By Joe Costello. From his book Of, By, For: The New Politics of Money, Debt and Democracy
Looking at Western civilization starting around the time of the Ancient Greeks, there are only scattered and relatively short periods of self-government.
Read more...Remarks rumored to have been delivered by Justice Antonin Scalia at an Opus Dei gathering on July 4, 2011
Eleven score and fifteen years ago our Incorporators brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in free markets, and dedicated to the proposition that all corporate persons are created equal.
Read more...In case it isn’t yet apparent to you, the unfolding scandal over manipulation of Libor and its Euro counterpart Euribor is a huge deal. Even though at this point, only Barclays, the UK bank that was first to settle, is in the hot lights, at least 16 other major financial players, which means pretty much everybody, is implicated.
Read more...A reader pointed out a news item we missed, namely, that the new government in France is trying to implement a maximum wage for the employees of state-owned companies. From the Financial Times:
Read more...Yves here. Big decision when Lambert and I are short on bandwidth, so this is just first impressions.
Read more...An article in the Boston Review by professor of sociology Claude Fischer falls prey to a pattern that is all too common: attributing social/political outcomes to American attitudes without bothering to examine why those attitudes came to be.
Let me give you a bit of useful background before I turn to the Fischer article as an illustration of a lack of curiosity, or worse, among soi disant intellectuals in America, and how it keeps Americans ignorant as to how many of our supposed cultural values have been cultivated to inhibit disruptive thought and action.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil
Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Heterodox economists – that is, those that do not subscribe to the neoclassical research program – often claim that they are marginalised within the profession. Anyone who has had dealings with academia would instinctively take such complaints with a pinch of salt. Indeed, academic quarrels often have as much to do with who said what at a dinner party as they have to do with questions of high theory. Academics, for better or for worse, are often characterised by their independent-mindedness… and with it: their stubbornness. This often leads them to partake in intellectual factionalism.
However, when I started studying economics and talking to heterodox economists, it quickly struck me that something wholly different was going on.
Read more...By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The Daily Banter.
Progressive intellectuals have been acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood swings ranging from the “We’re sorry we abandoned labor, how could we!” sentiment during last year’s Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy Scott Walker, to the recent “labor is dead/it’s all labor’s fault” snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.
The intellectual-left’s wild mood swings between unrequited love towards labor unions, and unrequited contempt, got me wondering how this abandonment of labor has manifested itself.
Read more...By Sell on News, a global macro equities analyst. Cross-posted from http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2012/06/finance-and-the-mafia-state/“>Macrobusiness.
The Economist this week had an interesting discussion about the epidemiology of financial contagion. It is interesting to observe the use of language. The article starts out with a correct observation about how economists choose a particular type of language used to lend their observations credibility:
Read more...By Michael Hudson and Jeffery Sommers, a distinguished professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee respectively, who have both advised members of Latvia’s government on alternatives to austerity. They are also contributors to the forthcoming book by Routledge Press: The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model. Cross posted from the Financial Times by permission of the authors
Austerity’s advocates depict Latvia as a plucky country that can show Europe the way out of its financial dilemma – by “internal devaluation”, or slashing wages. Yet few of the enthusiastic commentators have spent enough time in the country to understand what happened.
Read more...Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him on Twitter athttp://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller
Recently, Barack Obama announced a laudable new policy position on immigration. His administration will no longer deport undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children by their parents, as long as they don’t get in trouble with the law. These are people who are essentially Americans without citizenship, and the risk of deportation to a country they don’t really know is a terrifying and unfair. Aside from this serving the cause of justice and human decency, this is a long overdue move to reward a constituency group, happening in an election year. It’s worth understanding how this policy change came about, so that one can get a sense of the incentives that animate the White House policy shop.
Read more...By Garrett Pace
The Moneylender
The pound of flesh which I demand of him
Is dearly bought, ‘tis mine, and I will have it.
If you deny me, fie upon your law!
There is no force in the decrees of Venice.
I stand for judgment. Answer: shall I have it?
So says Shylock, the villain and most interesting character in Shakespeare’s tragicomedy The Merchant of Venice.
Read more...Bloomberg has a useful piece up tonight describing how markets are reacting in no consistent way to ratings agency actions on sovereign debt. The story is long and prominent enough that it looks to be an indicator of shifting stances in the media on deficit cutting.
Read more...You too can be an IMF success story if you grind your population into penury by wearing the austerian hairshirt. And this little video (hat tip Nathan) has to skip over capture some of the extreme measures operating in Latvia, such as bankers taking souls as collateral for loans.
Read more...By Sell on News, a global macro equities analyst. Cross-posted from Macrobusiness.
The argument advanced by the historian Philip Bobbitt that a transition is occurring in world politics from the nation state to the market state has long appealed as a snapshot of what is occurring in world politics. It is, as with any thesis about a large subject, far too simple to reflect accurately all that is happening, but it is nevertheless a fine starting point. As we witness the political travails plaguing southern Europe, it gives us a useful analytic to trace the outline of what is happening.
That, at least, is what I used to think. I am starting to wonder if something very different is happening.
Read more...