Recession and Austerity Good for the Rich
This Real News Network interview with James Henry gives yet another vantage on our have versus have-not economy.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
Medical Journal Editorial Blasts Obamacare for Increasing Underinsurance
During the protracted Congressional fight over the Affordable Care Act, its supporters kept stressing the importance of extending coverage to tens of millions of uninsured. But some observers, including your humble blogger, warned that having overpriced insurance that didn’t cover much was a headfake, not real progress.
Physicians for a National Health Care Program has gotten access to an editorial approved for publication next week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine titled Life or Debt. It which takes aim at the lousy job Obamacare does for the group it was billed as benefitting, the un- and underinsured.
Read more...Inequality, Technical Change and the “Hunger for Surplus Value”
By Alejandro Nadal, Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies of El Colegio de Mexico. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
There is (almost) no quarrel about the fact that inequality has increased during the past three or four decades. One of the consequences of this is the growth of unsustainable indebtedness of households in order to maintain aggregate demand, a problem intimately related to the global financial crisis and the so-called Great Recession.
So it is critically important to understand the causes of this rising inequality.
Read more...If Only Europe Could Sell Unemployment
By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2013/01/imf-admits-more-mistakes/“>MacroBusiness.
Another day, another round of atrocious data out of the Eurozone:
Read more...The Inflation Dog Didn’t Bark, But What About the Others?
By Eric Yeldan, Professor of Economics and Dean at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences Yasar University. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
The IMF released the April edition of its World Economic Outlook (WEO). One of the key analytical chapters (Chapter 3) of the Report is titled “The Dog that Didn’t Bark: Has Inflation Been Muzzled, or Was It Just Sleeping?” Its main argument (or rather sort of a mystery that needs to be resolved, in the words of its authors) is that over the course of the previous crisis episodes we used to witness severe increases in unemployment along with a simultaneous fall in inflation. Yet, during the current great recession there has been very little movement in inflation, while unemployment rates soared almost everywhere; —hence the metaphor: inflation (the dog…) does not respond (… bark). And the alleged mystery is but why?
The WEO suggests two candidates for explaining the mystery. Perhaps instead of looking for dogs, they should stop ignoring the elephant in the room.
Read more...Fierce Anti Bank Music Video by Animal Kingdom (NSFW)
Lambert and other readers old enough to remember the 1960s, when protest ballads of various sorts were an important part of both the civil rights movement and the opposition to the war in Vietnam, have wondered at the absence of anti-bank, anti-autocratic songs.
Below is one with a suitably pointed video taking aim squarely at predatory financiers.
Read more...The Hissing Sound of Air Leaving the Economy
There’s a remarkable amount of optimism in the US financial media given the underlying health of the economy. Of course, the sort of short term investors that have come to dominate securities trading had been in a “risk on/risk off” pattern for a protracted period before commodities weakness and the remarkable run of the Nikkei has led to some renewed focus on relative values of various macro plays. But the markets are still dominated by an underlying faith in the willingness of central bankers to protect the backs of investors and limit any downside (while, ironically, many of these same investors howl about ZIRP and QE, which were clearly intended to goose the value of financial assets and real estate, with the hope that would lead to more consumer spending).
And why shouldn’t the professional investors (as opposed to widows and orphans who can no longer rely on low risk bond investments to produce adequate income) be pleased as punch?
Read more...Jeffrey Sachs Calls Out Wall Street Criminality and Pathological Greed
One of the things that Matt Stoller has stressed that the possibility of reform is remote until breaks within the elites take place.
Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia professor and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, is a controversial figure for his neoliberal stance on macroeconomics and his role in promoting the use of “shock therapy” in emerging economies. But it is also important to recognize that criticism from a connected, respected insider has more significance than that of someone like Bill Black, who has made a career of taking on bank fraud but has never reached a top policy-making level.
This talk is blistering at several points.
Read more...Obama: The Buckraking Starts Here
It has become depressingly normal to hear of senior Administration officials going immediately for the golden ring when they leave public service. But for every Mary Shapiro joining Promontory and Lanny Breuer returning to Covington & Burling for $4 million a year, there are even more operatives at similar or lower levels who make a very juicy return on their association with Obama but don’t get the same level of attention in the mainstream media.
Norm Scheiber, in a must-read article in The New Republic, “Get Rich or Deny Trying:
How to make millions off Obama,” chronicles how this process works. It’s even uglier than you might imagine.
Joe Stiglitz Blasts Our Wealthy-Coddling Tax System for Increasing the Returns on Rent-Seeking
It’s a sign of how well relentless propagandizing works that Joe Stiglitz has to devote a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times to debunking the idea that our income tax system, whose salient characteristic is low tax burdens for the rich, is good for anyone other than the rich.
Read more...Europe’s Stark Choice: Resignation or Revolution
Contributed by Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog, Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media.
Catalonia’s riot police unleashed the untamed fury of the state upon the protestors and cleared Barcelona’s Plaza Catalunya of all occupants. A dense ring of shell-shocked people gathered around the square. I was one of them. A child riding on his father’s shoulders held up a sign: “No soy anti sistema, el sistema es anti yo,” it said (I’m not anti-system; the system is anti-me).
Read more...Troika Demands Another €6 Billion from Cyprus, Making “Rescue” Bigger Than GDP
Nothing like dramatic proof that austerity is a failure
Read more...Michael Hudson on Obama’s “Catfood” Social Security Reform
Michael Hudson, in a Real News Network interview, puts paid some of the key ideas used to sell catfood futures, um, Social Security and Medicare cuts, such as if we don’t Do Something, interest on government bonds will eat the economy. He also gives a good explanation of what “chained CPI” is really all about.
Read more...Obama Moves Forward with Cutting Social Security and Medicare as We Lecture Europe Otherwise
It must be really hard to be an Obama defender these days, at least if you are not on a big corporate payroll.
Read more...BBC on Child Poverty in the US
One of the ongoing frustrations in being (of necessity) a heavy consumer of what passes for media in the US is how insistent and disconnected the official narrative is with conditions on the ground. This BBC documentary gives a much-needed counterpoint.
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