Lynn Parramore: ‘Greed Is Good’ – Top 7 Most Piggish Commencement Speeches
Get out the barf bag! Here a few choice orations from some of the world’s most illustrious jerks.
Read more...Category Archives: Social values
Your Humble Blogger Speaks on the Melissa Harris-Perry Show About Apple’s Senate Hearing, Corporate Tax Avoidance
We appeared on the Melissa Harris-Perry show on Saturday to participate in a discussion of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on Apple’s astonishingly low tax payments.
Read more...Your Humble Blogger Appears on RT’s Truthseeker
We discuss how outsourcing and offshoring are more about transferring income from low-level workers to middle and senior level managers than cost savings.
Read more...Are Germans Poorer than Other Europeans?
Yves here There’s been a great deal of consternation over a report that found that the median Spanish and Italian households are more than three times as wealthy as the median German household. This report says that these differences aren’t what they seem to be.
Read more...Catholic Church Voicing Opposition to Eurozone Austerity
It’s been slow in coming, but religious leaders are starting to speak out against the mechanisms and high social cost of austerity.
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America
By Lynn Parramore, a senior editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
We think we know what democracy is. But do we?
Read more...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.
Read more...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.
Read more...Are Extroverts to Blame for Excessive Risk-Taking?
Given the lameness of the bible of psychological diagnostics, the DSM, it’s pretty easy for the lay public to play armchair psychologist, particularly in the realm of organizational behavior.
Read more...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.
Read more...