Lynn Parramore: Guess What? Fewer Americans Call Themselves Economic Conservatives
New Gallup polls shows that economic conservatism is down, social liberalism is up.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
Sasha Breger: How Big Finance is Eating the World’s Lunch Agricultural Wealth
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...Joe Firestone: Sorry Folks, Austerity’s Not Dead Yet!
By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He has taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
Read more...More Market State In Action: Consumers Treated Differently Under the Law Than Businesses
You thought corporate personhood was a bad thing? Think twice. You should be so lucky as to be a corporate person. They don’t just get treated like you and me, they are increasingly being treated better than you and me.
Read more...Barbara Parramore Speaks About Her Arrest in “Moral Monday Protests” Against Republican Railroading of Extreme Right-Wing Agenda in North Carolina
Yves here. NC intern Jessica Ferrer interviewed 80 year old Barbara Parramore, who was one of 57 arrested in North Carolina on May 20 as part of what has become weekly protests at the state General Assembly called “Moral Mondays”.
Read more...Nathan Tankus: New York City Public Libraries Attack Alert – Privatizing Prized Locations and Cutting Budget by 35%
By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Now that pubic libraries have “done their jobs” (in FIRE sector terms) they can do one more thing for finance and real estate: be killed for private sector fun and profit.
Read more...Is Apple Risking Its Brand Overseas With Its Tax Gimmicks?
For those immune to Apple lust or otherwise unwilling to cut the Cupertino giant slack just because it has sleek products and cool stores, a new article by tax maven Lee Sheppard at Forbes gives a layperson-friendly overview of how Apple managed to keep $44 billion of revenues out of the hands of the tax men.
Read more...Lynn Parramore: ‘Greed Is Good’ – Top 7 Most Piggish Commencement Speeches
Get out the barf bag! Here a few choice orations from some of the world’s most illustrious jerks.
Read more...Your Humble Blogger Appears on RT’s Truthseeker
We discuss how outsourcing and offshoring are more about transferring income from low-level workers to middle and senior level managers than cost savings.
Read more...Coming Corporate Control of Medicine Will Throw Patients Under the Bus
In the US, business freedom means the God-given right to exploit the vulnerability of the public. The example slouching into view is more corporate control over the practice of medicine. And based on the previews, it will make the horrors falsely attributed to socialized medicine look pale.
Read more...Wall Street Hiring More Ex-Government Prostitutes Officials to Assure it Gets its Way
The infamous James Carville quote, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find,” seems more applicable to official Washington than the much-maligned Paula Jones.
Read more...Wolf Richter: When Flight Safety Gets Outsourced To China
Aircraft maintenance was a highly paid blue-collar job that required education, training, manual skills, and brains. It was one of the perfect American middle-class jobs with generous healthcare, retirement, and vacation benefits; and free flights! They were working for icons like Delta, American Airlines, Continental, TWA, or Pan Am. Icons indeed!
Read more...Are Flagging Productivity Gains a Sign of a Played-Out Economy?
Bloomberg flagged that productivity gains in the US are tepid, and that’s a sign of economic weakness:
Read more...Japanese Movement Against TPP Growing
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
This Real News Network video on resistance to the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Japan (one of our military protectorates) explains some implications of TPP for health care policy, but also gives a glimpse of how our post-national global elites would like the nature of the State to change. Of course, the TPP negotiations are secret, which cannot but give the impression that TPP’s advantages are not likely to be readily apparent to the citizens who putatively give sovereign states their legitimacy. So, although US discussions have focused mainly on content and intellectual property issues, it would seem that the powers that be have bigger fish to fry.
Read more...Obama’s Patronage System: Pritzker Nomination for Commerce Department, Limp-Wristed Dodd Frank
The consternation at the not-exactly-a-surprise nomination of billionaire Penny Pritzker to be Commerce Secretary, is sadly much less than is warranted. That suggests that the Forbes 400 member will survive her confirmation hearings. And in a telling bit of synchronicity, last week some fauxgressives set about amplifying an article in the Nation that big bank lobbying efforts were the reason Dodd Frank was amounting to very little. As we’ll discuss, both reflect how much Obama supports the interests of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate).
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