J.D. Alt: GROAF & CONTRAKSHUN
Why “groaf” is the new “growth” and Naked Capitalism readers are duly skeptical of it, along with its young cousin, “jawbs”.
Read more...Category Archives: Social values
The Stealthy, Ugly Growth of Corporatized Medicine
If you think medical care in the US is already suffering from crapification, the Brave New World of corporatized medicine will take it to a new level.
Read more...More Effective Remedies for Inequality
Yves here. The subject of inequality in income and wealth has, in the last year or so, become an oft-mentioned topic in economic and political commentary. It’s now even acceptable to use the word “oligarchy” to describe the US. Yet too often lost in the debate is that this type of inequality is the result of what right society allows various members to have. For instance, in the last 30 years, intellectual property laws have gotten stronger while the rights of workers to organize have been cut back.
We had a more equitable society when unions were stronger, taxes were more progressive, and anti-trust laws were enforced. This post by Geoff Davis serves as a reminder that there are remedies other than progressive taxation (which he regards as an after-the-fact remedy) to achieve that end.
Read more...Why Are We Still Working So Hard?
Why are long hours and more focus on work the new normal?
Read more...Tom Engelhardt: Too Big to Jail? Why Kidnapping, Torture, Assassination, and Perjury Are No Longer Crimes in Washington
Why national security state crimes seem to fall into a “too big to fail”-like category. Call it “too big to jail.”
Read more...Abigail Field: Our Corrupt Tax Code
ur nation’s tax code reflects our corrupt politics. The code contains many provisions that benefit our wealthiest, most powerful companies and people while hurting the rest of us.
Read more...Paul Krugman Discusses Piketty’s Capital and the Rise of Inherited Wealth on Bill Moyers
Paul Krugman discusses Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, on Bill Moyers’ show.
Read more...When Will Big Business Figure Out That the Education-Industrial Complex is Eating its Lunch?
Yves here. This post points out how parochial Corporate America has become in its looting. Look at how some not-very-large changes in approach would leave those fat cats much better off! And they wouldn’t be so terrible for the rest of us either.
Read more...How the Junk Food Industry Preys on the Young in Emerging Markets
How the junk food industry tries to get its way with young children in India.
Read more...Game of Thrones, Agency, and the Arrogance of the Present Day
Peter Campbell argues that Game of Thrones represents a major break in literature because the characters have agency. Um, seriously?
Read more...Edward Snowden Testimony at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
Snowden’s big messages were familiar: the lack of effective supervision of the US surveillance state, the scope and methods of surveillance, and the ability of citizens to protect themselves if they use strong enough encryption of their data and their communications. But it was striking to see, even in such a formal setting, how seriously European officials took his remarks.
Read more...Was Marx Right?
We participated in a Room for Debate forum at the New York Times, on the topic of “Was Marx Right?” Readers are likely to say, “But of course!” Yet Marx had such a large opus and his forecasts were so bold that any fair reading has to come to more nuanced conclusion.
Read more...Joe Firestone: Inequality – Envy or Honest Outrage?
Yves here. Even though I applaud Joe for his effort to take on the “class warfare as jealousy” meme, I think it needs to be attacked much more aggressively.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Think Big, Think Bold – A Green New Deal
Yves here. One of the common frustrations expressed by the NC commentariat is that we spend a lot of time on diagnosis and not as much on solutions. I actually don’t think our emphasis on forensics and analysis is misplaced. Too often, people are uncomfortable with examining deep-seated problems and thus rush to devise remedies that are incomplete or worse, counterproductive.
A second frustration, which I sympathize with, is that many of the solutions recommended by economists to our current problems (income disparity, high unemployment, increasing looting of the private sector and government) is based on restoring growth, which will make redistribution and other measures less contentious. Readers correctly point out that more growth is a 20th century remedy, when the 21st century is faces with global warming (meaning an need to start containing and better yet, reducing energy consumption) and resource constraints.
Yanis Varoufakis addresses both issues in his outline of what he calls a “Green New Deal”.
Read more...How Do the Powerful Get the Idea That They ‘Deserve’ More? Lessons from the… Laboratory
The distribution of power and wealth can be, and usually is, highly arbitrary and independent of ‘marginal productivity’, ‘risk taking’ or, indeed, any personal characteristic of those who rise to the top. So how do those at the top convince themselves that they are more deserving?
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