This post will serve to remind you: call your Representative (contact info here) and Senators (contact info here) today and tell them in no uncertain terms that you expect them to vote against Fast Track authority.
Read more...The Federal Reserve (“the Fed”), the central bank of the United States, is at the center of a big political fight, once again.
Read more...How Fed policies exacerbate inequality and dampen growth.
Read more...Aversion to Hillary Clinton among bona fide progressives is far more acute than Democratic party loyalists recognize.
Read more...I don’t see a time in the future when American consumers will start spending again at a rate near that required for economic recovery.
Read more...Time to boycott Amazon. The Verge has broken an important story on how far Amazon has gone in its relentless efforts to crush workers.
Read more...Are progressives willing to attack Ron Wyden on TPP?
Read more...Even though this video is from December (hat tip Philip Pilkington), it gives an informative and nuanced explanation of the rise in income inequality and consumer debt levels, and how they play into our unimpressive “recovery”. The interview of Steve Fazzari and Barry Cynamon by Marshall Auerback discusses how the rise of inequality has many drivers, but the biggest appears to be financialization which is so pervasive and well-protected politically as to make it hard to roll back. It also put focus on key metrics that often get lost in conventional coverage. For instance, inflation and productivity adjusted wages would now need to be over $20 to match the levels of the 1960s.
Read more...Michael Hudson recaps the theory, or perhaps more accurately, political justifications for quantitative easing, as opposed to how it works in practice.
Read more...Two stories on Slashdot say a great deal about the reality of the labor market versus the official hype. It’s noteworthy that the comments, which are typically fractious at Slashdot, line up almost uniformly on the “employers are looking for insanely specific and often unrealistic experience.” And why might that be? In the case of tech in particular, to justify bringing in more H-1B visa candidates.
Read more...On the curious way a New York Times story on McDonald’s efforts at transformation said almost nothing about McDonald’s workers.
Read more...The Troika and Eurogroup look to be working towards the Greek government to start having similar thoughts. However, given the high level of popular support for Syriza, and press reports that Greek citizens fully expect that the new government to at best only be able to deliver on a small portion of its campaign promises, the end game for Greece is looking more and more likely to be a failed state rather than a more neoliberal-friendly government.
Read more...Some Serious Economists have signed a letter supporting the TransPacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The missive says a lot about the discipline, and not in a good way.
Read more...Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has channeled his inner Mitt Romney and written off an immense swath of Americans as people he would not represent if he were elected President.
Read more...Elizabeth Warren is clearly getting on the Administration’s nerves.
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