Both the IMF and the ECB call for “structural reforms” which are code for further weakening labor protection as beneficial to “competitiveness” and job creation. Does this claim stand up to scrutiny?
Read more...Why you can be sure Obama’s talking up progressive issues, like minimum wages, is another effort to re-entice (and re-deceive) the left-leaning voters that voted him in in 2008.
Read more...As we discussed earlier, even though there’s abundant evidence that the Administration’s plans to push through its trade deals, the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Transstlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, are in trouble, the official messaging has been to keep pretending that the pacts are still moving forward smartly.
Read more...Yves here. Wolf’s latest post gives a crisp overview of how bad things are in job land. Among other things, he highlights the catastrophically high unemployment levels among young people, and how financially stressed older workers are hanging on to jobs much more than they used to in the past.
Read more...Yves here. Although the current spell of nasty cold weather isn’t unusual by the standards of three decades ago, in the intervening years we’ve also had a big increase in homelessness, which means a lot more people are at risk of freezing to death.
Read more...Yves here. I don’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed to see Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff retreat from their pro-austerity stance and endorse debt restructuring, since their prior view (that budget-cutting was necessary and productive) served to justify considerable and unnecessary pain being inflicted on periphery Eurozone countries to preserve the illusion of health of French and German banks.
But as Yanis Varoufakis points out, although Reinhart and Rogoff are retreating from much of their erroneous thinking, they haven’t renounced all of it.
Read more...Stock speculator Jay Gould remarked, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” That, sports fans, is the real foundation of the generational warfare propaganda effort.
Read more...Mexico is doing badly at feeding its own people, thanks to 20 years of NAFTA.
Read more...As most people who have passing familiarity with student debt in the US know, it’s a millstone that is brutally difficult to remove. But it turns out that even the limited ways out are often not available in practice thanks to the hyper-aggressive conduct of a key government contractor.
Read more...A new Bloomberg story, Americans on Wrong Side of Income Gap Run Out of Means to Cope, is a zeitgeist indicator: the normally-well-insulated-from-realty investing classes have noticed that large swathes of what was once the middle class aren’t just downwardly mobile but are struggling.
Read more...f you come to San Francisco or Silicon Valley and look around, you’d arrive at the conclusion that California is booming, that companies jump through hoops to hire people, that they douse them with money, stock options, and free lunches. But in the rest of the state, the picture isn’t that rosy.
Read more...A Christmas Carol is often mistakenly charged with creating our contemporary, festive, largely secular Christmas. And while that may have been one of Dickens’ motives, a bigger one is more obvious: that of better treatment of children and the working poor.
Read more...Reader dSquib flagged a “bizarre” article by Mike Konczal in the New Republic titled, “Corporatism” is the Latest Hysterical Right-Wing Accusation: The secret history of a smear.” dSquib seemed quite perplexed that anyone would deem calling Obama a corporatist, which as we’ll demonstrate is patently true, a smear.
Read more...An interview with 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, on the Renegade Economists radio/podcast
Read more...A mere day after strikes at Amazon warehouses in Germany, which caught the attention of the media in the US, Slate ran as its lead piece in Moneybox an article that bears all the hallmarks of being a PR plant: Amazon Warehouses Are the New Factories.
I suspect the author, Emma Roller, wouldn’t recognize a factory if it fell on her.
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