Category Archives: Social policy

The Wages of Austerity: Superbug Runs Wild in Greek Hospitals

Many writers tend to depict the effects of austerity in purely economic terms: loss of wealth and income, lesser income/social mobility. But depressions and accompanying changes in social norms can and do have more serious consequences.

A story in Bloomberg illustrates how the combination of budgets slashed thanks to austerity policies leads directly to deaths. The Wall Street Journal described last year how distress in the Greek economy had produced a significant increase in suicides. A new Bloomberg story recounts how severe cutbacks in hospital staffing have enabled superbugs that is hard to combat even under normal circumstances to inflict even more fatalities than usual in Greek hospitals.

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Wired’s Embarrassing Whitewash of Foxconn

Wired’s Joel Johnson has written a stunning bit of PR for Foxconn, now-controversial supplier to the consumer electronics industry, duly wrapped in credibility-enhancing guilt over Western materialism.

The article, “1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?” pretends to be about Foxconn’s factories. But Johnson admits he’s a tech toy writer who apparently has no knowledge of manufacturing. Yet he’s remarkably uninhibited in using his fantasies and abject ignorance as a basis for making sweeping generalizations about the Taiwanese powerhouse. For instance:

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Property Rights and Growth: Lessons from Slavery

I’m running this video because I like it and I hope you do too. I happen to know Suresh; he’s a member of the Alternative Banking Group of Occupy Wall Street. He discusses a clever and potentially important bit of research he is conducting on slavery in the US (the brutal 1800s kind, not our modern watered down debtcropper version). This clip also separately demonstrates that economists are not necessarily beyond redemption.

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Mainstream Economics as Ideology: An Interview with Rod Hill and Tony Myatt — Part II

Rod Hill and Tony Myatt are Professors of Economics at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John and Fredericton (respectively). Their new book, The Economics Anti-Textbook is available from Amazon. They also run a blog at www.economics-antitextbook.com.

Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington

Philip Pilkington: I think it was Joan Robinson who said something along the lines of “while we may have to teach a limited amount of material, we could at least teach that which is useful”. I’ve often encountered economics students who, frankly, seem to me to have a very tenuous grasp of the important aspects of economics. I recall one in particular who graduated from a very prestigious university not understanding what I meant when I said that I thought the chronic unemployment in Ireland was due to a lack of effective demand triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble.

In your experience do you find that students leave mainstream economics courses equipped to deal with real world issues?

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Mainstream Economics as Ideology: An Interview with Rod Hill and Tony Myatt — Part I

Rod Hill and Tony Myatt are Professors of Economics at the Department of Social Science at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. Their new book, The Economics Anti-Textbook is available from Amazon. They also run a blog at www.economics-antitextbook.com.

Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington.

Philip Pilkington: Your book seems to me a much needed antidote to the mainstream economics textbooks and can either be read alone or together with them. I think that’s a great approach because it allows students to become familiar with what is being taught in the classroom but also allows them to take a critical perspective on this material. So, let’s start with the format of these textbooks.

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Michael Hudson: Banks Weren’t Meant to Be Like This

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

A shorter version of this article in German will run in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on January 28. 2012

The inherently symbiotic relationship between banks and governments recently has been reversed. In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.

Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States.

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Philip Pilkington: ‘Does Capitalism Have a Future?’ – Why the Financial Times Asks All the Wrong Questions to Avoid the Real Issues

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

The Financial Times recently ran a series on the future of capitalism. The FT is usually an excellent publication – but the series came up seriously lacking.

The lack arises because of the question posed.

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Spain’s “Indignados” and the Globalization of Dissent

Real News Network highlighted a foreign broadcast on Spain’s “indignados,” and the way they have been providing advice to other anti-neoliberal movements around the world. I’m not sure it has gotten the attention it warrants, but the people that were involved in Occupy Wall Street early on conferred a good deal with seasoned protestors in Spain and Egypt.

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Bloomberg News Joins the “Inside Job” Team, Objects to Economics’ Inadequate Conflict of Interest Standards

It’s surprising and refreshing to see Bloomberg News, via an editorial, take on the way the economics profession has failed to clean up its act not simply in the wake of a massive intellectual failure but after the movie Inside Job highlighted some examples of corruption in the ranks of Famous Economists.

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Ron Paul Debate Flushes Out Gender-Baiting Right Wing Opportunists Masquerading as Progressives


The intense debate precipitated by a post on this site, “How Ron Paul Challenges Liberals,” and follow up posts by Glenn Greenwald and here serve to prove their simple yet frequently misrepresented thesis: that Ron Paul’s anti-war, anti-Fed positions expose fault lines among those traveling under the “liberal” banner.

Anyone who read comments on NC prior to this debate would have noticed some sympathy for Paul, ranging from the more common “he’s batshit and I’d never vote for him, but his opposition to our Middle East adventurism and the lack of accountability at the Fed is refreshing” to some making a stronger case for him. That shouldn’t be surprising given the point often made here and in the few lonely “progressive” outposts on the blogosphere (“progressive” is in the process of being co-opted in the same way “liberal” has been): that the Democratic party has been so deeply penetrated by the neoliberal/Robert Rubin/Hamilton Project types that it isn’t that different from the right on economic issues.

It should not be controversial to point out that the Democratic party uses identity politics as a cover for its policy of selling out the middle class to banks and big corporate interests, just on a slower and stealthier basis than the right. And we’ve seen the identity card used in a remarkably dishonest manner in this Ron Paul contretemps.

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Why Banks Back SOPA, the “Bring the Chinese Internet to America” Bill

Although lots of technology-related sites are correctly up in arms about the Stop Online Piracy Act, the MSM has given it short shrift, and the financial blogosphere has not paid much attention (cross posts of some of George Washington articles being a welcome exception).

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Naked Capitalism, “A Home for All Sorts of Bircher Nonsense”

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

A post I wrote two weeks ago, How Ron Paul Challenges Liberals, created something of a stir.  It was the most commented article on Naked Capitalism, ever.  And it kicked up a series of arguments among Democrats and civil libertarians.  Glenn Greenwald, who has been talking about these problems in prominent forums, followed up with this remarkable post (and then this one), and has taken many insults as a result.  This in and of itself is worth noting – the slurring of those who critique the structure of modern liberalism is an essential tool in the preservation of the status quo.  I’m going to highlight a few of the reactions here without much of a rebuttal, because I think the reactions themselves illustrate the struggle that boxes in traditional partisan Democrats.

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