This talk may be too TED-ish for some readers’ tastes. But I happen to have a weakness for plummy accents and theaterical delivery. And even though it’s not even in theaters, I believe an antidote to Zero Dark Thirty is in order.
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.
In a 2009 speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Alan Grayson said that the Republican health care plan consists of two steps. One, don’t get sick. Two, if you do get sick, die quickly. Raising the Medicare age to 67 is the same sort of plan for those who wind up uninsured, and we can take a stab now at how many they will be and how many will die.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
The New York Times produces profiles of national leaders like Italy’s Mario Monti and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. I invite readers to contrast the worshipful treatment accorded Monti with the Correa profile. The next time someone tells you the NYT is a “leftist” paper you can show them how far right it is on financial issues.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis asked: Why has European social democracy abandoned the legacy of leaders like Bruno Kreisky, falling in line with a toxic economics and politics that thinkers like Kreisky would have dismissed in their sleep as pathetic claptrap? Here he takes a step back to explain why he views Kreisky’s chancellorship in Austria in the 1970s as a success in social and economic terms.
Read more...By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
A common criticism of Modern Monetary Theory is that it is a naïve doctrine of free lunches.
But this criticism misses the mark. MMT does focus a good deal of attention on the monetary system and the banking system, and on the operational mechanisms of public and private finance. But the whole point of analyzing and clarifying the monetary system is to help people see through the glare of the economy’s glittering monetary surface to the social and economic fundamentals that operate below that surface.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
Austerity has driven unemployment among young Italian adults to over 35%. The result is that Italian university graduates are emigrating. This loss of Italy’s greatest source of future productivity gains is particularly crippling because Italy has far fewer university graduates than most developed nations.
Read more...Citi is a particularly blatant example of a way of operating that has become endemic in American business: when things get tough, throw as many employees as possible under the bus, and use that to maintain or even increase the pay of the top echelon.
Read more...CEOs talk about shared sacrifice, but the only thing they want to share is your retirement money with their wealthy friends.
Read more...Yves here. This is Lambert’s pick, but since I still remember my two years in Sydney fondly, I thought I would comment. Australia is often stereotyped as being 20 years behind the US in a good way: it has a commitment to collective good, a sense of community, and a robust middle class, things that are increasingly wanting in the US. And it has those qualities along with better broadband and first class, cheap healthcare (the offsets are getting used to the seasons being the reverse of up North, having to adopt a footie team, dealing with the onerous documentation requirements of their tax authority, and having most movies get there after you can see them on international flights).
The interesting quality of this article by Houses and Holes is its sense of consternation about what looks like rising corruption in Australia. I don’t mean to sound condescending, but being in a country so much further along in this ugly process, there’s an underlying trust in authorities and process evident in this piece, while those sentiments are in tatters in the US.
Most societies have a level of crooked behavior that they tolerate; the assumption seems to be that these dirty backchannels are sometimes the only efficient way to work around obstacles, and that enough bad guys will be caught and punished to keep the dubious dealing at a manageable level. You can see here a quiet sense of horror, as if someone in a movie sees their hand suddenly changing into something they don’t recognize as human and realize they may be undergoing a fundamental, chthonic transformation.
Read more...Last month, I criticized the well meaning but naive strategy of the Occupy Wall Street group Strike Debt for dealing with consumer debt, which is to buy severely discounted debt from debt collectors and forgive it. My main complaint was that there were more productive approaches, such as wider publicity and distribution of the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, providing more counseling and legal support to borrowers, and using debt purchases to develop cases against the debt sellers. By contrast, the Rolling Jubilee increases the profitability of bad system by providing more revenues to the incumbents, while the debt purchases are unlikely to do more than help a few random people. It might make for feel-good PR, but it won’t make a dent in the problem.
Perversely the post got pushback on the last (and by implication, the least important) issue raised, namely, that of possible tax problems with the scheme. I wanted to revisit this issue and demonstrate why the responses of allies and members of Strike Debt have failed to put the issue to rest, and more important, why this matters.
Read more...Yves here. Any post that starts out by making fun of Matt Yglesias already has something going for it. But one bit I quibble with. Kervick suggests that Social Security might be excluded from a Grand Bargain. Don’t get too optimistic.
Read more...Yves here. Even though this piece may seem off topic for Naked Capitalism, I suggest you read down to the section, “Why the MacDonald Case Matters to Everyone.” It describes some sea changes in our criminal justice system that you may not be aware of.
Read more...No wonder the collision of the higher education bubble and the job market is proving to be so painful.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a senior editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
A gang of brazen CEOs has joined forces to promote economically disastrous and socially irresponsible austerity policies. Many of those same CEOs were bailed out by the American taxpayer after a Wall Street-driven financial crash. Instead of a thank-you, they are showing their appreciation in the form of a coordinated effort to rob Americans of hard-earned retirements, decent medical care and relief for the poorest.
Read more...Like it or not, you in the not too distant future are going to have to submit to personal surveillance to get many types of insurance and certain financial products. And that future is closer than you probably realize.
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