Yves here. Varoufakis’ post may seem a bit off topic for this blog, but he has provided a history of censorship in Greece as seen through his personal relationship with the recently-shuttered state broadcaster ERT. And that is a more useful reference point for Americans (and likely most Anglo-Saxon readers).
Read more...The New York Times has one of those “inside” stories that unintentionally demonstrate the collapse of justice and financial reporting. This genre involves the media reporting gravely (and uncritically) the administration’s claims that its failure to prosecute any elite for the largest and most destructive financial frauds in history actually demonstrates the exceptional ethical rectitude of the non-prosecutors and non-enforcers.
Read more...Yves here. Mirabile dictu! A VoxEU article discusses, admittedly in suitably dense economese, how economists create and enforce biases against taxation by using terminology that presupposes that it’s bad. And as Lambert noted after he saw it went up here: “That post got Tyler Cowen really ticked off, so it must be good.”
Read more...Normally I’d relegate a good job of news spadework to the daily Links feature, but Bloomberg caught out Attorney General Eric Holder in such an egregious lie that this failed con job merits ample, widespread publicity and well-deserved derision.
Read more...Thanks to Obama’s famed “no drama” coolness, it’s hard to detect when he’s breaking a sweat. But if you look at the substance of his actions, it’s clear the President is losing his famed poise, at least as far as Snowden and the surveillance state revelations are concerned.
Read more...Moral sentimentalism rules the ethical landscape. For radical change, the Left should take morality back.
Read more...Yves here. This letter from Chicago Public Media (hat tip martha r), signed by a number of prominent scholars and Latin American professionals, sets out to correct the record of the American media’s depiction of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in their discussion of Edward Snowden’s situation. I hope our readers south of the border will be able to add to this discussion.
Read more...Bill Moyers interviewed Marty Kaplan who heads the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California on how the choice of media stories helps keep Americans politically somnambulant.
Read more...I’m a bit late to get to an article in the New York Times that ran on one of the slowest news days of the year, last Saturday, Warren Mosler, a Deficit Lover With a Following. Since Bill Black has since issued a good kneecapping, I’ll soon turn the mike over to him, but I wanted to add some points about the approach used in this heavy-handed exercise propaganda.
Read more...By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience
Although the incident occurred several days ago, the responses among French readers were so extraordinary that they merit further attention. For many, the incident represented an unmistakable turning point:
There is a certain concept of the world that is disappearing definitively.
And so I have selected a representative sample of these responses, both from Le Figaro (center right) and Le Monde (center left), and formed them into a conversation:
Read more...So this week I got an education in the mentality of “official” Washington.
Last week I was asked by a DC-based publication to give a comment on Corker-Warner, the flavor-of-the-month proposal to abolish Fannie and Freddie and reform mortgage finance. I basically take the same position as Yves on this issue: all of these GSE 2.0 plans assume a private label MBS market the way the proverbial economist on a desert island assumes a can opener.
Read more...If you think Independence Day came to be a national holiday as an organic expression of pride in our successful rebellion against England, you need to think twice.
Read more...Yves here. Steve Keen sent this note along with his post:
The journalist David Hirst was both one of the few to warn of the crisis, and someone who became a good friend. He died last week, as a long term consequence of internal injuries sustained about ten years ago in the USA, when he tried to stop a woman being bashed.
His spouse asked me to see if I could get the attached published on NC, which was one of his favourite sites.
If you know David’s writing, you’ll understand what a loss this is. And if you missed his prescient and incisive commentary before and during the crisis, I hope you’ll sample his work below and get a sense of what a talent he was. Either way, I trust you’ll join me in sending condolences to David’s widow and his family, as well as to Steve.
Read more...For those of us who grew up in the Greece of the neo-fascist colonels, nothing can stir up painful memories like a modern act of totalitarianism. When the television screen froze last night, an hour before midnight, as if some sinister power from beyond had pressed a hideous pause button, I was suddenly transported to the 60s and early 70s when a disruption in television or radio output was a sure sign that another coup d’ etat was in the offing. The only difference was that last night the screen just froze; with journalists still appearing tantalisingly close to finishing their sentence. At least the colonels had the good sense of pasting a picture of the Greek flag, accompanied by military tunes…
Read more...The Grey Lady roused itself to profile Glenn Greenwald after his blockbuster stories of the last two days: the first on a secret court order now in effect for Verizon to provide the NSA on all telephone records in its systems, the second on the PRISM program, which has given the NSA direct access to servers of information giants including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, since 2007. But the piece is mean-spirited, underplaying Greenwald’s credentials and coming too close for comfort to character sniping.
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