If you’ve been following the story of the official response to Occupy Wall Street, it was apparent that the 17 city paramilitary crackdown was coordinated; it came out later that the Department of Homeland Security was the nexus of that operation. The deep FBI involvement is a new and ugly addition to this picture.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly posted with New Economic Perspectives
A little bit of economics can be a truly terrible thing, for the introductory classes in micro and macro-economics are the most dogmatic and myth-filled part of the neo-liberal curriculum. Dogmas that have been falsified for 75 years (such as austerity) are taught as revealed truth. The poor indoctrinated student is then launched into the world “knowing” that austerity is the answer and that mass unemployment and prolonged recessions are small prices to be paid (by others) to achieve the holy grail of a balanced budget. Students are taught that national budgets are really just like household budgets. These dogmas are not simply false, they are self-destructive and cruel. Neo-liberal economics is so bad and has gone downhill at such a rapid rate that it now worships the economic analog to bleeding patients – austerity – as a response to a Great Recession. Millions of people are indoctrinated annually into believing this long-falsified nonsense, and that includes people who consider themselves progressives.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a senior editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
Fear gripped Middle Earth. The little people looked nervously toward the horizon, wondering if their few remaining possessions would be snatched away by marauding bands of goblins and orcs.
Read more...As readers may recall, we expressed serious reservations about the tax consequences of a program launched by Strike Debt, an Occupy Wall Street working group, to buy distressed consumer debt from debt collectors and forgive it. These concerns have been confirmed by a top tax expert, Lee Sheppard. Sheppard not only describes how the scheme has the potential to harm the borrowers that Strike Debt wants to help, but also points out how their initiative runs afoul of IRS rules for not for profits.
Read more...This Real News Network segment covers an important and not well recognized bit of American history: how a hugely popular, progressive vice president who would otherwise have become president was sidelined by the Democratic party machinery.
Read more...By Thomas Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Paul Jorgensen,s Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Texas and Jie Chen, University Statistician at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Cross posted from Alternet
Analysts of American elections routinely confuse the voice of the people with the sound of money talking.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
In July 2011, President Obama and Speaker Boehner reached an agreement in principle on a deal crafted to inflict $4 trillion in austerity by raising taxes modestly, slashing social spending, and beginning to unravel the safety net. The deal would have been a disaster for America. Unemployment was 9.1%. The deal would have thrown us back into a recession and caused unemployment to surge. Recessions and increased unemployment cause tax revenues to fall and increase demand for social services (e.g., for unemployment compensation) – they produce large deficits. Austerity kills jobs and frequently increases deficits. The Eurozone is the latest demonstration of this fact.
We should, therefore, all be celebrating the failure of the July 2011 austerity deal.
Read more...This post focuses on the role of neoliberal ideology in promoting a system of expropriating property and economic rights from ordinary people.
Read more...NC readers can find some of the background on Nikki Turner’s story here. 18 months later, five years after her own business was destroyed, and a full decade after the very beginning of the HBOS fraud story, she is still waiting for the police investigation to lead to a prosecution. Mrs Turner’s open letter was […]
Read more...I had fun in this conversation with conservative Bruce Bartlett, even though he stole some of my best lines (like Obama not being a liberal). Bartlett is in exile from the Republican party for saying things like Keynesian deficits stimulate the economy (after doing research and finding he couldn’t debunk it based on data) and unions help promote higher wages.
Read more...Paul Krugman is troubled by this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is looking for explanations.
Read more...By Hugh, who is a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at Corrente.
I suspect that the Bureau of Labor Statistics report covering November 2012 will be heralded as a solid report, but as usual there are a lot of negatives behind the headline numbers. Seasonally adjusted, 146,000 jobs were added to the economy and the unemployment rate dropped two-tenths of a percent to 7.7%. For those of you who are conspiratorially minded, after upward revisions in the months preceding the election, last month’s jobs number was cut by 33,000 and September’s 16,000.
Read more...Econ4, which is a group of reform minded economists (that may sound like an oxymoron but it isn’t) is presenting a series of videos on major topics where it believes our policies are seriously out of whack. Their latest release is on housing and foreclosures. Your humble blogger is a participant.
Read more...Our states and localities are cannibalizing one another as they concoct targeted tax breaks which they use to lure corporations from their neighbors.
Read more...Citi is a particularly blatant example of a way of operating that has become endemic in American business: when things get tough, throw as many employees as possible under the bus, and use that to maintain or even increase the pay of the top echelon.
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