Michael Hudson: Oligarchs Will Never Cancel Debts We Owe Them
Michael Hudson sent this short video which explains the history of debt jubilees and the role of private debt in the rise of oligarchies.
Read more...Category Archives: Social policy
U.S. Student Homelessness Up 10% Since Last Year
On Bill Moyers last week, Henry Giroux talked about how our political system is willing to throw young people on the trash heap, and indifference to rising homelessness among students is an ugly example.
Read more...Michael Hoexter: Loathsome Wall Street Deficit Hysterics: ‘Blame the Old and Sick, Not Us’ – Part 2
While Pete Peterson and Bob Rubin have couched their campaign against Social Security and Medicare in the moral vestments of “fiscal responsibility”, they gloss over the macroeconomic financial reality of government and the requirement for deficit spending to maintain growth of the national and world economies. The moral fervor that they apply is inapplicable to government programs: while it may seem real to them or the gullible politicians they influence, the moral outrage they hope to play on is based on false and inhumane premises.
Read more...How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get-Rich-Quick Scheme — Again
Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix
Read more...Identity Politics and the Stoking of Generational Warfare
I have to confess I find stereotyping annoying, and in almost all cases, it’s a poor substitute for more careful analysis and characterization. Yet it is marvelously effective in politics, as Karl Rove proved.
Read more...Bob Goodwin: Why Code is Law
Several bellwether software initiatives have gone off the rails over the last five years. I am going to focus on one, because I learned about it on Naked Capitalism, and is where I first saw the expression “Code is Law”. I hope when history is written, this example will stand out on how the anarchist nerds that we call software engineers inadvertently started to hijack public institutions.
Read more...The Skunk Party Manifesto
The best political system that money can buy is doing a great job for its customers and a lousy job for the rest of us.
Read more...Chronicles of a European Winter: “There is a Difference Between Saying Greeks Should Live With Less and Saying Greeks Should Live With Nothing”
This is the first segment of an ongoing project, Eurowinter, to record the human toll of austerity policies in Europe. It focuses on the suffering Greece, as told by Greeks themselves.
Read more...Michael Olenick: Comprehensive Review of ObamaCare Plans Reveals Not Only High Cost for Atrocious Coverage, but Also Apparent Violations of ACA Requirements
After five weeks healthcare.gov presented insurance policies for my family to purchase. No wonder the website was dark for so long: the plans are expensive, atrocious, and the insurance companies look like they are cheating.
Read more...Student Debt is Crushing the Economic Future of the Young
If a bad job market wasn’t damaging enough, the cost of paying off student loans does much more harm to the long-term prospects of young people than is commonly realized.
Read more...Obama Wants to Cut Social Security
Yves here. The headline is hardly news, at least if you’ve been paying attention, but this post does a great job of debunking arguments against Social Security, particularly ones designed to stoke generational warfare.
Read more...Greed, Revolution, and Governance
I’m generally very taken with Ian Welsh’s work, particularly two recent posts, A New Ideology and How to Create a Viable Ideology. He then continued with 44 Explicit Points on Creating a Better World. And I hate to say it, but the last piece was no where near as well thought out as the preceding pieces. What troubled me about his latest piece was its combination of confidence (as opposed to modesty and soliciting reactions and input) in combination with it having internal contractions and a lack of precision of language. But perhaps the biggest shortcoming was trying to finesse the question of governance.
Read more...Attention: Deficit Disorder and the Real Crisis Ahead
Yves here. This article focuses on the critically important of how the real danger to the economic welfare of young people is not the cost of retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare but the failure to generate enough jobs now and invest in infrastructure and education.
Read more...The Coercive Power of Capitalism
What is remarkable is how we’ve blinded ourselves to the coercive element of our own system.
Read more...Ilargi: Winter In America Gets Colder – Why We Choose Poverty
We continue to live with the idea of recovery, which in our minds equals a return to what we had, plus added growth. For some of us that may come true, but for a very rapidly increasing number amongst us, it will not. Because, and it’s high time we acknowledge this, at this point in time, the only way the upper echelons of our societies can achieve some level of growth is to take it away from everyone else. And those upper echelons, mind you, demand exponential growth, which means, in a society that cannot grow, that the numbers of poor people will rise exponentially as well.
In reality, we are of course already seeing a huge redistribution of wealth today, only this one increases inequality instead of decreasing it. Which means all those dreams about equal access for everyone to the best health care and education available are long gone. If we would only redistribute wealth in such a way that it would see us return to the level of inequality that existed when those dreams were relevant, 60-odd years ago, much of our poverty conundrum would be solved. It is really as simple as that.
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