Reader craazyman asked for mathematician and sometimes guest writer Andrew Dittmer to explain what is going on in Europe. Unfortunately, Andrew has many projects and Europe is rather large and complicated to sort out right now. Nevertheless, he did decide to help by translating some lead editorials from the Corriere della Sera to shed light on the reaction of the elite media to the recent elections.
Read more...It’s unlikely that the destabilizing of the political calculus in Europe resulting from impressive showing of anti-austerity candidates in Italy will end prettily or nicely. However, Europe had already put itself in the position of having only bad choices. So the question is who suffers, and the public in periphery countries are starting to rebel against being broken on the rack while Eurocrats and pampered German and French bankers feel no pain.
Read more...The fact of this talk is telling in and of itself: that a mainstream commentator would devote an entire segment to the idea that capitalism isn’t working. While that idea may seem obvious to many NC readers, it was supposed to remain relegated to the sphere of deviance (see Daniel Hallin’s spheres of discourse for more detail).
Read more...The game of chicken both the Republicans and Democrats are playing with the sequester and the budget/deficit talks is striking. One of the truly bizarre elements is that neither side is signaling the faintest interest in dealmaking of any kind. As I indicated the week before last, the lack of any sense of urgency was obvious: Congress had a holiday last week, and there were no real negotiations or even an exchange of proposals, virtually guaranteeing the sequester would take place as scheduled.
Read more...By Michael Hoexter, a policy analyst and marketing consultant on green issues, climate change, clean and renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
There is no unified theory in our popular understanding of value: there are the market values of goods and then there are our “values” which we consider to be some of the most personal and even sacred aspects of ourselves. In practice, these beliefs and ideology are filtered through a process by which powerful and wealthy interest groups influence and shape the behavior of lawmakers.
Read more...The media increasingly appears to define the state of the economy based on corporate bottom lines and the experience of the upper echelon, reflected in the way it glosses over the anxiety and distress outside the top 1% of the population.
Read more...With public companies fixated on quarterly profits, which results in underinvestment and treatment of employees as disposables, companies who (gasp) pursue a long-term strategy and invest in their workforce should have a real competitive advantage. Thus worked owned enterprises aren’t simply a way to contend with the program to disempower labor; it’s also a way to take advantage of the inefficiencies of rentier capitalism.
Read more...One of the canards libertarians like to sell is that the state has a monopoly on violence.
Read more...I’m obviously removed from the action, but I’m surprised at the complacency in DC and in the markets over the fact that the sequester is a comin’ soon. Next week Congress is out of session, and the media messaging from both sides at this point lacks the sense of urgency (in particular, front page reports of intense pow-wows) that I’d expect if a deal were to be done by the sequester deadline of early March.
So I have these questions for the NC commentariat:
Read more...Yes, sports fans, you read that headline correctly. The top 1% has captured all of the income gains since 2009 and then some, roaring ahead while the rest of the population slipped behind.
Read more...The New York Times comes in on the side of the whining rich in a piece titled, “Two-Tax Rise Tests Wealthy in California.”
Read more...Please download and enjoy this ebook, which is a joint project of Alternet and Econ4, an organization of heterodox economists promoting social change.
Read more...Dystopian technology fantasies are flooding the media, to the delight of the 1 percent.
Read more...Nathan Tankus found this archival video (you are going to get a gas out of the production values…and be patient with the set up, it takes a few minutes for the video to get going).
Read more...A new paper by Mark Weisbrot and Helene Jorgensen of CEPR have managed to unearth a dirty little secret: the IMF doesn’t just prescribe broadly similar policies in its Article IV consultations, it looks like its hands out the same medicine. We’ve used the metaphor of breaking countries on the rack, but cutting them to fit a Procrustean bed might be more apt.
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