Category Archives: Social values

Germans and Eurocrats Throw Hissy Fits Over Italian Elections

It’s unlikely that the destabilizing of the political calculus in Europe resulting from impressive showing of anti-austerity candidates in Italy will end prettily or nicely. However, Europe had already put itself in the position of having only bad choices. So the question is who suffers, and the public in periphery countries are starting to rebel against being broken on the rack while Eurocrats and pampered German and French bankers feel no pain.

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Jack Lew’s Grotesque Citi Employment Deal and the Institutionalization of Corruption

Corruption has now become so routine in Washington that improprieties far worse than Turbo Timmie’s implausible failure to pay taxes on income from his days working as a consultant to the World Bank barely evoke a yawn from the media. Apparently the fourth estate is either so bedazzled by star turns, like Michelle Obama presenting at the Oscars (!!!) or so cowed by the prospect of being cut off from information that it dutifully falls in line.

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Why Obama Refuses to Kill the Sequester

The game of chicken both the Republicans and Democrats are playing with the sequester and the budget/deficit talks is striking. One of the truly bizarre elements is that neither side is signaling the faintest interest in dealmaking of any kind. As I indicated the week before last, the lack of any sense of urgency was obvious: Congress had a holiday last week, and there were no real negotiations or even an exchange of proposals, virtually guaranteeing the sequester would take place as scheduled.

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Yanis Varoufakis: Europe Needs a Hegemonic Germany

By Yanis Varoufakis, professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog

For six decades Germany was being pampered by a hegemonic America that oversaw the write-off of its wartime debts, the reversal of Allied designs to de-industrialise it and, above all else, the constant generation of the global demand which allowed German manufacturers to concentrate on efficiently producing quality, desirable wares.

Having taken all this for granted for too long, Germany’s elites are now finding it conceptually difficult to come to terms with the new ‘normal’.

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Philip Pilkington: Kill The King – Why Are We So Scared of Fiat Money?

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well if were done quickly.”
– Macbeth contemplating the killing of King Duncan

If a Martian were to visit planet Earth there is no doubt that it would find it bizarre how we relate to our current monetary system.

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Via Government’s Fiscal Policy and Regulatory Oversight, Ethical Values Shape Monetary Value

By Michael Hoexter, a policy analyst and marketing consultant on green issues, climate change, clean and renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

There is no unified theory in our popular understanding of value: there are the market values of goods and then there are our “values” which we consider to be some of the most personal and even sacred aspects of ourselves. In practice, these beliefs and ideology are filtered through a process by which powerful and wealthy interest groups influence and shape the behavior of lawmakers.

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Love as a Consumer Good

It’s probably a bit late to be addressing this topic, but the use of romance and sexual insecurity as a hook for selling goods and services is so pervasive that it’s societal Muzak. Well, worse than Muzak, because it’s not hard to tune Muzak out, but the touting of romance keys into deep-seated emotional and physical needs, making it more challenging to ignore this type of hucksterism.

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Worker Owned Businesses Point to New Forms of Ownership

With public companies fixated on quarterly profits, which results in underinvestment and treatment of employees as disposables, companies who (gasp) pursue a long-term strategy and invest in their workforce should have a real competitive advantage. Thus worked owned enterprises aren’t simply a way to contend with the program to disempower labor; it’s also a way to take advantage of the inefficiencies of rentier capitalism.

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