Devolution: Welcome to the World Where Things Don’t Work Well
When I took the introductory fine arts course in college (which actually was a tough course), one of the ideas that stuck with me was devolution.
Read more...Category Archives: Social policy
Banksters’ Useful Idiots: Brockton Considers Dubious Eminent Domain Strategy, Tainting More Legitimate Uses
Somewhere, someone must be laughing.
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...Yes, Virginia, The Rich Did Very Well With the Fiscal Cliff Deal
The Real News Network has conducted a series of interviews on the fiscal cliff deal, and the two most recent are worthwhile in and of themselves, and are also good tools for persuading those who fallen for the idea that Obama got a good deal to reexamine their view. With the Vichy Left now trying to soften up the public for Social Security and Medicare “reform,” it’s particularly important to keep an accurate scorecard on what has already gone down.
Read more...Michael Hudson: America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff, Part IV– Why Financial and Tax Reform Should Go Together
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. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.”
Taxes pay for the cost of government by withdrawing income from the parties being taxed. From Adam Smith through John Stuart Mill to the Progressive Era, general agreement emerged that the most appropriate taxes should not fall on labor, capital or on sales of basic consumer needs. Such taxes raise the break-even cost of employing labor. In today’s world, FICA wage withholding for Social Security raises the price that employers must pay their work force to maintain living standards and buy the products they produce.
However, these economists singled out one kind of tax that does not increase prices: taxes on the land’s rental value, natural resource rents and monopoly rents.
Read more...Latvia’s Economic Disaster as a Neoliberal Success Story: A Model for Europe and the US?
By Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson was Professor of Economics and Director of Research at the Riga Graduate School of Law. He is a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City. His latest book is Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents. Jeffrey Sommers is visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. He is an Associate Professor of Political Economy & Public Policy at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. The authors have advised Latvian politicians and government officials up to the Prime Minister level. Both have published extensively in the Latvian press.
A generation ago the Chicago Boys and their financial supporters applauded General Pinochet’s anti-labor Chile as a success story, thanks mainly to its transformation of their Social Security into Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) that almost universally were looted by the employer grupos by the end of the 1970s.
Today’s most highly celebrated anti-labor success story is Latvia. Latvia is portrayed as the country where labor did not fight back, but simply emigrated politely and quietly. Can this really be a model for the United States or Europe’s remaining social democracies? Or is it simply a cruel experiment that cannot readily be emulated in larger countries un-traumatized by Soviet era memories of occupation?
Read more...Philip Pilkington: The New York Times’ Bizarre and Misleading Praise of Austerity Poster Child Latvia
By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil
Most pieces written and published on economic topics in our newspapers are morality tales rather than economic analysis. Economic analysis is boring and thus only a few people are going to read it. By contrast, morality tales pull at the heartstrings like a Hollywood script.
Read more...