How Pursuing “Competitiveness” Crushes Labor and Lowers Growth
Why pursuing national “competitiveness,” as in squeezing labor pay and rights, does not produce the promised benefit of more growth.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
Full Text of TPP, Including Annexes, and Boy is it Nasty
Yes, sports fans, the TPP is as bad as you feared it might be….
Read more...Martin Wolf on the Low Labor Participation as the Result of the Crapification of Jobs
Why are more and more prime age people refusing to take jobs on offer?
Read more...Mussolini-Style Corporatism, aka Fascism, on the Rise in the US
While the new neoliberal economic order is not a replay of fascism,, there is a remarkable amount of inhibition in calling out the similarities where they exist.
Read more...Hillary Clinton Indicates She is Open to Raising the Retirement Age
Hillary Clinton again reveals her inner neoliberal in suggesting that raising the retirement age might not be a bad idea.
Read more...The Plutonomy Is Doing Fine
Oddly, the latest release of a report on the state of the plutonomy didn’t get as much attention as it warranted. We are doing our part to make up for this reporting lapse.
Read more...Weaker Unions Correlated with More Inequality, Higher Pay for Top Earners
The decline in union power plays an important role in explaining the rise in inequality in advanced economies.
Read more...Attacks on Sanders, Progressives Falsely Depict Obama As Lefty Failure as Opposed to Neoliberal Success
A sign that the progressive cause is moving out of the wilderness and starting to rattle The Powers That Be is that the messaging apparatus is starting to attempt to demonize Sanders as a hopeless cause. And the arguments made against him and the progressive cause generally are made via bizarre analogies to the neoliberal Obama.
Read more...Hillary Clinton on Social Security Expansion: Words are Wind. A Cold Wind.
Spoiler: Hillary Clinton does not support Social Security expansion. And that’s not the worst of it.
Read more...Reformers Stymie Obama a Second Time on Wall Street Cronies: Progressive Pick Lisa Fairfax Nominated for SEC
The Wall Street wing of the Democratic party has taken a visible defeat with the nomination of Lisa Fairfax to the SEC.
Read more...5 of the Biggest Acts of Corporate Hypocrisy in America
Socialism for the rich is inherently hypocritical….but which forms of corporate truth-distortion are the most brazen?
Read more...Mark Ames: Why Finance is Too Important to Leave to Larry Summers
Mark Ames explains why the left became stupid about finance and why that was a very costly mistake.
Read more...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.
Read more...How Much Money Does the 1% Have Hidden in Tax Havens?
UC Berkeley professor Gabriel Zucman is doing pathbreaking work on tax havens. HIs estimates of how much the rich hide in them are eye-popping.
Read more...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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