Yearly Archives: 2012

Matt Stoller is 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.

Even authoritarian systems require legitimacy to retain the support of the governed, and the new authoritarian America is no exception. Since 2004, the brilliant public journalism advocate Jay Rosen has been asking, what is the point of a political convention? No news is made, yet over 15,000 journalists show up, ostensibly to cover the pomp. But everyone knows that coverage isn’t so much the point; these conventions trade shows for the political class, where party insiders, journalists, politicians, celebrities, corporate types, and lobbyists mingle to organize political hierarchies. The public is simply irrelevant, a mass of jeering and cheering message imbibers or apathetic and cynical former citizens, people who are unseen behind their TV screens. The only fresh elements are protesters, and they are met by a police state, lest they disrupt the insider deal-making.

By Richard Wood, a long serving economist at the Treasury in Canberra, Australia. He served as Minister (Economic and Financial Affairs) in Paris, and represented Australia at the OECD and the Paris Club. Views expressed in these articles are his own and may not be shared by his employing agency. Originally published at VoXEU.

The crisis is deepening in Europe, and recession is spreading globally. This column argues that macroeconomic policies have failed to overcome the dual problems of flagging aggregate demand and high and spiralling public debt. It urges policymakers to abandon failed orthodoxies and irrelevant treaties and consider new, alternative solutions.

Dan Kervick has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, and is an active independent scholar specializing in the philosophy of David Hume. He also does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives.

An important anniversary is approaching.  On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed and issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  The proclamation that sounded the final end of the depraved institution of American slavery was presented to the nation and the world as an emergency war act, a “fit and necessary” measure for suppressing an armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States.  The language of the Emancipation Proclamation is restrained by the customary legalisms of government writ; and yet, vibrating through and beyond the tight cords of executive propriety, the drama and permanence of Lincoln’s statement sound clearly, along with the solemn national commitment to sustain the liberation of the newly freed men and women by force of arms:

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet contributing editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of ‘Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.’ Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore. Originally published at Alternet.

A native explains how the people of North Carolina have been giving hell to fatcats for over 300 years.

Bill Black is 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. He blogs at New Economic Perspectives. Here he’s interviewed by Paul Jay of the Real News Network.

By lambert strether

Here are two Wordles from the last night of the RNCon. Which do you think is Romney, and which do you think is Eastwood? Spoiler alert: Click the image to enlarge and find out.

By Will Galison and Milton Allimadi. Will Galison is an internationally known musician with many recording and performing credits. Will became a part-time journalist after being a victim of judicial corruption and discovering that no mainstream media was writing about the subject and no government agencies were challenging it. Milton Allimadi, publisher and CEO of the Black Star News, is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism. Originally published at Truthout.

The cover-up of the death of an anti-corruption whistleblower by numerous agencies and the mainstream media.

Lambert here: Definitely long form, and definitely required reading.

* * *

By Sell on News, a global macro equities analyst. Cross-posted from Macrobusiness.

One of the consequences of economics pretending to be a science, when it is not, is the tendency to attempt to explain financial behaviour from its base constituent parts, rather as a physicist might build up a picture of a compound from its molecules. This repeatedly results in observations that are either banal or based on circular arguments. And once those observations are generalised, taken beyond their thought experiment circularity, they become consistently misleading.

By lambert strether

For those who just have to have a shot of horse race politics, here’s RNN’s Paul Jay interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson about the recently concluded RNCon (and I use that abbreviation for a reason… ).