Bill Moyers Journal: Bill Moyers talks with Thomas Frank: Web Exclusive But this was the subject of my 2000 book, ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, which discussed NAFTA and the Telecommunications Act at some length. THE WRECKING CREW is an effort to explain the particular species of corruption we see in Washington today. Clinton's contributions here were not insignificant, but they were more passive than active. His celebration of outsourcing set up the government-for-profit of the Bush era. His war on federal wages ensured that government would remain an unattractive career option, especially when compared to what's offered by the contractors who are our de facto government today. His failure even to try to reverse certain initiatives of the Reagan years allowed them to harden into permanent fixtures of the Washington scene. There are other forms of corruption that are particular to liberalism, and that occur more naturally among Democrats. As for Washington's wealth, it is uniquely a phenomenon of the era of privatization and outsourcing, not of liberalism. Yes. No.
History Net: Where History Comes Alive - World & US History Online Mac Rumors: Apple Mac iOS Rumors and News You Care About WEB OF DEBT BLOG | ARTICLES IN THE NEWS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . COMMENTS, FEEDBACK, IDEAS Cult of Mac | Breaking news for Apple fans Why Do Banks Get Away With Murder? For five long and very strange years, death haunted tiny Dryden, NY, a town near the Finger Lakes where a plague of car accidents, suicides, and even grisly murders involving two popular cheerleaders just kept mounting up. At the end of Fargo, Frances McDormand’s police chief, Marge Gunderson, captures the psycho played by Peter Stormare. He’s in the backseat of her police cruiser and she talks to him as she drives. We see that she cannot fathom the evil she’s just seen. “And here ya are,” she says, “and it’s a beautiful day. I am not surprised by violence or horror but still sometimes find myself struck, not unlike Marge, in a kind of a daze, unable to wrap my head around it. Why do horrible things happen? In the meantime, dig into “The Cheerleaders.” The Cheerleaders by E. Welcome to Dryden. If you live in Dryden, the kids from Ithaca, that cradle of metropolitan sophistication 15 miles away, will say you live in a “cow town.” In the summer of ’96, many bonfires are built. “What?”
Nathan Tankus: Krugman von Hayek By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Fields Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus Mainstream economic discussions employ a false dichotomy. Let us begin with what they agree on: A central bank that sets a short term interest rate In contrast with monetarists of many stripes, both camps argue that the short term interest rate (the “Fed funds” rate in the United States) is set by the central bank (In the U.S., the Federal Reserve). Money is an endogenous, not an exogenous variable It follows from the argument that central banks set a short term interest rate that they control the price of settlement balances (sometimes called “reserves” ) and not their quantity. Krugman on the other hand, is often less clear. This again is contrary to monetarist dogma (that article was in fact a response to an attack from Milton Friedman’s lesser known – but still prominent – co-author Anna Schwartz.
Financial Sector Thinks It’s About Ready To Ruin World Again NEW YORK—Claiming that enough time had surely passed since they last caused a global economic meltdown, top executives from the U.S. financial sector told reporters Monday that they are just about ready to completely destroy the world again. Representatives from all major banking and investment institutions cited recent increases in consumer spending, rebounding home prices, and a stabilizing unemployment rate as confirmation that the time had once again come to inflict another round of catastrophic financial losses on individuals and businesses worldwide. “It’s been about five or six years since we last crippled every major market on the planet, so it seems like the time is right for us to get back out there and start ruining the lives of billions of people again,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. “People are beginning to feel at ease spending money and investing in their futures again,” Blankfein continued.
Steve Keen's Debtwatch I’ve attended two conferences in two days where both the power and the impotence of the European Central Bank (EBC) have been on vivid display. Its political power is considerable, both in form and in substance. At both seminars, the ECB speaker—ECB Board member Peter Praet at the first, and ECB President Mario Draghi at the second—spoke first, and then left. In form, the ECB has no need to defend its policies because it is unimpeachable in its execution of them. In substance, it does not even considering engaging with its subjects—I use the word deliberately—in open and robust discussion. The position of the economy in the environment is a shared blindspot in economics: no existing school handles the topic well, and yet this is the key issue we need to understand. Click here for the Powerpoint slides. Permanent link to this post (73 words, estimated 18 secs reading time) Click here to download the Powerpoint slides.
Susan George (political scientist) Susan George (born June 29, 1934) is a well-known Franco-American political and social scientist, activist and writer on global social justice, Third World poverty, underdevelopment and debt. She is a fellow and president of the board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She is a fierce critic of the present policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (IBRD) and what she calls their 'maldevelopment model'. She similarly criticizes the structural reform policies of the Washington Consensus on Third World development. She is of U.S. birth but now resides in France, and has dual citizenship since 1994. After attending a public, co-educational primary school, she went on to enroll at all-girls private preparatory academy. George's father encouraged all her interests, including those outside the realm of traditional femininity, such as science and baseball. As a young student, George was a voracious reader and always ranked first in her class.
Calculated Risk The Physics of Finance PERI: Home With New Internet and Cell Phone Rules, Federal Communications Commission Approves Mass Sell-off of Public Airwaves This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about media consolidation, I wanted to go to a new issue. This story might not have made the front page of your local newspaper, but the FCC’s actions will likely affect the lives of everyone in this country that uses the Internet and mobile phones. To explain what the FCC is doing, Craig Aaron is still with us in Chicago, communications director of Free Press. We’re going to start with Craig Aaron. CRAIG AARON: What happened this week at the FCC, Amy, is that the commission really squandered a historic opportunity to bring the benefits of broadband, of high-speed Internet access to all Americans. AMY GOODMAN: Wally Bowen, can you explain the practical application of this in the kind of work that you do? WALLY BOWEN: Yes. The problem is, is that this unlicensed spectrum that we use will not penetrate buildings, it will not bend around mountain ridges. AMY GOODMAN: Craig, what do you think about that?