Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class

The Global Corporatocracy is Almost Fully Operational

Yves here. I hope you don’t mind additional coverage of the pending trade pacts, this from a European perspective. This is bar none the single most important geopolitical initiative underway, yet it’s getting virtually no media play. While this discussion overlaps with our chat on Bill Moyers, many of you have friends, family members, and colleagues who don’t have time to watch a video but would read an article. Please use whatever route you think will work best with the people you know to get the word out.

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Greed, Revolution, and Governance

I’m generally very taken with Ian Welsh’s work, particularly two recent posts, A New Ideology and How to Create a Viable Ideology. He then continued with 44 Explicit Points on Creating a Better World. And I hate to say it, but the last piece was no where near as well thought out as the preceding pieces. What troubled me about his latest piece was its combination of confidence (as opposed to modesty and soliciting reactions and input) in combination with it having internal contractions and a lack of precision of language. But perhaps the biggest shortcoming was trying to finesse the question of governance.

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Ken Rogoff Loses It, Calls Criticism of Errors in Debt Paper a “Witch Hunt”

Ken Rogoff has just shown how out of touch he is with reality and basic standards of professional accountability, as demonstrated in an interview published in the Frankfuerter Allgemeine, which is best thought of as a center-right New York Times. He’s come as close as Serious People do to foaming at the mouth, accusing those who criticized the discovery of errors in a widely cited austerity-supporting paper he wrote with Carmen Reinhart as being on a “witch hunt” and engaging in an “orchestrated attack…as in the 1950s under McCarthy.”

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Us Versus Them

By Gerald Minack, a former global equity strategist for Morgan Stanley. Cross posted from MacroBusiness

Rising political polarisation in the US has gone hand-in-hand with rising income inequality, falling top-end tax rates, lower taxes on business, rising leverage and higher asset prices. These trends may be coincidental, but they seem to reinforce each other.

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The Rise of an American Debtcropper System for the Young

Readers have often been using the term “neofeudalism” to describe the outlines of the new economic order, in which the uber wealthy and a thin cadre of their advisors, managers, and other elite professionals do well, with a network of less lofty managers helping oversee and orchestrate the provision of services to the broad base of the public, and they struggle to eke out a meager existence.

Debt appears to be the “one ring that rules them all” of this emerging order.

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Why the “Maximizing Shareholder Value” Theory of Corporate Governance is Bogus

One mantra you see regularly in the business and popular press goes something along the lines of “the CEO and board have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.”

That is untrue. Moreover, the widespread acceptance of that false notion has done considerable harm.

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Ilargi: Winter In America Gets Colder – Why We Choose Poverty

We continue to live with the idea of recovery, which in our minds equals a return to what we had, plus added growth. For some of us that may come true, but for a very rapidly increasing number amongst us, it will not. Because, and it’s high time we acknowledge this, at this point in time, the only way the upper echelons of our societies can achieve some level of growth is to take it away from everyone else. And those upper echelons, mind you, demand exponential growth, which means, in a society that cannot grow, that the numbers of poor people will rise exponentially as well.

In reality, we are of course already seeing a huge redistribution of wealth today, only this one increases inequality instead of decreasing it. Which means all those dreams about equal access for everyone to the best health care and education available are long gone. If we would only redistribute wealth in such a way that it would see us return to the level of inequality that existed when those dreams were relevant, 60-odd years ago, much of our poverty conundrum would be solved. It is really as simple as that.

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Who Should Young People Throw Under the Bus: Granny or Billionaire Hedgie Stan Druckenmiller?

Without attempting to wade too deeply into the goo of Friedman’s latest column, let’s limit ourselves to the the fact that Friedman is running PR for former Soros Fund Management lead investor Stan Druckenmiller. The column also serves to illustrate how Serious People like Friedman were ready to jump on the deficit cutting bandwagon once the shutdown/debt ceiling drama was put to rest for a bit.

Druckemiller’s latest cause is to foment generational warfare.

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Obama Blames Shutdown on Lobbyists, Bloggers, “Talking Heads” and “Professional Activists”

You cannot make this stuff up.

Obama gave his usual adult talking to the children, meaning American citizens, type of speech to mark the cease-fire in the budget battle so that the two sides can work out a peace accord. These speeches are unpleasant to read because the blarney is so thick it could be packaged and sold as an industrial lubricant. But underneath the greasy veneer is the message that the Important People in the Beltway, meaning Obama, Democrats, and “responsible Republicans” in Congress must dedicate themselves to the pursuit of prosperity…of the 1%.

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