AARP Back in Bed With Effort to Cut Social Security and Medicare
Wow, the AARP must be taking lessons from the Democratic Party, that you can afford sell out your putative base if you do the bidding of really big moneyed interests.
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David Apgar: The Trouble With Jeff Sachs
Yves here. This post echoes some of the messages of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s article The Fourth Quadrant and our piece Management’s Great Addiction
By David Apgar, the co-founder of GoalScreen LLC, which has a free cell phone app in testing at www.goalscreen.com that helps you test what you think drives results in your job, fitness program, love life, investments, and upcoming sports events in order to determine which assumptions are helping you succeed and which ones are undermining you
Jeff Sachs has always been the most outspoken advocate of development aid so it would be out of character if he were not outspoken about becoming the head of the World Bank. But there has always been a lingering concern about his projects and his approach to development. And it sheds a lot of light on where development, economics, and politics are heading even if it’s the wrong concern.
Read more...Bill Black: (Re) Occupy Greece
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 New Economic Perspectives.
While the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement set its sights on occupying a financial center, Germany has accomplished the vastly more impressive feat of occupying an entire nation – Greece. Germany has experience at occupying Greece having done so during World War II. The art of occupying another nation is to recruit a local puppet to do the dirty work required to repress the citizens. Germany used several puppets, most notoriously the murderous Ioannis Rallis, to (nominally) rule Greece and terrify the Greek people during World War II. (After Germany’s defeat, Rallis was executed for his treason.)
This time around, Germany has been far more successful in recruiting and using a puppet to (nominally) rule Greece and terrify the Greek people before the German occupation.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Falling for Behaviourism – The Neoclassicals Join a New Cult
By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil
Read more...The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He is an isolated definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another.
– Thorstein Veblen
Philip Pilkington: Student Debt in the US Continues to Blow Up
By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil
Perhaps the most obvious indicator that the US has become a society of debtors is the ever-expanding market for student loans.
Read more...Video Demonstrates How to Circumvent TSA Body Scanners
This is a bit O/T for this blog, except I hate the body scanners, since they are security theater and looting all rolled into one. The few times I’ve had to deal with them, I’ve made the gate agents pat me down.
Jonathan Corbett, who filed a suit against the TSA, has just released this video to annoy them further and with any luck, get the ineffective, intrusive scanners shut down.
Read more...On the Continuing Oxymoron of Ethics at Harvard
There is so much crookedeness among our elites that it’s hard to know, absent more systematic study, whether Harvard is playing a leading role in this decline.
However, the glaring gap between Harvard president Drew Faust’s talk on ethics and her recent actions has stuck with me and I’ve concluded it merits discussion.
Read more...Is Obama Still on the Austerity Train?
This Real News Network interview with William Crotty provides a useful overview of the current Obama stance on the Federal budget. Crotty does an adept job of delineating the gap between the President’s rhetoric and his policy stance.
Read more...The New Priesthood: An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis Part I
Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist who currently heads the Department of Economic Policy at the University of Athens. From 2004 to 2007 he served as an economic advisor to former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou. Yanis writes a popular blog which can be found here. His treatise on economic theory ‘Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World’, co written with Nicholas Theocrakis and Joseph Haveli is available from Amazon.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington.
Philip Pilkington: Without getting into too much technical detail what is it that you refer to in your book Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World the ‘inherent error’ in all economic theories and models?
Read more...Adam Davidson Praises Economic Exploitation
There has been so much news on the mortgage beat the last few weeks that I managed to neglect one of my missions, which is my personal Ben Stein watch on Adam Davidson, who operates as the Lord Haw Haw for the 1% in his column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.
His latest piece, “Why Are Harvard Graduates in the Mailroom?” is more accurately titled “In Praise of Exploitation.”
Read more...Matt Stoller: Towards a Creditor State – One in Seven Americans Pursued by Debt Collectors
Ten years ago, one in fourteen American consumers were pursued by debt collectors. Today it’s one in seven.
Read more...Michael Hudson: 2,181 Italians Pack a Sports Arena to Learn Modern Monetary Theory – The Economy Doesn’t Need to Suffer Neoliberal Austerity
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
I have just returned from Rimini, Italy, where I experienced one of the most amazing spectacles of my academic life. Four of us associated with the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) were invited to lecture for three days on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and explain why Europe is in such monetary trouble today – and to show that there is an alternative, that the enforced austerity for the 99% and vast wealth grab by the 1% is not a force of nature.
Read more...Matt Stoller: Warren Buffett Says “Hormones” Will Fix the Housing Crisis
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.
Last week, Warren Buffett made some news with his folksy, charming as always shareholder letter. Most people focused on his admission that he was wrong about the housing crisis. Buffett pointed to his year ago statement that “a housing recovery will probably begin within a year or so.” And he said, graciously, that this prediction “was dead wrong.” This is rhetorically notable, because it’s so rare that our masters of the universe ever admit error. But it is just more PR dressing up bad policies.
Read more...Spinning Necessity as a Virtue: Families to Stand in for Fragmenting Social Safety Nets
An anodyne seeming article at VoxEU, which I reproduce in full below, makes a straightforward seeming case for policies that bolster family ties in the face of a nasty combination of aging populations and high unemployment among the young.
It isn’t hard to see that this line of thinking is the policy equivalent of getting in front of a mob and trying to call it a parade.
Read more...Paul Mason of BBC on How Austerity is Reducing Greece to Developing Country Status
The BBC’s Paul Mason, fresh back from Greece, gives a report on Democracy Now of how living conditions have deteriorated as a result of the imposition of austerity measures. One of the stunners, mentioned in Atlantic Wire (hat tip Lambert), is that not only will some Greeks have to work without pay, some will have to pay for their jobs (yes, that is not a typo). The euphemism is a “negative salary.”
Mason also discusses how this program is radicalizing the public. Communists, Trotskyists and other extreme-left groups are polling at 43%. That’s a strikingly high number. This plus the level of dissent on the street suggests Greece is on its way out of the eurozone. But will the technocrats prevail? As Michael Hudson has stressed here and in other commentary, the banks are succeeding in stripping Greece of assets, an operation that used to be possible only via military force.
From Democracy Now (hat tip Philip Pilkington):
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