Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class

Michael Hudson: The Paradox of Financialized Industrialization

The great question today is whether post-feudal rentier capitalism will stifle industrial capitalism instead of serving it. The aim of finance is not merely to exploit labor, but to conquer and appropriate industry, real estate and government. The result is a financial oligarchy, neither industrial capitalism nor a tendency to evolve into socialism.

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Michael Perelman: The Essential Handbook for Engineering an Unequal Society

While the thrust of Perelman’s post is no doubt familiar to readers, take note of how simple and few in number are the essential principles for creating a highly unequal society, and how easy it is to describe them them in antiseptic language.

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Mark Blyth: “Austerity Cures Nothing”

This is a bracing, no-nonsene talk from economist Mark Blyth of Brown University, who is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century and Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.

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Clinton Outdoes Tsipras in Kolotoumbas with Her Reversals on TPP, Bank Regulations

The big problem with Hillary is it is hard to believe she stands for anything other than her desire to exercise power. Her latest bout of opportunism only reinforces that notion.

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Michael Hudson on Parasitic Financial Capitalism

An interview with Michael Hudson on his latest book, Killing the Host, which focuses on the destruction wrought by financial capitalism.

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Richard Richard Wolff on Jobs Now, and David Cay Johnson and Jobs Then

By Lambert Strether of Corrente. Typically, when we post a video, we post only one. But I felt these two posts were more powerful combined than separately. First, Richard Richard Wolff, in 38% of American Workforce Still Jobless. Wolff is a Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently a Visiting […]

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