Has Sherrod Brown started to follow Obama’s lead in the bait and switch category? Elizabeth Warren showed a lot more spine than he did in an trade-related vote on Wednesday.
Read more...OK, you remaining Obama fans: tell me why we should trust the biggest baiter and switcher in the history of the Presidency, particularly when he insists on unprecedented levels of secrecy? Because he has nice teeth and cute kids?
Read more...Readers were duly exercised about a paper published by Greg Mankiw which had to go through so many hoops to promote the idea that inequality was the result of merit as to be worthy of our Frederic Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity.
Suffice it to say further ridicule of Mankiw is in order, and Parramore provides a useful contribution.
Read more...When union members demand decent pay levels and work conditions, they are charged with featherbedding and overmanning or the new neoliberal catchall, “demanding uncompetitive wages”. But when the upper crust loots institutions, the mainstream media is typically missing in action.
Read more...Yves here. This post swings for the fence, but still makes an important point about how the uprising in Turkey differs from Arab Spring and the Orange Revolution.
Read more...Joe Firestone reviews the state of play on the Social Security/Medicare “reform” debate.
Read more...For those of us who grew up in the Greece of the neo-fascist colonels, nothing can stir up painful memories like a modern act of totalitarianism. When the television screen froze last night, an hour before midnight, as if some sinister power from beyond had pressed a hideous pause button, I was suddenly transported to the 60s and early 70s when a disruption in television or radio output was a sure sign that another coup d’ etat was in the offing. The only difference was that last night the screen just froze; with journalists still appearing tantalisingly close to finishing their sentence. At least the colonels had the good sense of pasting a picture of the Greek flag, accompanied by military tunes…
Read more...By Sasha Breger, a lecturer at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and author of the recent book Derivatives and Development. Her research includes global finance, derivatives, social policy, food, and farming. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
In my last two posts (http://triplecrisis.com/a-great-sucking-sound-part-2/, http://triplecrisis.com/a-great-sucking-sound-part-1/), I addressed the roles of debt, farmland acquisition, and physical commodity hoarding in helping finance siphon wealth from global agriculture. In this final post, I discuss the role of derivatives and insurance markets in this redistributive process.
Read more...A weak job market, killer student loans and a crappy economy mean continued struggle for America’s college grads.
Read more...Why is a whole job getting harder to find every day in America?
Read more...Dave Dayen’s latest article at Salon makes a critical point about student debt, that is it fundamentally misleading to call it a loan.
Read more...The first article in a series by Black on the remarkable, in the bad sense of the work, work by Nobel prize winners on regulation.
Read more...It’s hard to know where to begin with a story up at the Wall Street Journal, Risk-Averse Culture Infects U.S. Workers, Entrepreneurs.
Read more...New Gallup polls shows that economic conservatism is down, social liberalism is up.
Read more...If you hear a kind of whooshing, rushing noise, don’t worry—it’s not US jobs moving to China. Today’s great sucking sound is the sound of agricultural wealth being siphoned off into the global financial system.
Read more...