Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class

Debunking the “It’s China’s Fault That American Worker Real Wages are Falling” Myth

Even in the cases where the outsourcing cost savings were significant, the idea that American wages were way out of line with Chinese wages and the only future for American workers was grinding wages lower and lower to compete with China has been oversold.

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Occupy Wall Street 2.0: The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual

The anniversary of Occupy Wall Street is September 17. While there will be public events in New York, it’s likely that number of people that will be involved will not be large enough to impress the punditocracy (multi-citi militarized crackdowns have a way of discouraging participation), leading them to declare OWS a flash in the pan.

That conclusion may be premature.

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Bloomberg Ranks Most and Least Miserable States

Bloomberg has developed a more detailed approach to looking at “misery” than the traditional “misery index,” which looked only at unemployment and inflation. They took their more granular method and used it to rank states in the US. This looks like a reasonable and useful metric, so I wish they had written a story detailing their approach and publishing the full ranking, but this TV clip gives the high points.

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Getting Economics to Acknowledge Rentier Finance

The economics discipline has for the most part managed to ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room: that of the role that the financial services industry has come to play. Astonishingly, even though the reengineering of the world economy along the lines preferred by mainstream economists resulted in a prosperity-wrecking global financial crisis and a soft coup by financiers, the discipline carries on methodologically as if nothing much had happened. And one of its huge blind spots is its refusal to acknowledge the role of banking and finance in modern commerce.

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The Euro as Idealist Project or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Pragmatic Elites

By Nathan Tankus,s a member of Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking working group. He is also deeply involved in the heterodox economics community and plans to have a PhD in economics before the decade is done. Cross posted with View From the Metropole.

In accounts of American economic history, the early days of banking are typically described as chaotic, contradictory and many decisions are depicted as awful, stupid mistakes. That period certainly included all these things, but looking at Europe now, one can’t help but feel that many back then (especially the elites) understood money better and were much better pragmatists.

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Chris Hedges: Hear the 99% Roar

This interview with Chris Hedges on TVO, Ontario’s answer to the BBC, does not appear to have gotten the play it deserves in the US. Hedges discusses Occupy Wall Street from both a strategic and tactical perspective, discussing the conditions that affect the progress and success of revolutions, what he sees as the “no demands” canard, and his criticisms of Black Bloc tactics.

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Wall Street’s War Against the Cities: Why Bondholders Can’t – and Shouldn’t – be Paid

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and author of “The Bubble and Beyond,” which is available on Amazon.

The pace of Wall Street’s war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill.

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Private Equity: A Government Sponsored Enterprise

By Nanea, a private equity insider, and Yves Smith

Private equity practitioners, including most famously Mitt Romney, often depict their sector as the epitome of private enterprise. These claims are false. Private equity firms not only depend directly and substantially on government support, they have also actively cultivated links to the state.

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Marcy Wheeler: The Grey Lady Falls Off the Balance Beam

Yves here. While Marcy starts with the most obvious misrepresentation in a New York Times hagiography of Michigan governor Rick Snyder, the most troubling parts come later in her post. She illustrates how the Times airbrushes out Synder’s anti-labor, anti-democracy stance.

By Marcy Wheeler. Cross posted from emptywheel

Granted, it pertains to my right-wing governor, so it’s personal.

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