Doug Smith: Dear Stephanie – Uh, That Thing About McDonald’s Workers That’s Missing
On the curious way a New York Times story on McDonald’s efforts at transformation said almost nothing about McDonald’s workers.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
Troika Tightening the Noose on Greece as Government Cash Crunch Worsens
The Troika and Eurogroup look to be working towards the Greek government to start having similar thoughts. However, given the high level of popular support for Syriza, and press reports that Greek citizens fully expect that the new government to at best only be able to deliver on a small portion of its campaign promises, the end game for Greece is looking more and more likely to be a failed state rather than a more neoliberal-friendly government.
Read more...Look Who is Selling the TransPacific Partnership
Some Serious Economists have signed a letter supporting the TransPacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The missive says a lot about the discipline, and not in a good way.
Read more...Bill Black: Scott Walker’s War on Workers and the Wall Street Journal’s Cleaned-Up Coverage
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has channeled his inner Mitt Romney and written off an immense swath of Americans as people he would not represent if he were elected President.
Read more...The Administration’s Dishonest Response to Elizabeth Warren’s Attack on Secret Investor Arbitration Panels in Trade Deals
Elizabeth Warren is clearly getting on the Administration’s nerves.
Read more...Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Forced Into Historic Runoff
This Real News Network interview describes why the coming mayoral runoff in Chicago is in many ways a referendum on failed neoliberal policies, such as privatizing schools. The very fact that this race is taking place at all reveals an unexpectedly large degree of popular discontent with misrule by what passes for our elites
Read more...The School Closure Playbook – How Billionaires Exploit Poor Children in Chicago
A hard-hitting overview of who is behind the taxpayer looting program known as “corporate school reform” and the mechanics of how it operates.
Read more...Mathew D. Rose: Greece – Dead Man Walking
Rose focuses on an issue that reader Swedish Lex and other have pointed out: the heavy-handed actions of Germany in the tempestuous negotiations between the Eurozone and Greece have wound up being a major own goal.
But the bigger issue that Rose raises is that last week’s ugly negotiations, in combination with the fiasco in Ukraine, is exposing Germany as a lousy hegemon, which he argues is producing a political crisis in Germany and fracture lines in Europe.
Read more...TransPacific Partnership: Fast Track to Financial Instability
In his State of the Union speech, President Obama said he would submit a bill to Congress that would grant him the fast track authority to finalize the TransPacific Partnership (TPP)—a trade pact with Pacific Rim countries such as Japan, Malaysia, Peru, and Chile. While free trade has brought benefits in the past, tariffs in the world economy are at an all time low and new deals like the TPP offer few new gains in terms of growth and jobs for the American people. And the TPP in particular comes at unacceptably high cost.
Read more...Negotiation Breakdown Exposes Widening Rift Between Germany and Greece
The negotiations between Greece and the Eurogroup are on a worse trajectory than conventional wisdom would have you believe.
Read more...How Third Way Trade Agreements Study Distorts Via Omission to Pave Way for TTP and TTIP
Even cherry-picked data shows only modest gains for trade agreements, and more comprehensive looks tell a very different tale. And that’s before you get to all the nasty sovereignty-gutting provisions of the TTP and TTIP.
Read more...Joe Firestone: Return of the Platinum Coin?
Just as sumer is icumen in, so to are budget fights. And that means another opportunity to talk up the platinum coin as a way around budgetary tactics designed to inflict austerity on ordinary Americans.
Read more...Why is It Hard to Land a Well-Paid Job After Losing One?
Yves here. I sometimes run posts from orthodox economic sites as exercise in critical thinking, or to remind readers of what passes for research in economics, since economic work is treated with undue reverence in policy circles.
Here, the issue at hand is why people who have well paid jobs take a while to land another one, of course assuming that they manage to land well. The analysis by the author is not bad, save its rather frightening level of abstraction. But take a good look at his summary of conventional assumptions about how job-finding and wage-setting for the unemployed is supposed to work.
Read more...Is Syriza About to Score a Tactical Win Against the Troika?
Those who were hoping that Syriza would be cowed by the ECB’s aggressive moves to shut Greece out of bond markets and Eurozone finance ministers’ unified resistance to the new government’s proposals are no doubt frustrated by its refusal to capitulate. On Sunday, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras gave a rousing speech reaffirming Syriza’s plans.
Read more...The Rich and the Great Recession
Much research about the Great Recession in the US has focused on the boom-bust in housing wealth and spending of the middle class. This column argues that a large role was actually played by the rich. The savings rate of the rich went through a similar cycle as that of the middle class with rising wealth first stimulating their consumption and falling wealth restraining it. Most importantly, the wealth of the rich has become so large and volatile that wealth effects on their consumption could impact the whole economy.
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