Five Reasons Congress Should Be Deeply Ashamed About Jobs
How Congress made itself a big part of the “where are the jobs?” problem.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
“Profitless” Stocks, Underinvestment, the Cannibalization of Labor, and Levitating Stock Prices
our humble blogger generally refrains from writing about stocks for a host of reasons. But several interesting news bits have prompted me to depart from my usual practice.
Read more...Bill Moyers with Richard Wolff on Inequality, Wage Slavery, and Economic Justice
Bill Moyers has a wide ranging and lively chat with Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and author of many books including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. Wolff is a fierce advocate of the need for policies for fairer wages for workers and argues why better pay is salutary not just for the employees but the broader economy.
Read more...Questioning the Underlying Structures of Property and Power is “Off the Table”
Yves here. The Real News Network interview below with Vijay Prashad, a professor of international studies at Trinity College, is part of a series that examines the power dynamics that undergird our economic system. Unlike most interviews, this one is more ruminative. Rather than trying to deliver some key observations to viewers, this one is more intended to help people recognize that they have blinkered views on some issues.
Read more...Stephanie Kelton: Reading Between the Lines – A Memo from Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles
Stephanie Kelton does an important service in discussing a memo from the Fed chairman during the Roosevelt Administration, Marriner Eccles. I was reminded of Eccles’ a fine appreciation for how the real economy worked and how government actions affected business. This keen eye for the fundamentals is sorely absent among most macroeconomists and policy experts today.
Read more...Lynn Parramore: Boomerang Babies – Record Numbers of Young Adults Live with Parents at Terrible Cost
Facing big debts and few decent jobs, today’s young people can’t get started in life.
Read more...Congressional Student Debt Deal Perpetuates Predatory Practices, Higher Education Cost Inflation
Yves here. This Real News Network interview with Alan Collinge, author of Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History and How We Can Fight Back, gives a short and clear overview of how student borrowers lack the protections that exist in other types of consumer lending, and how the Congressional deal to tinker with interest rates completely sidestepped the real problems in this market.
Read more...Ilargi: Capitalism, A Norwegian Rat And Some Cockroaches
Yves here. Ilargi takes up one of our favorite topics, how the fetishization of numbers and measurement is at best misguided and at worst profoundly dysfunctional, as we discussed in a 2006 article, Management’s Great Addiction.
Read more...“The Media Just Won’t Report on This Crappy Economy,” Such As 80% of US Adults Near Poverty, GDP Funny Business
Reader Cathryn Mataga complained yesterday in comments about the under-reporting of how bad things are out in the real world where most people live. It’s not hard to find proof of her thesis.
Read more...The Hidden Credit Report That Shuts People Out of the Banking System
Jessica Silver-Greenberg at the New York Times has an important account of how a system created by banks to catch scam artists like check-kiters has morphed over 20 years into a shadow credit reporting system.
Read more...More Obama Big Lies: Touting Sweatshop Amazon Warehouse Jobs as “Middle Class”
Obama needed a visual to show that, no, really, truly, jobs really are being created somewhere in America for yet another one of his exercises in trying to pretend that he’s on the side of ordinary Americans. So Obama used as his backdrop an American success story, Amazon, which is opening a new a warehouse in Chattanooga and hiring 7,000 people. That choice tells you everything about what Obama’s “middle class” program is really about.
Read more...Fiscal Crises: Coming To A City Near You?
The sad fact of the matter is that Detroit suffers today from international trade and international financial policies of the past two decades that many leading international economists embraced.
Read more...James Galbraith on Social Breakdown and Financial Stress in Europe and Why the Word “Stimulus” Needs to be Banned
Yanis Varoufakis provided the English translation of a new interview with James Galbraith published in Suddeutsche Zeitung. Galbraith focuses on institutional arrangements, the need for restructuring and reform, and constraints on growth.
Read more...Yes, Virginia, Rich People Are Not the Same as You and Me. They Cheat More.
When middle class and low income people complain about the lousy ethics among what passes for our ruling classes, they usually shrug it off as jealousy, class warfare, and/or the sensationalism.
Guess what? Conventional wisdom is right.
Read more...Chicago CEO Club, With Rahm and Pritzkers on Board, Pushed for Chicago Bond Downgrade, Whacking Local Investors and Pension-Holders
Even more so than most cities, Chicago has had the best government money can buy. In this case, the money is willing to engage in a scorched-earth policy of crushing local investors and wrecking the city budget to achieve its end of taming unions and making Chicago even easier pickings for looting via infrastructure sales.
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