Category Archives: Social values

On Combatting Trolls

Long-standing readers have noticed an increase in the amount of trolling in the comments section. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. As traditional broadcast media are becoming less important, both advertisers and PR firms are seeking to influence opinion and popular tastes through social media and blogs. Since I prefer to take a more hands-off approach to the comments section that other bloggers do, it puts me in a bit of a quandary. But the increase in orchestrated efforts to attack certain posts leaves me with no choice but to intervene more heavily.

The post last week from Project S.H.A.M.E. on Megan McArdle is an illustration.

Read more...

Bill Black: Romney Dooms his Candidacy by Doing the Full Murray

Yves here. As much as I agree with the Black on how remarkably revealing and self-destructive Romney’s claim that nearly half of America consists of economic parasites is, it’s too soon to declare his presidential bid dead. Past studies show that many voters make their decision in the final six weeks before election. Even though Obama looks to be solidly placed, and Romney keeps throwing Hail Mary passes that go awry, you’d expect a sitting President to be further ahead given the caliber of campaign Romney has run. Obama is still exposed to negative events, such as further deterioration in Europe hitting US markets (and it does not necessarily take a full bore crisis, just enough nagging doubt to offset the equity market goosing of QE3), escalating hostility in the Middle East producing a credibility-sapping event, or successful voter suppression and other election day chicanery (just look at how many swing states have Republican governors). Mind you, we believe in keeping pressure on Obama since the Romney horrorshow gives Obama plenty of room to be merely less visibly awful in catering to plutocrats. So it’s important to repudiate the Romney message without giving Obama a free pass.

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

Charles Murray’s newest book: Coming Apart: The State of White America proves two classic truths. First, it is impossible to compete with self-parody. Second, be careful what you ask for; for you may receive it.

Read more...

Michael Hudson on How Finance Capital Leads to Debt Servitude

This edited transcript is expanded from a live phone interview with Michael Hudson by Dimitris Yannopoulos for Athens News. It summarizes some of the major themes from Hudson’s new book, The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis, which is available on Amazon.

Q: How has the financial system evolved into the form of economic servitude that you call “debt peonage” in your book, implying a negation of democracy as well as free-market capitalism as classically understood?

Read more...

Occupy Wall Street 2.0: The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual

The anniversary of Occupy Wall Street is September 17. While there will be public events in New York, it’s likely that number of people that will be involved will not be large enough to impress the punditocracy (multi-citi militarized crackdowns have a way of discouraging participation), leading them to declare OWS a flash in the pan.

That conclusion may be premature.

Read more...

Bloomberg Ranks Most and Least Miserable States

Bloomberg has developed a more detailed approach to looking at “misery” than the traditional “misery index,” which looked only at unemployment and inflation. They took their more granular method and used it to rank states in the US. This looks like a reasonable and useful metric, so I wish they had written a story detailing their approach and publishing the full ranking, but this TV clip gives the high points.

Read more...

Getting Economics to Acknowledge Rentier Finance

The economics discipline has for the most part managed to ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room: that of the role that the financial services industry has come to play. Astonishingly, even though the reengineering of the world economy along the lines preferred by mainstream economists resulted in a prosperity-wrecking global financial crisis and a soft coup by financiers, the discipline carries on methodologically as if nothing much had happened. And one of its huge blind spots is its refusal to acknowledge the role of banking and finance in modern commerce.

Read more...

Waldman’s Rational Astrologies, or the Use and Misuse of Conventional Wisdom

Steve Waldman at Interfluidity today has an important post on what he calls “rational astrologies” or when it makes sense to hew to widely accepted belief systems, even when you know following them won’t necessarily produce the best outcomes. You really must read his post in full; I think the first part is terrific but have some quibbles when he tries extending his observation.

Read more...

Chris Hedges: Hear the 99% Roar

This interview with Chris Hedges on TVO, Ontario’s answer to the BBC, does not appear to have gotten the play it deserves in the US. Hedges discusses Occupy Wall Street from both a strategic and tactical perspective, discussing the conditions that affect the progress and success of revolutions, what he sees as the “no demands” canard, and his criticisms of Black Bloc tactics.

Read more...

Wall Street’s War Against the Cities: Why Bondholders Can’t – and Shouldn’t – be Paid

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and author of “The Bubble and Beyond,” which is available on Amazon.

The pace of Wall Street’s war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill.

Read more...

Why do Keynesians Think More Spending will Stimulate the Economy?

By Stephanie Kelton, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.

My Twitter followers are constantly asking me if I think more spending would really help the economy recover. I understand their skepticism.

Read more...

Mark Ames: Tracy Lawrence: The Foreclosure Suicide America Forgot

Every week, it seems there’s another tragic story about a suicide or murder-suicides linked to foreclosure trauma. Some of the more spectacular murder-by-foreclosure stories the past few years have been collected by a blog called “Greenspan’s Body Count”—others, myself included, have been writing about these terrible stories of class warfare being waged by the only side fighting it, and winning it, as Warren Buffett rightly said.

Before the 2008 crisis, the media paid little attention to the death toll taken on Americans by the decades-long class warfare waged against the 99%. Now they’re impossible to ignore.

Read more...