I try to avoid republishing other people’s very cool charts, but this is on a pet blog topic. So you readers please be very nice and go look at the accompanying text at Visualizing Economics and better yet, subscribe too (hat tip Richard Smith, click to enlarge): This serves to confirm the idea that from […]
Read more...Normally, I’d relegate an article that discusses torture to Links and let readers chat it up among themselves. But an article at TruthOut on the genesis of the US torture program needs to be read widely. And in many respects, it’s not as off topic as it might seem to be.
On one level, it is a troubling illustration of an Israeli saying, “Love your enemy, for you will become him.”
Read more...From this week’s “New Rules” section of the Bill Maher show. The relevant part starts at 2:10 (hat tip Helaine Olen via Gawker). It is gratifyingly brutal.
Another sign of the MSM’s descent into Pravda-like irrelevance is that the only mass audience venues that regularly provide commentary within hailing distance of reality are comedy shows.
Read more...It seems that the efforts of the austerians to cow the public into cutting Social Security and Medicare are not getting traction. And Tea Party adherents are breaking with the Republican party line on this issue.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Read more...‘ve gotten messages but don’t see any news items yet (you can apparently find confirmation on Twitter, @AndrewKroll, @ddayen, and PRNewswatch for instance) that the police in Wisconsin have announced they will begin arrests to clear the capitol building. It’s to start at 4:00 PM Central, so it is now in process.
Hundreds have said they are willing to be arrested. Human chains were formed around the capitol.
Wonder what happens when they run out of local jail space.
Read more...Yves here. I thought this post was useful not only in describing how high food prices posed a particularly difficult policy problem for North African countries, but also in providing important background.
By Ronald Albers and Marga Peeters; cross posted from VoxEU.
World food prices are now even higher than their peak just before the global crisis. During periods of high commodity prices, North African and Middle Eastern governments have a long tradition of subsidising food and fuel products. But this column shows that food price inflation and consequently subsidies were also high during periods when global commodity prices were falling. Now these countries have an opportunity to correct this.
Yesterday, we discussed a mundane reason to be leery of the sale of assets owned by the public to private parties: the outcome, almost without exception, is a ripoff. Even if the owners manage to orchestrate the bidding well enough to assure that the entity fetches a decent price, the cost of doing the deal and the investors’ return requirements assure that charges to the public will rise faster than if the property was left in government hands (and this does not preclude the owner scrimping on maintenance and service levels). Macquarie Bank has been the world leader in this business, and reader Crocodile Chuck gave some useful examples:
Read more...On the one hand, it’s a badge of honor of sorts to see the most powerful political lobby, the Chamber of Commerce, have its operatives moving from the “ignore you” to the “fight you” stage of engagement. The flip side is that the tactics that they are willing to consider don’t reflect at all well on their commitment to principles like the rule of law or decency.
ThinkProgress today broke the story of the dirty works being considered. Readers may be aware of a massive leak of e-mails of the security firm HB Gary Federal which made the mistake of trying to hack the computers of Anonymous, the group that has taken to punishing organizations that cut off donations to Wikileaks.
Anonymous obtained and leaked the internal messages and rubbed HB Gary’s face in it a bit too.
The e-mail dump exposed some dirty laundry, namely that of a disinformation campaign that HB Gary plus two other “security” firms Palantir, and Berico Technologies (which together called themselves Team Themis had started to map out for a law firm the Chamber of Commerce works actively with, Hunton & Williams.
Read more...By Tom Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
Food and oil prices are rising as tension in Cairo is soaring — time to get on board with the people’s demands.
Add Barack Obama to the long list of statesmen who couldn’t solve the Riddle of the Sphinx. For a while last week it looked like a miracle was happening: The United States was on the verge of doing right and doing well at the same time. After stumbling initially, the administration openly warned the Egyptian army and government not to slaughter the protesters. It also started lining up behind the Egyptian people’s demands for a swift transition to a new, more democratic regime. Neo-con lions like Robert Kagan and Elliott Abrams bedded down with liberal internationalist lambs in a “Working Group on Egypt” that called for reforms and Mubarak’s exit, while John McCain and other Republicans offered bipartisan cover for Real Change in the world’s oldest civilization.
But by Saturday, February 5, the wheels started coming off.
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager who writes at New Deal 2.0. If we’re forced back to square one by the Supreme Court, why not get it right? My colleague, Bo Cutter, has noted the likelihood of continued challenges to health care reform in the wake of the recent Florida State […]
Read more...Yves here. I thought this post from VoxEU was worth featuring because it provides concrete support for one theory about how to reduce US/Chinese trade imbalances. As long as China has a high savings rate and low domestic consumption, it will have to also show a high level of exports, which in turn means other countries or countries wind up showing high levels of consumption and rising debt levels. And worryingly, China’s consumption as a percent of GDP has been falling, a very unusual pattern for a developing economy.
One common prescription is for China to improve its social safety nets. This analysis indicates that might have merit. Admittedly, there are practical obstacles to implementing it, one of the large ones being the level of corruption in provincial governments.
Read more...Freddie deBoer’s post “the blindspot” (hat tip Richard Smith) seems to have created a bit of a frisson among political bloggers. It make a long-form argument that ” the political discourse, in our punditry, lacks a left-wing.”
That should not be a controversial statement.
Read more...Reader Gary P sent me an e-mail about a Planet Money list of “must read” economics books. I had toyed with posting on it, held off because I have a wee conflict of interest as an an author of a book decidedly critical of mainstream economics, but the biases implicit in the NPR piece have been nagging at me.
If nothing else, this tally should dispel any idea that NPR is left-leaning:
Read more...Reader Crocodile Chuck highlighted an important post at Houses and Holes, an economics-oriented Australian blog. While Australia is reeling from the immediate impact, the broader impact of 2010-11 weather patterns may have much bigger ramifications for food and energy prices in Australia and abroad.
The post focuses on the possibility, increasingly endorsed by top meteorologists, that the heavy Australian rains are the result of a super La Niña, the last of which was seen in 1973-4,the time of the last severe flooding in Queensland. Super La Niñas are hugely disruptive to agricultural production and can have other nasty knock-on effects (some contend the 1917 La Niña helped spawn the 1918 influenza pandemic).
In this case, the damage of a super La Niña will not only increase food costs at a time when price rises and food scarcity are already a major concern, but will likely extend to energy prices as well. That one-two punch would be particularly devastating to China.
Read more...As New Jersey governor Chris Christie found out the hard way, saying bad things about union pensions at the wrong times can lead to egg on one’s face and higher costs to taxpayers. From Bloomberg:
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