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I'm not an economist, and I'm not born of a particular economic school that I've bet my life's work on, so I have observed the global economic events of the past five years with a fairly open mind. I've listened to Keynesians like Paul Krugman argue that the way to fix the mess is to open the government spending spigot and invest like crazy. And I've listened to Austerians like Niall Ferguson argue that the way to fix the mess is to cut spending radically , balance government budgets, and unleash the private sector.
Ron Paul Article
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WhoShotJR comments on Obama signs NDAA as-is, he loses my vote
Editorialize the titles of your link submissions or they may be removed. Your headline should match the article's headline as closely as possible, to avoid misrepresenting the gist or facts of the article. Note, the "no editorializing" rule does not apply to self-posts. For those, standard guidelines of reddiquette apply.
yrugay comments on Obama signs NDAA as-is, he loses my vote
Chris Shore's "Building Europe" is an innovative study of the European Union, and should be taken seriously. Shore is one of the first to jump in the post-EMU debate: now that Europe has almost completed Economic Union, what are the expectations, challenges, and impossibilities with regard to further integration? Shore offers a systematic discussion of the role of 'culture' in the European Union. How has a European identity been created, or not!, among both citizens and civil servants in Brussels? Shore turns out to be quite critical in the end.
Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (9780415180153): Cris Shore: Books
Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.
Jihad vs. McWorld - Magazine - The Atlantic
Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-first Century (Globalization) (9780742555877): Manfred B. Steger: Books
PRAISE FOR EARLIER EDITIONS This is the best short book on the phenomenon of globalization. Clear, concise, and well-organized..... (Stephen Manning ) PRAISE FOR EARLIER EDITIONS This is an effective and valuable contribution to the examination of contemporary globalization and intellectual underpinnings..... ( Political Studies )
Part of the reason economic policymakers have failed to properly address the poor economy is because the nation’s news media has not properly covered the unemployment crisis. For example, at the beginning of August, when Washington, DC was debating the debt ceiling crisis, the national debt dominated the airwaves . While it was appropriate for the media then to be covering the deficit due to the debt ceiling debate at the time, there was a stunning lack of coverage of the jobs crisis. A ThinkProgress review of the media coverage of the last week of July found that the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, and “unemployed” was only mentioned 75 times:
Thanks to the 99 Percent Movement, Media Finally Covering Jobs Crisis and Marginalizing Deficit Hysteria | Truthout
As the medical condition of Marine Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen appears to have improved , he is becoming the Neda Agha-Soltan - the martyr of the Iranian Green Revolution - of the "Occupy" struggle for economic justice. What occurred this week in Oakland - including the wounding of Olsen - shouldn't have happened. In June of 2004, the Oakland Police Department reached an agreement to refrain from using the kind of bloody and militarized tactics that they employed earlier this week. According to a November 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article : Oakland police will no longer indiscriminately use wooden or rubber bullets, Taser stun guns, pepper spray and motorcycles to break up crowds, under an agreement announced Friday.... The new policy settles part of a federal class-action lawsuit filed by 52 people who claimed their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly were violated as they targeted two shipping companies with contracts tied to the war in Iraq.
Oakland Police Violated 2004 Agreement Limiting Use of Militarized Weapons to Disperse Crowds | BuzzFlash.org
What does it mean to stop cooperating with the banks? Some activists, organizers, and technologists think the answer might be mass refusal to pay debts. In the gorgeous, purple-and-green-lit Lower East Side headquarters of the Angel Orensanz Foundation, nearly 300 techies, activists and thinkers gathered, shouting out ideas for social justice-minded Web projects that they would break into small groups to attempt to hash out in a day. A man in a plaid shirt stood up and told the moderator and the crowd, “I want to create a tool for organizing debt strikes.” The man was Thomas Gokey, an artist and adjunct professor at Syracuse University, and his idea wound up one of the four “winners” at ContactCon , a conference hosted by Douglas Rushkoff that urged people to think of solutions to the problem of the corporate-controlled Internet—and by extension, the world.
Debtor's Revolution: Are Debt Strikes Another Possible Tactic in the Fight Against the Big Banks? | | AlterNet
Income Inequality Is Hobbling the Middle Class
October 25, 2011 I ncome inequality in the U.S. has been rising for the last several decades, and with it concern about the consequences. For example, to what extent does the large flow of income into the hands of financial executives give them the power to influence Congress through campaign donations? How does this have an impact on the willingness of legislators to impose regulations that would stabilize the financial system but inhibit the ability of the financial industry to make the huge profits that fund political campaigns?
Take the flat tax plan of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. For all his talk about how it would make filing easier — that is dubious — what it would really do is give high-income Americans a big tax break, while almost everyone else could expect relatively modest tax savings or none at all. In his plan, taxpayers could choose to stick with the current system or use the flat tax, under which wages and salary would be taxed at 20 percent, versus a current top rate of 35 percent for the affluent. Investment income and multimillion-dollar estates would be untaxed, versus a current top rate of 15 percent on most investments and 35 percent on estates.
Flat Taxes and Angry Voters - NYTimes.com
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PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org) is the non-profit hypothetical web site that was just described on Reddit five hours ago for crowdsourcing problems and solutions : politics
I run Think Computer Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with no political affiliation. My friends and I have been working on the exact same idea that was just described on Reddit five hours ago here: Lawrence Lessig has already signed up. We need your help, too, though. Spread the word and post the issues that matter to you.This weekend I read a post titled " Dear Congress: It Is No Longer OK To Not Know How the Internet Works ." The author, Joshua Kopstein, is right: it's not ok to not know about something before legislating or regulating it. The confessions by members of Congress that they are " not nerds " is frustrating at best because these guys, the guys that are regulating the Internet can't tell a server from a waiter. And so a post is born, sympathetically climbing the charts at Reddit and HackerNews, telling Congress to get a clue. But the problem is that that post won't do any good. Few if any members of Congress will read it, and those that might certainly won't read it and decide that it's time for them to brush up on understanding how the Internet works as well as a professional that works on the Internet.
Information Diet | Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works
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