Colleges as Merchants of Debt
Student loan debt slavery is even worse than you probably thought.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
Yes Lab Gives US Trade Negotiators “Corporate Power Tool” Award
The Yes Lab is a is brainstorming/training effort associated with the Yes Men to help activists subject people in positions of influence to well deserved ridicule. Aquifer highlighted their latest project, which was infiltrating an award ceremony for a trade group in Dallas and bestowing their own prize.
Read more...Bill Black: New York Times Reporters Embrace the Berlin Consensus and Ignore Krugman and Economics
Yves here. Black does yeoman’s work in describing the bias in the New York Times’ Eurocrisis reporting
Read more...What Can Americans Learn from the Eurocrisis
At the risk of looking like NC has become the “all Michael Hudson, all the time” channel, we’re featuring his latest talk with Real News Network. He discusses how and why candidates make promises to ordinary people that they promptly repudiate when they assume office.
Read more...Dan Kervick: The Political Economy of Citadella
Yves here. Readers seem to like Kervick’s storytelling format, and he seemed to take NC readers’ suggestion to heart regarding making it a bit more compact next time.
By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
Imagine a world and a society in which 500 people own everything – absolutely everything.
Read more...The Bankruptcy “Reforms” of 2005: Creation of a New Debtor’s Prison?
An article by law professor Linda Coco, “Debtor’s Prison in the Neoliberal State: ‘Debtfare’ and the Cultural Logics of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005,” (hat tip Michael Hudson) is a an informative, if disheartening, overview of the significance of the bankruptcy law reforms implemented in 2005.
One might cynically observe that after 25 years of making it easier for consumers to borrow and encouraging them to load up, banks realized that they might have too much of a good thing and realized they needed to improve their ability to extract payments from the credit junkies they had created.
Read more...How did Quebec Students Mobilize Hundreds of Thousands for Strike?
It’s telling that the fact that hundreds of thousands of people in Quebec have been striking for over two months has gone virtually unreported in the US.
Read more...Lynn Parramore: Why the Rich Are Sending Pets on a Diamond-Studded Trip to the Afterlife
I live in Manhattan, where signs of the New Gilded Age scream from the windows of deluxe pet spas and boutiques hawking crystal-studded dog collars. The biggest emerging trend of all? That would be giving dead pets the star treatment.
Read more...David Graeber: New Police Strategy in New York – Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protestors
By David Graeber, a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and an author and activist currently based in New York
A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
Read more...Adam Davidson Parrots Disinformation as He Extols Rule by the Top 0.1%
Adam Davidson is moving up in the world. He has gone from fellating the 1% to the top 0.1%.
Read more...New York Times Yet Again Demonstrates Its Fealty to the 1%
I got a message from a regular reader:
Read more...Big Employers Extorting States, Pocketing Employee Income Tax Withholding
Wonder why states are broke? It isn’t just the global financial crisis induced knock-on effects of a plunge in tax receipts and a rise in social safety net payments. Nor is it just pension fund time bombs (note that despite the press hysteria, the problem is unmanageable only in a comparatively small number of states, with New Jersey way out in front, thanks to 15 years of the state stealing from the workers’ kitty, plus a decision to take big risk at exactly the wrong moment, in 2007, which resulted in large losses). A significant unrecognized culprit is companies managing to divert tax revenue from stressed states to their coffers.
Read more...Occupy Wall Street Sues New York City, JP Morgan #OWS
One of the continuing and largely unrecognized aspects of the ongoing media coverage of Occupy Wall Street is that police brutality and lesser abuses have been airbrushed out.
Read more...Jamie Galbraith on Changes in Finance as the Driver of Inequality
I’m working my way around to the INET talks that I missed, and this one by Jamie Galbraith is very much worth viewing. It takes a while to build up steam, so be patient.
Galbraith has marshaled a great deal of cross country data over time, and shows how changes in equality happened in a very large number of economies in parallel. He explains, persuasively, that the most plausible culprit is changes in the financial regime.
Read more...The Trust Deficit
This weekend, the National Journal published, “In Nothing We Trust,” using Muncie, Indiana to illustrate the distrust that is eating away at the American social fabric.
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