When middle class and low income people complain about the lousy ethics among what passes for our ruling classes, they usually shrug it off as jealousy, class warfare, and/or the sensationalism.
Guess what? Conventional wisdom is right.
Read more...Even more so than most cities, Chicago has had the best government money can buy. In this case, the money is willing to engage in a scorched-earth policy of crushing local investors and wrecking the city budget to achieve its end of taming unions and making Chicago even easier pickings for looting via infrastructure sales.
Read more...Whatever happened to innovation in America?
Read more...Michael Hudson was so incensed by what he called a “Blairesque” speech by Obama on Wednesday that he took it upon himself to comment on its all-too-frequent sleights of hand and outright fabrications
Read more...There are many seminal thinkers who are so well known they’re never read. This category includes Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, Immanuel Kant, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Fredrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes and many, many others.
One thinker I’d like to focus on is Karl Marx.
Read more...The bankruptcy filing and underlying train wreck of the once prosperous city of Detroit carries so much symbolic and practical baggage as to be beyond the scope of a single post. So rather than attempt to do a deep dive, particularly since the media and various experts are still weighing in, I thought I’d offer some high level observations and let readers provide more information, observations, and links.
Read more...Yves here. While I prefer to emphasize finance and economics posts over more political ones during the week, this one on the peril posed by so-called non-lethal weapons struck me as important.
Read more...Yves here. Varoufakis performs the important service of translating what is effectively a formal communication from Germany on its stance towards subject states, meaning the Eurozone periphery.
Read more...Yves here. As readers likely recall, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst wrote a paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” which revealed serious methodological problems with one of the linchpin papers used to justify cutting government spending even in times of recession. Robert Pollin here discusses some of the bigger issues in the political and economic debates on austerity and the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Read more...A Real News Network interview with Chris Hedges precipitated a lively, thoughtful discussion of the mess we are in as a civilization and whether we can pull ourselves out of what looks like a nosedive.
I thought readers might enjoy continuing the exchange, and the latest release in this Real News Network series should provide ample grist for debate.
Read more...Yves here. The high social cost of inequality – the fact that it shortens the lives of people at the top of the pecking order along with the lower orders – has long been excluded from discussion in polite company in the US.
Read more...One of hedge fund manager David Einhorn’s saying is “no matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.” An article in Washington Monthly, Special Deal by Haley Sweetland Edwards, deep dives into one big and largely hidden reason why medical costs in the US are out of control and are unlikely to be reined in any time soon.
Read more...Only a small part of the TransPacific Partnership is about trade as such. Most chapters are on other issues, like services, investment, government procurement, disciplines on state-owned enterprises and intellectual property.
Joining the TPP or similar free trade agreements will mean the country having to make often drastic changes to existing policies, laws and regulations, which will in turn affect the domestic economy and society.
Read more...Yves here. I wonder if the pattern described in this article, which is basically a brain drain of inventors to the US, is playing a meaningful role in the degradation of public education in the US. Why do the elites need to care about home-grown “talent” if they exploit the investments in schooling made by other countries?
Read more...The poor have to endure not just the indignity of struggling to survive, but also from having to listen to pious lectures on how they really can proper on their meager incomes.
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