Apparently Obama’s idea of a Holy Week sacrifice is to feed American citizens to rapacious bankers, this time through the device of “public/private partnerships” to support infrastructure spending.
Read more...Yves here. This is an important piece, in that it bucks conventional wisdom about growth and economic development in several ways.
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...Here we are, a mere nine days after Sandy, and what would ordinarily be a mere “sorta bad” winter storm is doing disproportionate harm by virtue of coming so close on the heels of the hurricane.
Read more...Even though the news media are generally focusing on the “progress is being made” aspects of the Hurricane Sandy aftermath (in large measure because that’s what officials are pushing), there is still a great deal of distress, as well as probable long-lingering problems that are not being acknowledged.
Read more...As a result of fully warranted bad press for some privatization deals, such as the lease of Chicago’s parking meters, there has been a bit (stress only a bit) more critical scrutiny of the de facto sale of public assets to consortia of private investors. Nevertheless, major banks have been using the financial distress of states and municipalities to push these deals as a solution to budget woes, when it’s a short-term expedient that leaves the public worse off.
Read more...The tone of media reports is that things are getting better after the storm, which is no doubt largely true, but there are still a lot of people in distress and discomfort.
Read more...The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy looks to be a soggy, protracted, costly affair.
Read more...By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)
Your Excellency, I am pleased to present the requested report on the economic outlook for the Great Southern Province of China, currently referred to by the local population as “Australia”. For convenience I will refer to the country by this older name.
Read more...Yves here. Stuart Zechman is a keen observer of how corporatist policies are peddled through various Rubinite/Hamilton Project organizations and other mouthpieces and skillfully messaged so as to snooker or co-opt bona fide progressives who ought to know better.
His article mentions Third Way. For benefit of those who have been so fortune as to have limited contact with the netherworld inside the Beltway, here is a brief description from an earlier post:
Read more...And make no mistake about the role of Third Way. Third Way runs the policy apparatus of the Democratic Party. In Congress, staffers attend regular Third Way policy briefings, where the group hands out pre-packaged legislative amendments in legal form, generic press releases, polling around those policy ideas, and talking points. It’s a soup-to-nuts policy apparatus. Most of these ideas are harmless – like increased volunteerism – but some are not, like various tax proposals.
The group has enormous juice.
By Richard Smith You won’t be hearing much from Yves today: Traceroute has started… traceroute to vroo.pair.com (209.68.1.136), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 5.882 ms 0.760 ms 0.631 ms 2 yves.tearing.hair.out (yves.tearing.hair.out) 8.501 ms 15.333 ms 9.936 ms 3 te-9-4-ur01.brunswick.me.boston.comcast.net (68.87.36.53) 9.966 ms 10.767 ms 9.605 ms 4 te-0-7-0-2-sur01.brunswick.me.boston.comcast.net (68.85.162.61) 10.250 ms […]
Read more...Sorry if you were looking for listing of the various Greek assets on offer. You need to be a really heavyweight investor (and have been verified as such) to get a real viewing. And you are late if you are taking interest only now. The Guardian last week visited a road show of sorts in London (note that the properties were being hawked BEFORE the Greek parliament had approved the sale). The potential bidders were very cool:
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
The fight for Europe’s future is being waged in Athens and other Greek cities to resist financial demands that are the 21st century’s version of an outright military attack. The threat of bank overlordship is not the kind of economy-killing policy that affords opportunities for heroism in armed battle, to be sure. Destructive financial policies are more like an exercise in the banality of evil – in this case, the pro-creditor assumptions of the European Central Bank (ECB), EU and IMF (egged on by the U.S. Treasury).
As Vladimir Putin pointed out some years ago, the neoliberal reforms put in Boris Yeltsin’s hands by the Harvard Boys in the 1990s caused Russia to suffer lower birth rates, shortening life spans and emigration – the greatest loss in population growth since World War II. Capital flight is another consequence of financial austerity. The ECB’s proposed “solution” to Greece’s debt problem is thus self-defeating. It only buys time for the ECB to take on yet more Greek government debt, leaving all EU taxpayers to get the bill. It is to avoid this shift of bank losses onto taxpayers that Angela Merkel in Germany has insisted that private bondholders must absorb some of the loss resulting from their bad investments.
The bankers are trying to get a windfall by using the debt hammer to achieve what warfare did in times past.
Read more...By Alex Andreou, a successful lawyer turned actor living in London. Cross posted from SturdyBlog
I have never been more desperate to explain and more hopeful for your understanding of any single fact than this: The protests in Greece concern all of you directly.
What is going on in Athens at the moment is resistance against an invasion; an invasion as brutal as that against Poland in 1939. The invading army wears suits instead of uniforms and holds laptops instead of guns, but make no mistake – the attack on our sovereignty is as violent and thorough. Private wealth interests are dictating policy to a sovereign nation, which is expressly and directly against its national interest. Ignore it at your peril. Say to yourselves, if you wish, that perhaps it will stop there. That perhaps the bailiffs will not go after the Portugal and Ireland next. And then Spain and the UK. But it is already beginning to happen. This is why you cannot afford to ignore these events.
Read more...One of the interesting features of the seemingly unending Eurozone crisis is that the half life of rescue measures is decreasing.
The elephant in the room, which we will put aside to focus on the current state of play, is that everyone knows the Greek debts must be restructured. To have Greece pay out punitive rates on past debt will simply grind the economy into a deeper hole, worsening its debt to GDP ratio and eroding its physical and human infrastructure. All the delay of the inevitable does is allow for more extend and pretend while Western financial firms strip the economy for fun and profit. And this is terribly inefficient looting; their profits from this pilferage will be small relative to the pain inflicted on the Greek populace.
Late last week, various commentators made a bit too much of the clearing of one obstacle to the extension of yet another short lifeline to Greece, namely, that Angel Merkel had relaxed one of conditions that stood in the way of a planned €12 billion credit extension. She had wanted private creditors to share in the pain, and agreed that a rollover of currently maturing debt would do. Before she had insisted on a full bond exchange, which would have resulted in a much more significant hit to investors.
This concession did not go over well in Germany.
Read more...