Budget Brinksmanship: American Exceptionalism Gone Bad
Being exceptional apparently means never having take responsiblity for your actions.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
How One Likely Budget Compromise Will Promote More Congressional Corruption
The current posturing by both the Democrats and Republicans over the debt ceiling impasse is that both sides are digging in for a long shutdown. Whether that proves to be the case or not, the resolution is likely to involve some face-saving concessions offered by each side. One that is up for grabs is the provision that allows Congressmen and their staffers to continue to have their own Congressional policies. This plan has been attacked as generous, with the Wall Street Journal describing features like doctors on site at Capitol Hill.
This is basically a long-standing plot to try to persuade the public that they can get a free lunch, even when what they are getting is rancid cooking.
Read more...Give Until It Hurts, or They Will Take It Anyway
The author of this post is an anonymous Washington insider
The Federal exchanges on Obamacare don’t work. They just don’t. I don’t mean they don’t serve the interests of keeping people healthy, I mean they literally can’t serve pages that allow people to sign up. This is directly due to faulty IT processes, which Naked Capitalism was all over months ago
Read more...How the Foreclosure Crisis Made the Rich Even Richer
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 52 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post.
It’s a welcome departure to see Adam Davidson’s weekly column in the New York Times, which usually puts a happy face on how the 1% are winning the class war in America, have a guest writer look at the other side of the story.
Read more...Joe Firestone: Stop “the Great Betrayal” – Kabuki Update
It now looks like the big media and leaders in both parties are no longer focusing on the Government Shutdown crisis, but are now moving on to the notion that the shutdown is melding with the upcoming probable breaching of the debt limit to create a combined mother of all fiscal crises. Don’t be fooled.
Read more...Debt Ceiling Chicken and Trench Warfare
From time to time, I remarked that the summer had a 1914 feeling about it in the context of military action against Syria. It may turn out the feeling was still correct but I was looking in the wrong place.
Read more...David Dayen: Mysterious Study Backs Financial Adviser Thieves Who Want To Keep Bilking Small Investors
At the risk of self-promotion, allow me to point you in the direction of a piece by me running today in The New Republic. It’s about a proposed update to the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, and how the financial services industry, along with members of both parties, are working to stop it. An excerpt:
Read more...Robert Reich, Inequality’s Intellectual Fraudster
Now it may seem churlish to take on a prominent former government official making a star turn to publicize one of the most pressing social and political problems in America, namely, our ever widening levels of inequality. But in fact, Reich is not only selling the equivalent of patent medicine as the remedy but he’s even getting commissions from some of the snake-oil manufacturers.
Read more...Ilargi: From Tragedy To Travesty – Selling Off The Cradle Of Democracy
Is it merely a coincidence that the troika rode its Trojan horse into Athens again on the very day Angela Merkel went awfully close to an absolute majority in German elections? I’m sure it is. But it’s still very bad news for the Greeks, who now have their perhaps last chance to throw out the international financial system and decide their own fate, before most of their valuables have been sold off to foreign interests. Greece is where democracy started, and the way things are going, it may be where it will end as well.
Read more...OWS’s Rolling Jubilee Has Yet to Explain What They’ve Done With $590,000 Despite Promises of “Full Transparency”
On Rolling Jubilee’s failure to live up to its plan of action and promises of transparency, and how they reacted when we asked them some pointed questions about that.
Read more...How to Put a Stop to Sweatshop Abuse
Yves here. Notice how American retailers for the most part continue to put profit over lives.
Read more...Budget Brinksmanship is Baaack!
Here we go again. Washington, and to a lesser degree, Mr. Market are all a twitter over the display of macho in the latest round of the Team Dem versus Team Republican professional wrestling bout budget battle.
Read more...Why Didn’t OWS Transform Into a Political Movement?
Yves here. I’ve not weighed in on the second anniversary of the start of the Occupy Wall Street anniversary because, truth be told, the movement has gone so local and has so many different faces that I’m not certain it’s possible to make good generalizations without doing a lot of investigation.
This short interview seeks to address one of the expectations for OWS, that it become a political force, and why it was never met
Read more...Egypt for Sale
Yves here. This piece provides an intriguing analysis and a lot of detail to support its thesis that Egypt’s inability to generate the income needed to make payments on IMF loans means the country is likely to have its assets stripped.
Read more...RJ Eskow: 11 Questions to Ask Libertarians to See if They Are Hypocrites
Yves here. It is all too easy to goad libertarians, since their ideas are internally conflicted and they get prickly when you point out the flaws in their dogma.
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