Bill Black: New York Times Reporters Embrace the Berlin Consensus and Ignore Krugman and Economics
Yves here. Black does yeoman’s work in describing the bias in the New York Times’ Eurocrisis reporting
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What Can Americans Learn from the Eurocrisis
At the risk of looking like NC has become the “all Michael Hudson, all the time” channel, we’re featuring his latest talk with Real News Network. He discusses how and why candidates make promises to ordinary people that they promptly repudiate when they assume office.
Read more...Dan Kervick: The Political Economy of Citadella
Yves here. Readers seem to like Kervick’s storytelling format, and he seemed to take NC readers’ suggestion to heart regarding making it a bit more compact next time.
By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
Imagine a world and a society in which 500 people own everything – absolutely everything.
Read more...The Intensifying Debate Over Food Security
One of the troubling ideas that seems to have gained traction is that nations should not care overmuch about the needs of their citizens and should accept market outcomes.
Read more...The Bankruptcy “Reforms” of 2005: Creation of a New Debtor’s Prison?
An article by law professor Linda Coco, “Debtor’s Prison in the Neoliberal State: ‘Debtfare’ and the Cultural Logics of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005,” (hat tip Michael Hudson) is a an informative, if disheartening, overview of the significance of the bankruptcy law reforms implemented in 2005.
One might cynically observe that after 25 years of making it easier for consumers to borrow and encouraging them to load up, banks realized that they might have too much of a good thing and realized they needed to improve their ability to extract payments from the credit junkies they had created.
Read more...How did Quebec Students Mobilize Hundreds of Thousands for Strike?
It’s telling that the fact that hundreds of thousands of people in Quebec have been striking for over two months has gone virtually unreported in the US.
Read more...Exclusive: How Obama’s Early Career Success Was Built on Fronting for Chicago Real Estate and Finance
Barack Obama remains an icon to many on what passes for the left in America despite incontrovertible evidence that he does not represent their interests. There are many contributing factors, including his considerable skills as a speaker and his programmatic effort to neuter liberal critics by getting their funding cut.
A central component of the seemingly impenetrable Obama mythology is his personal history: a black man, son of a broken home, who nevertheless got on the fast track to financial success by becoming editor of the Harvard Law Review, but turned instead to working with and later representing a particularly disadvantaged community, the South Side of Chicago.
Even so, this story does not quite add up.
Read more...David Graeber: New Police Strategy in New York – Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protestors
By David Graeber, a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and an author and activist currently based in New York
A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
Read more...Adam Davidson Parrots Disinformation as He Extols Rule by the Top 0.1%
Adam Davidson is moving up in the world. He has gone from fellating the 1% to the top 0.1%.
Read more...Charlotte to Suspend Constitutional Free Speech and Assembly Protections to Help Bank of America, Duke Shareholder Meetings
It has become pretty routine for local police to engage in thuggery and run roughshod over Constitutional protections in the name of maintaining order, which increasingly means not annoying big companies.
Read more...Occupy Wall Street Sues New York City, JP Morgan #OWS
One of the continuing and largely unrecognized aspects of the ongoing media coverage of Occupy Wall Street is that police brutality and lesser abuses have been airbrushed out.
Read more...Reining in Finance and the Effort to Silence a Critical UN Agency
This Real News Network segment gives a window into the efforts to squash criticism of the neoliberal orthodoxy in the world of international agencies. Even though the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) gets very little attention in the major media, its well researched and often prescient reports are enough of a threat to the orthodoxy to produce efforts by the advanced economy block in the UN to try to clip the wings of the agency. The start of this interview may seem like a bit of inside baseball, but it shortly gets to issues that are critically important.
Read more...Jamie Galbraith on Changes in Finance as the Driver of Inequality
I’m working my way around to the INET talks that I missed, and this one by Jamie Galbraith is very much worth viewing. It takes a while to build up steam, so be patient.
Galbraith has marshaled a great deal of cross country data over time, and shows how changes in equality happened in a very large number of economies in parallel. He explains, persuasively, that the most plausible culprit is changes in the financial regime.
Read more...Randy Wray: The Job Guarantee and Real World Experience
By Randy Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City
There have been many job creation programs implemented around the world, some of which were narrowly targeted while others were broad-based. The American New Deal included several moderately inclusive programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corp and the Works Progress Administration. Sweden developed broad based employment programs that virtually guaranteed access to jobs.
Read more...The Trust Deficit
This weekend, the National Journal published, “In Nothing We Trust,” using Muncie, Indiana to illustrate the distrust that is eating away at the American social fabric.
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