By Lynn Parramore, a contributing editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
Trying to convince the public to cut America’s best-loved and most successful program requires a lot of creativity and persistence.
Read more...Yves here. This article points out what others have noted: that Hurricane Sandy has given much more visibility to the dangers of climate change. It’s an environmental version of the old economists’ joke: A recession occurs when your neighbor loses his job. A depression takes place you lose your job. The media and policymakers in large measure live in a bubble centered on New York and Washington DC, and it has taken an event that hit their sheltered world hard to get them to wake up and take notice.
Read more...If you stand far enough away, the OWS Strike Debt debt cancellation initiative, called Rolling Jubilee, looks like a simple and clever way to beat banks at their own game. So it’s not surprising that it has attracted a roster of celebrity supporters. But like most things in finance, the devil lies in the details, and the Rolling Jubilee plan, on closer inspection, is wanting.
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
Third Way, lobbyists for and from Wall Street who are leading the effort to enrich Wall Street by privatizing Social Security, was created by Wall Street to fool some of the people all of the time.
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at https://twitter.com/matthewstoller and he can be reached at stoller at gmail.com.
First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then they can actually just keep cycling through those, turns out. – James Adomian
This is a somewhat unusual post, because I’m going to explain why I think you should put a few dollars towards this site and Yves Smith. I’m plunking down $100 myself, just as Neil Barofsky has donated, because what this site, its readers, and this community mean to me and to the possibility of social change in this country. You can give here, or you can read on.
Read more...Societies have a funny way of walling off undesirables.
Read more...Regular readers may recall we suspended our 2012 fundraiser, which started right before Hurricane Sandy. We want to express our deep appreciation to those of you who have donated thus far.
Many of the things we talked about when we launched our first fundraiser last year are still true: the elites, who have shown little regard for how their misrule has hurt ordinary citizens, still have a firm grasp on the reins of power. The global financial crisis imposed tremendous costs on investors and society at large, via unemployment, a housing bust, plunging tax revenues, cuts in government services and increasing political discord. No one in a position of influence before the crisis has been punished or even suffered much. In fact, as Matt Stoller has pointed out, the rich became even richer, with 93% of the gains in income under Obama going to the top 1%.
So it isn’t surprising that what passes for leadership in the US is gearing up to provide us with more of the same, since it has worked out so well for them.
Read more...This Real News Network interview with Bill Black provides an overview of why Wall Street and the Administration are so keen to gut well loved and socially valuable safety nets for the elderly, in particular, Social Security. This talk is a good introduction for people who may not understand how high the stakes in the budget fight are and why the economic arguments used to justify it are bogus.
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
President Obama gave a major speech today on his legislative agenda. He said that the overriding national priority had to be jobs. We agree.
The problem is that Republicans and Democrats are pushing a “Grand Bargain” that would reduce jobs.
Read more...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.”
The Democrats could not have won so handily without the Citizens United ruling. That is what enabled the Koch Brothers to spend their billions to support right-wing candidates that barked and growled like sheep dogs to give voters little civilized option but to vote for “the lesser evil.”
Read more...The 2012 Election was a demonstrably party line affair. In that, it was a canvas with a deeper meaning in US history than the results for individual candidates and parties: this is the first time in American history that all of the rural vote was committed to a single party. That seems a non-earthshaking statement, but is non-trivial looking at the socio-political landscape in the USA previously, and has implications for the future.
Read more...This interview with Rob Johnson of the the Roosevelt Institute, Marc Steiner of WEAA, and Lester Spence of We are Many gives a sobering view of election results.
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 Benzaga
Wall Street’s leading “false flag” group, the Third Way, has responded to the warnings that Robert Kuttner, AFL-CIO President Trumka, and I have made that if President Obama is re-elected our immediate task will be to prevent the Great Betrayal – the adoption of self-destructive austerity programs and the opening wedge of the effort to unravel the safety net (including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid).
Read more...A remarkably important and persuasive paper that calls into question the need for “reforming” Medicare has not gotten the attention it warrants. “An Examination of Health-Spending Growth In The United States: Past Trends And Future Prospects” (hat tip nathan) by Glenn Follette and Louise Sheiner looks at the model used by the Congressional Budgetary Office to estimate long term health care cost increases. Bear in mind that this model is THE driver of virtually all forecasts of future budget deficits.
This paper, although written in typically anodyne economese, is devastating in the range and nature of its criticisms.
Read more...By Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist who lives in New York City and member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Groups. Cross posted from mathbabe.org
As a loudmouthed data scientist/blogger/activist, I go on record regularly complaining about quants and data scientists who sacrifice their integrity to put out crappy or misleading or exploitative or destructive models because they want to make their bosses happy, or rake in big bonuses, or because they’re afraid to speak up and get fired, or because they don’t bother to think through the consequences of their actions.
But here’s the thing, I’m not sure what anyone can do about economists.
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