat dinner.”
Stoller looks at the political consensus that in an earlier era was gung ho to build major public assets and now would rather rip fees from them by hocking them to investors:
Read more...By Jon Walker, a senior policy analyst at Firedoglake. Cross posted from Firedoglake.
Worrying about long term deficits with official unemployment over 9 percent and treasury bonds rates at near-record lows is inherently an act of madness. It is the antithesis of both progressive policy and basic logic. Left to their own devices, liberals would relegate reducing the deficit to a very low priority in this economic climate. Of course when you’re a billionaire like Pete Peterson and you’re willing to spend millions promoting deficit hysteria, your can convince “liberals” to play into your deficit fetish at even the most illogical of times. Hence the Peter G. Peterson Foundations 2011 Fiscal Summit.
I’ve berated all the so called “progressive” groups that took part in the Peter G. Peterson Foundation 2011 Fiscal Summit for including health care reform in their deficit reduction proposals, yet totally abandoning the traditional progressive solution: a single payer health care system. If the United States simply adopted a system that was roughly as efficient as France, Finland, Norway, Australia, Denmark, England, or New Zealand, we wouldn’t have a deficit. Yet the clear and demostrable global precedent set by these nations somehow managed to escape inclusion by these leading liberal economic lights.
The Roosevelt Institute’s deficit plan, however, deserves special attention. Of the three plans, it is particularly bad on the issue of health care.
Read more...I’m about to reveal that I am a hopeless Old Fart, but I don’t understand why anyone other that a public figure uses Facebook. It has been demonstrated that anything on Facebook can and probably will be used against you. If you have a dispute or someone took an obsessive romantic interest in them, it would normally take some doing (like hiring a private detective) to try to find dirt. By making what would have been private information pubic, Facebook greatly lowers the cost of people with bad intentions toward you making your life miserable.
One development overseas that may be coming to the US is using Facebook to send legal notices, such as foreclosure notices. As Bloomberg informs us (hat tip reader Buzz Potamkin), this practice has been accepted by courts in Australia, Canada, and the UK.
This article triggered my “planted story” detector, since the piece kept stressing how there were no privacy issues involved (well, that’s close to tautological given how Facebook works) and had virtually no negative views expressed about this practice being adopted in the US.
Read more...