Welfare Queen Walmart Has Thanksgiving Food Drive for its Own Needy Employees
Prima facie evidence of the need to boycott Walmart (as if more were necessary)
Read more...Category Archives: Social values
Chronicles of a European Winter: “There is a Difference Between Saying Greeks Should Live With Less and Saying Greeks Should Live With Nothing”
This is the first segment of an ongoing project, Eurowinter, to record the human toll of austerity policies in Europe. It focuses on the suffering Greece, as told by Greeks themselves.
Read more...Judge Rakoff Blasts Breuer, Prosecution of Companies Rather than Individuals in Bar Speech
Absent sitting on the Supreme Court, it is difficult for a single judge to effect much change. Yet Jed Rakoff, in sending the SEC back to the woodshed in two separate cases over its failure to get factual admissions, meaning admissions of misconduct, on civil settlements of SEC cases, singlehandedly embarrassed the SEC and the Department of Justice into seeking these statements (for instance, numerous media reports indicate that the Administration wants that sort of confession as part of its pending settlement with JP Morgan).
Rakoff threw down another gauntlet in a New York Bar Association speech on Tuesday.
Read more...Student Debt is Crushing the Economic Future of the Young
If a bad job market wasn’t damaging enough, the cost of paying off student loans does much more harm to the long-term prospects of young people than is commonly realized.
Read more...Your Humble Blogger Discusses the Pending Trade Deals and JP Morgan on Le Show!
I really enjoy speaking with Harry Shearer, both for his engaging manner and his thorough preparation. I also hope you’ll see fit to circulate this interview, since the more attention we can bring to this plan to legalize corporate pillage, the better.
Read more...Gaius Publius: The Rich – “A Class of People for Whom Humans are Disposable”
I want to give you a picture of our rulers, our betters. You may think of them as far-seeing modernists (Eric Schmidt, stand up please) or vaguely boorish (Mr. Trump? Mr. Adelson?). But even the lowest of your visions of them would, in the main, be generous.
Their depravity and psychopathology is worse than your worst imaginings.
Read more...Greed, Revolution, and Governance
I’m generally very taken with Ian Welsh’s work, particularly two recent posts, A New Ideology and How to Create a Viable Ideology. He then continued with 44 Explicit Points on Creating a Better World. And I hate to say it, but the last piece was no where near as well thought out as the preceding pieces. What troubled me about his latest piece was its combination of confidence (as opposed to modesty and soliciting reactions and input) in combination with it having internal contractions and a lack of precision of language. But perhaps the biggest shortcoming was trying to finesse the question of governance.
Read more...Ilargi: Still Feel Confident About Collecting Your Pension After This?
By Raúl Ilargi Meijer, editor-in-chief of The Automatic Earth, Cross posted from Automatic Earth
If your answer to that question is affirmative, I suggest you take a good hard look at what’s coming out of Detroit these days.
Read more...Ilargi: Energy Is A Power Game – 3 (They Cheat And They Lie)
Yves here. This post is important not just in and of itself but also as an example of the methods and costs of rent-seeking.
Read more...Attention: Deficit Disorder and the Real Crisis Ahead
Yves here. This article focuses on the critically important of how the real danger to the economic welfare of young people is not the cost of retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare but the failure to generate enough jobs now and invest in infrastructure and education.
Read more...The Coercive Power of Capitalism
What is remarkable is how we’ve blinded ourselves to the coercive element of our own system.
Read more...Why the “Maximizing Shareholder Value” Theory of Corporate Governance is Bogus
One mantra you see regularly in the business and popular press goes something along the lines of “the CEO and board have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.”
That is untrue. Moreover, the widespread acceptance of that false notion has done considerable harm.
Read more...Ilargi: Winter In America Gets Colder – Why We Choose Poverty
We continue to live with the idea of recovery, which in our minds equals a return to what we had, plus added growth. For some of us that may come true, but for a very rapidly increasing number amongst us, it will not. Because, and it’s high time we acknowledge this, at this point in time, the only way the upper echelons of our societies can achieve some level of growth is to take it away from everyone else. And those upper echelons, mind you, demand exponential growth, which means, in a society that cannot grow, that the numbers of poor people will rise exponentially as well.
In reality, we are of course already seeing a huge redistribution of wealth today, only this one increases inequality instead of decreasing it. Which means all those dreams about equal access for everyone to the best health care and education available are long gone. If we would only redistribute wealth in such a way that it would see us return to the level of inequality that existed when those dreams were relevant, 60-odd years ago, much of our poverty conundrum would be solved. It is really as simple as that.
Read more...What Was ‘Essential’ and What Wasn’t: The Government Shutdown in Perspective
Even though the press has repeatedly described the nearly-two-week reduction in Federal government activities as a “shutdown,” it in fact was a partial closure, since some offices remained open at reduced levels of activity and others operated normally. This post tallies which operations were favored, which were deemed dispensable, and how lost out as a result.
Read more...Ethics and Complex Systems
Why ethics in complex systems matters.
Read more...