By Matthew Berg. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
1. A Parable About the Origin of Money
Perhaps the most convincing single example cited by proponents of the view that money is a commodity is the well-known use of cigarettes as “money” by Allied prisoners of war in Germany during World War II.
Read more...Nathan Tankus is a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
President Obama adopted a reflective tone to mark the passing of Maggie Thatcher. Commenting on her death, he stated “the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty.” In Obama’s proposed budget, we found out what the terms “freedom” and “liberty” mean: the freedom for the old to go hungry and the freedom of the poor to go cold.
Read more...Contributed by Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog, Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media.
Catalonia’s riot police unleashed the untamed fury of the state upon the protestors and cleared Barcelona’s Plaza Catalunya of all occupants. A dense ring of shell-shocked people gathered around the square. I was one of them. A child riding on his father’s shoulders held up a sign: “No soy anti sistema, el sistema es anti yo,” it said (I’m not anti-system; the system is anti-me).
Read more...News flash! Neurotics are conscientious team members and should be appreciated and used more effectively in organizations. Or so say Corinne Bendersky, an associate professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and Neha Parikh Shah, an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School, in The Downfall of Extraverts and the Rise of Neurotics: The Dynamic Process […]
Read more...This Real News Network segment does a very nice, compact job of explaining why chained CPI is such a disastrously bad policy for older Americans. I’m featuring it with the hope that it might prove useful in educating friends and family members who might not be up to speed on this issue.
Read more...Michael Hudson, in a Real News Network interview, puts paid some of the key ideas used to sell catfood futures, um, Social Security and Medicare cuts, such as if we don’t Do Something, interest on government bonds will eat the economy. He also gives a good explanation of what “chained CPI” is really all about.
Read more...I’m so out of touch with popular culture that it’s only a lucky happenstance for someone to mention a mainstream phenomenon that I’m familiar with . What is striking about Game of Thrones is how restrictive a feudal, meaning highly class/role stratified society is, and how scheming his characters are.
Read more...One of those cases where a picture is worth a thousand words.
Read more...It must be really hard to be an Obama defender these days, at least if you are not on a big corporate payroll.
Read more...By Timothy Wise, Director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
Just when you thought the unhealthy ties between food, fuel, and financial markets couldn’t get more perverse, we get the announcement that Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader, is entering the grain-trading business, hiring a team from Viterra, based in Toronto, to run the show. And lest we toss this off as just another corporate deal, Javier Blas in the Financial Times reminds us that Viterra has itself recently been bought by Glencore, perhaps the world’s greatest global commodity speculator.
What could go wrong?
Read more...Yves here. Be warned this piece is long but very much worth your time, since it demolishes the myth of the attractiveness of privatizations by looking at its record in England, where it was first undertaken on a widespread basis.
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. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.”
As in Chile, privatization in Britain was a victory for Chicago monetarism. This time it was implemented democratically. In fact, voters endorsed Margaret Thatcher’s selloff of public industries so strongly that by 1991, when she was replaced as prime minister by her own party’s John Major, only 35 percent of Britain’s voters supported the Labour Party – half the proportion registered in 1945. The Conservatives sold off public monopolies, used the proceeds to cut taxes, and put the privatized firms on a profit-making basis. Their stock prices rose sharply, making capital gains for investors whose ranks included millions of Britons who had been employees and/or customers of these enterprises.
Yet by 1997 the Conservatives were voted out of office by one of the largest margins in their history. What concerned voters were the results of privatization that Mrs. Thatcher had not warned them about
Read more...Matt Stoller warned last June that citizens will increasingly have to submit to personal surveillance to get many types of insurance and financial products. That trend is further along than you might realize.
Read more...There is no more pretense possible. We now have the absurd spectacle of Paul Ryan’s budget being to the left of Obama’s on the issue of Social Security and Medicare.
Read more...I’ve taken off and on to writing about devolution, which is when the application of new technology winds up not producing net gains, but at best, questionable tradeoffs, and at worst, net negatives. The stealthy “technology” that has been applied across large businesses around the world is the relentless pursuit of efficiency, which too often takes the form of simple-minded cost cutting.
Read more...By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
(Brussels) Nonplussed by this week’s unemployment report showing the Eurozone jobless rate rising to an unprecedented 12%, members of the European Parliament and Europe’s national governments pressed ahead on Wednesday with passage of a stringent new package of austerity measures. Dubbed “hyperaustérité” or “Übersparpolitik” by its backers, the new program of ruthless cuts and social demolition promises to deliver even higher levels of joblessness, misery and hopelessness than has been achieved so far by earlier rounds of austerity.
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