Lambert and other readers old enough to remember the 1960s, when protest ballads of various sorts were an important part of both the civil rights movement and the opposition to the war in Vietnam, have wondered at the absence of anti-bank, anti-autocratic songs.
Below is one with a suitably pointed video taking aim squarely at predatory financiers.
Read more...There’s a remarkable amount of optimism in the US financial media given the underlying health of the economy. Of course, the sort of short term investors that have come to dominate securities trading had been in a “risk on/risk off” pattern for a protracted period before commodities weakness and the remarkable run of the Nikkei has led to some renewed focus on relative values of various macro plays. But the markets are still dominated by an underlying faith in the willingness of central bankers to protect the backs of investors and limit any downside (while, ironically, many of these same investors howl about ZIRP and QE, which were clearly intended to goose the value of financial assets and real estate, with the hope that would lead to more consumer spending).
And why shouldn’t the professional investors (as opposed to widows and orphans who can no longer rely on low risk bond investments to produce adequate income) be pleased as punch?
Read more...One of the things that Matt Stoller has stressed that the possibility of reform is remote until breaks within the elites take place.
Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia professor and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, is a controversial figure for his neoliberal stance on macroeconomics and his role in promoting the use of “shock therapy” in emerging economies. But it is also important to recognize that criticism from a connected, respected insider has more significance than that of someone like Bill Black, who has made a career of taking on bank fraud but has never reached a top policy-making level.
This talk is blistering at several points.
Read more...It has become depressingly normal to hear of senior Administration officials going immediately for the golden ring when they leave public service. But for every Mary Shapiro joining Promontory and Lanny Breuer returning to Covington & Burling for $4 million a year, there are even more operatives at similar or lower levels who make a very juicy return on their association with Obama but don’t get the same level of attention in the mainstream media.
Norm Scheiber, in a must-read article in The New Republic, “Get Rich or Deny Trying:
How to make millions off Obama,” chronicles how this process works. It’s even uglier than you might imagine.
It’s a sign of how well relentless propagandizing works that Joe Stiglitz has to devote a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times to debunking the idea that our income tax system, whose salient characteristic is low tax burdens for the rich, is good for anyone other than the rich.
Read more...Contributed by Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog, Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media.
Catalonia’s riot police unleashed the untamed fury of the state upon the protestors and cleared Barcelona’s Plaza Catalunya of all occupants. A dense ring of shell-shocked people gathered around the square. I was one of them. A child riding on his father’s shoulders held up a sign: “No soy anti sistema, el sistema es anti yo,” it said (I’m not anti-system; the system is anti-me).
Read more...Nothing like dramatic proof that austerity is a failure
Read more...Michael Hudson, in a Real News Network interview, puts paid some of the key ideas used to sell catfood futures, um, Social Security and Medicare cuts, such as if we don’t Do Something, interest on government bonds will eat the economy. He also gives a good explanation of what “chained CPI” is really all about.
Read more...It must be really hard to be an Obama defender these days, at least if you are not on a big corporate payroll.
Read more...One of the ongoing frustrations in being (of necessity) a heavy consumer of what passes for media in the US is how insistent and disconnected the official narrative is with conditions on the ground. This BBC documentary gives a much-needed counterpoint.
Read more...We’ve been poking at Walmart of late because the Bentonville giant appears to have feet of clay. It has been pursuing its relentless cost-cutting strategy to the point where it is damaging its franchise. Bloomberg (and later, the New York Times) described how the retailer had cut headcount to the point where it was having difficulty keeping shelves stocked and checkout lines to a tolerable length. Proving the validity of the Bloomberg account, over 1000 Walmart customers e-mailed the news service, describing their crummy experiences.
But Walmart may have started going off the rails even earlier than the counterproductive staffing cuts suggest.
Read more...Yves here. Be warned this piece is long but very much worth your time, since it demolishes the myth of the attractiveness of privatizations by looking at its record in England, where it was first undertaken on a widespread basis.
By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.”
As in Chile, privatization in Britain was a victory for Chicago monetarism. This time it was implemented democratically. In fact, voters endorsed Margaret Thatcher’s selloff of public industries so strongly that by 1991, when she was replaced as prime minister by her own party’s John Major, only 35 percent of Britain’s voters supported the Labour Party – half the proportion registered in 1945. The Conservatives sold off public monopolies, used the proceeds to cut taxes, and put the privatized firms on a profit-making basis. Their stock prices rose sharply, making capital gains for investors whose ranks included millions of Britons who had been employees and/or customers of these enterprises.
Yet by 1997 the Conservatives were voted out of office by one of the largest margins in their history. What concerned voters were the results of privatization that Mrs. Thatcher had not warned them about
Read more...There is no more pretense possible. We now have the absurd spectacle of Paul Ryan’s budget being to the left of Obama’s on the issue of Social Security and Medicare.
Read more...By Gaius Publius. Cross posted from AmericaBlog
Bottom line first, since this is turning long. For the owners of the country (and their paid national managers), the real emergency associated with Social Security isn’t the day the last dollar will leave the Trust Fund. It’s the day the first dollar will leave. That’s a whole different problem, and a whole different timeline, for them.
How did I come to that conclusion? Read on.
Read more...After NC got its own mini comment deluge on our post yesterday about devolution and cost-cutting gone rabid leading to declines in service, with Walmart as the featured example, Bloomberg has a follow up story on customer complaints about Walmart stock levels.
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