Category Archives: Social values

Philip Pilkington: The Ideology to End Ideologies – A Response to Corey Robin on Nietzsche, Hayek, Mises, and Marginalism

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

The political philosopher Corey Robin recently published an interesting essay on what he thinks to be the connection between the late German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the economic theory of marginalism which Robin associates with the Austrian school (but which, of course, is also a mainstay of mainstream neoclassical economics). As much as I admire his work, his latest piece is grossly misguided and reflective of the fact that, when it comes to theoretical economics, academic critics on the left simply do not know their enemy at all.

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Coming Corporate Control of Medicine Will Throw Patients Under the Bus

In the US, business freedom means the God-given right to exploit the vulnerability of the public. The example slouching into view is more corporate control over the practice of medicine. And based on the previews, it will make the horrors falsely attributed to socialized medicine look pale.

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Wall Street Hiring More Ex-Government Prostitutes Officials to Assure it Gets its Way

The infamous James Carville quote, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find,” seems more applicable to official Washington than the much-maligned Paula Jones.

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Cathy O’Neil: The Rise of Big Data, Big Brother

By Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. Cross posted from mathbabe

I recently read and article off the newsstand called The Rise of Big Data, It was written by Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and it was published in the May/June 2013 edition of Foreign Affairs, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). I mention this because CFR is an influential think tank, filled with powerful insiders, including people like Robert Rubin himself, and for that reason I want to take this view on big data very seriously: it might reflect the policy view before long.

I’m glad it’s not all rainbows and sunshine when it comes to big data in this article. Unfortunately, whether because they’re tied to successful business interests, or because they just haven’t thought too deeply about the dark side, their concerns seem almost token, and their examples bizarre.

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You Are a Guinea Pig: Americans Exposed to Biohazards in Great Uncontrolled Experiment

By David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, the co-authors and co-editors of seven books and 85 articles on a variety of industrial and occupational hazards, including Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution and, most recently, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children. Rosner is a professor of history at Columbia University and co-director of the Center for the History of Public Health at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. Markowitz is a professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Cross posted from TomDispatch

A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote.

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Medical Journal Editorial Blasts Obamacare for Increasing Underinsurance

During the protracted Congressional fight over the Affordable Care Act, its supporters kept stressing the importance of extending coverage to tens of millions of uninsured. But some observers, including your humble blogger, warned that having overpriced insurance that didn’t cover much was a headfake, not real progress.

Physicians for a National Health Care Program has gotten access to an editorial approved for publication next week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine titled Life or Debt. It which takes aim at the lousy job Obamacare does for the group it was billed as benefitting, the un- and underinsured.

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Inequality, Technical Change and the “Hunger for Surplus Value”

By Alejandro Nadal, Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies of El Colegio de Mexico. Cross posted from Triple Crisis

There is (almost) no quarrel about the fact that inequality has increased during the past three or four decades. One of the consequences of this is the growth of unsustainable indebtedness of households in order to maintain aggregate demand, a problem intimately related to the global financial crisis and the so-called Great Recession.

So it is critically important to understand the causes of this rising inequality.

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Fierce Anti Bank Music Video by Animal Kingdom (NSFW)

Lambert and other readers old enough to remember the 1960s, when protest ballads of various sorts were an important part of both the civil rights movement and the opposition to the war in Vietnam, have wondered at the absence of anti-bank, anti-autocratic songs.

Below is one with a suitably pointed video taking aim squarely at predatory financiers.

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Philip Pilkington: Defrocking Reinhart and Rogoff – Controversy Ignores Fundamental Issues in the Use and Abuse of Statistical Studies

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

Over the past week there has been some fuss over alleged inconsistencies found by the economists Herndon, Pollin and Ash in the famous 2010 Rogoff-Reinhart study on levels of government debt and its effects on growth. What is really interesting about the critique of Reinhart and Rogoff is that it raises the issue of just how contentious these studies are.

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The Elephants in the Room: Citizens United, Trade and Corporate Ownership of Our Natural Resources

Yves here. This is a short but useful reminder of how the failure to enforce anti-trust laws leads to oligopolies. MBAs are taught how to make markets inefficient to increase corporate profits, and one of the most lasting ways is to achieve a dominant position, ideally in a concentrated industry. “Roll ups” which is a consolidation play, is a favorite among private equity firms (but they often stumble in integrating the companies).

The author describes how dominant players preserve their profits through aggressive lobbying in the food space, and why that is particularly troubling.

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Boston Bombing Open Thread

I’m not sure what I can add to the extensive, and often confused, media coverage of the Boston bombing, the MIT police shooting and resulting manhunt, save to extend my condolences to the victims. As Marcy Wheeler pointed out, what differentiated these events from other outbreaks of violence was the intensity of the media coverage.

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Jeffrey Sachs Calls Out Wall Street Criminality and Pathological Greed

One of the things that Matt Stoller has stressed that the possibility of reform is remote until breaks within the elites take place.

Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia professor and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, is a controversial figure for his neoliberal stance on macroeconomics and his role in promoting the use of “shock therapy” in emerging economies. But it is also important to recognize that criticism from a connected, respected insider has more significance than that of someone like Bill Black, who has made a career of taking on bank fraud but has never reached a top policy-making level.

This talk is blistering at several points.

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Yanis Varoufakis: Greek Banksters in Action – On the Latest Twist in the Story of Mafia-Style Terror Spreading Through the Greek Polity

Yves here. When high level bank and government dealings start resembling a John Grisham novel, it’s a sign that the rule of law is breaking down in a serious way. Given that the Troika’s plan for Greece is to break it on the rack, this sort of criminality isn’t a surprise. But the troubling bit is that if you reset this story in the US, I doubt anyone would find it implausible.

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