Category Archives: Social values

The Damaging Links Between Food, Fuel and Finance: A Growing Threat to Food Security

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?

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Michael Hudson: Thatcher’s Legacy of Failed Privatizations

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

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Supply Chain Problems Hitting Hospitals Near You

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.

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Euro-da-Fé

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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Like Nixon to China, It Takes a Democrat to Put the First Knife in Social Security

By Gaius Publius. Cross posted from AmericaBlog

Bottom line first, since this is turning long. For the owners of the country (and their paid national managers), the real emergency associated with Social Security isn’t the day the last dollar will leave the Trust Fund. It’s the day the first dollar will leave. That’s a whole different problem, and a whole different timeline, for them.

How did I come to that conclusion? Read on.

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When “Culture” is the Best Explanation

By Rumplestatskin, a professional economist with a background in property development, environmental economics research and economic regulation. Cross posted from MacroBusiness

A recent blog post about ‘culture’ making a lousy explanation of social and economic phenomena sheds even more light on the bizarre culture that is economics.

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More on Devolution and the Walmartization of Our Economy

A couple of months ago, I wrote about devolution:

It’s become fashionable to discuss the creeping decay in advanced economies, particularly the US, both in term of third worldification and end of empire. The more apocalyptic turn to theories of collapse from writers like Jared Diamond and Jacques Tainter. But I think they miss one aspect that may prove to be important, that of how the pursuit of efficiency doesn’t always produce net gains, as economic theory might tell us.

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TransPacific Partnership Threatens Sovereignty and Public Ownership

Although the TransPacific Partnership negotiations are being kept firmly under wraps, what little has leaked out is so appalling that it legitimates Alex Jones-type fears about world government, or more accurately, a market state where the interests of globe-spanning businesses come first. The TPP expands on NAFTA’s extreme investor-state regime that allows foreign companies to directly challenge a government’s derivatives regulation, capital controls, and other financial, health, and environmental policies.

We’ll be writing more about the TPP, and this Real News Network segment provides a good introduction.

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Barack Obama’s Economic Legacy: The Billionaire-Boosting Big Four on His Wish List

By Gaius Publius. Follow him on Twitter @Gaius_Publius. Cross posted from AmericaBlog

I’ve been writing about Obama’s Legacy Tour (sorry, his second term) from time to time without focusing on the legacy itself. So this post will lay down a marker — in brief, what’s on Obama’s economic legacy list, and what will he get if he succeeds?

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Oligarchy Exists Inside Our Democracy

By Ed Walker, who writes regularly for Firedoglake as masaccio

Suddenly it looks like we are seeing political victories for progressives, on LGBT rights, on issues important to Hispanics, even occasionally on issues important to women. At the same time, we lose every single battle over economic issues. Why?

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