News reports tell us that more than 500 people have now died and more than 2,500 were injured in Savar, Bangladesh, while the toll in West, Texas stands at 15 dead and over 200 injured. Behind these two disasters is a common thread of greed - and a common need for unionized resistance.
Since the austerity crowd won't own up to a mistake, I will: I engaged in a kind of thought experiment last week, after we first learned that austerity economics is partly based on a spreadsheet error. I wondered, What if you were a government leader who sincerely believed those figures, or an economist who made the mistake of a lifetime? My empathy was misplaced. This discovery hasn't changed government policy one bit—at least not yet. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff seem surprisingly unremorseful. And austerity's paid pitchmen are still hawking their wares.
Corporate interests and their elected representatives have created a world of illusion in order to resist paying a decent wage to working Americans. They’d have us believe that minimum-wage workers are teens from ’50s TV sitcoms working down at the local malt shoppe.
The pro-corporate, anti-majority political class is sustaining itself with a lot of self-serving myths these days. Guess you need to do that when you’re dismantling the social contract. In the closed society that is Insider Washington, rites and mythologies are used to promote the otherwise-indefensible: the cruel irrationality of Austerity Economics.
Whom the gods would destroy, the old saying says, they first make mad. And there’s no quicker way to become completely untethered than to read economic reports, including the latest one from the Congressional Budget Office, and then watch the political debate go on as if reality didn’t even exist.
The quote of the day comes from Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who suggested to NPR that Obamacare is a “fascist” program. Other CEOs are still insisting the health bill’s too “socialist,” as Mackey has in the past.
By all accounts Aaron Swartz was brilliant, gifted, idealistic ... and fragile. Too bad he wasn’t “too big to fail.” I never met Aaron, but I know a lot of people who knew him well. (We did “converse” as members of the same online discussion group.) I learned about Aaron’s suicide at the age of 26 the same way millions of other people did: on the Internet whose freedom he served with such dedication and brilliance.
The anti-Social Security propagandists should’ve thought this one through a little more carefully: On the same day that Goldman Sach’s CEO issued his “balanced” demand for Social Security and Medicare cuts, the Wall Street-funded group called “Third Way” published the results of a poll which precisely reflected the wishes of Goldman Sach’s CEO.
Columbus is honored as an adventurer In the European-created nations of the New World. He’s seen a little differently by those whose ancestors were enslaved by Europeans, or who arrived in chain.
Forget the “Buffett rule.” It’s not enough. What’s more, “letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the rich” isn’t enough either - although it might get us halfway there.
Economic issues make some people’s eyes glaze over, so we’ll put this plainly: Today’s minimum wage is epic in its injustice and Dickensian in its cruelty. It’s a shame that Dickens himself isn’t here to write about it.
It was a dream come true for the austerity crowd when Great Britain’s conservative/“centrist” coalition government took power in 2010. And for commentators like Slate’sAnne Appelbaum it was that kind of dream. Her celebratory column reflected the orgiastic glee with which the new government’s austerity plans were greeted, reveling in admiring (yes, admiring) phrases like these:
In the ongoing scandal about Barclays’ employees tampering with the “LIBOR,” or London interbank lending rate - which is to say, bank fraud - The Economist offers this brilliant cover. It’s not just the word “banksters,” or the fact that it shows bank executives dressed like the guys in Reservoir Dogs.
Here’s a headline we’re tempted to write - or rather, one that we would be tempted to write if we weren’t so nice, or so dedicated to avoiding oversimplification: “Climate-Change Deniers Struck by Climate Change in Texas Tornado Outbreak.”
These words are being written from the veranda of a small house in an African valley, in the hour just before dawn. In the past week I’ve met people from Pakistan, Great Britain, Iraq, Australia, New Zealand and several other countries, as well as South Africans from all backgrounds. And they’ve all asked me the same thing: What’s going to happen with the Occupy movement?
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently said that he felt safer in Lebanon than he did when Occupy marched past his house. If nothing else, it proves that Wall Street bankers haven’t gotten any better at risk management—the art of knowing where danger lies and avoiding it—than they were when their bad bets crashed the economy and caused the Great Recession.
I hate what I’ve learned about Apple’s outsourcing to China. I hate hearing Professor William Black explain why he believes that Steve Jobs, who I admired very much in some ways, must have ignored repeated reports that employees were being cheated and endangered.
Despite its many failures, “austerity economics” keeps remaking—and unmaking—the global economy. The only disagreement at this weekend’s Republican debate was over which candidate would push austerity more aggressively. And austerity dominated the political agenda last year—“Deficit Commission,” anyone?—until Occupy came along.
The name of the deceased was “Austerity Economics,” and it was first glimpsed in a 1921 paper by conservative economist Frank Wright. Austerity died of natural causes brought on by prolonged exposure to reality. But in the nation’s capital, dead things still rule the night.
Fire all the janitors and make poor kids clean their schools? Zap Korea with an airborne superlaser that’s never worked during testing? Ignore global warming and plan to re-engineer the entire planet with untested technology instead?
The Book Killers have always been with us. Before recorded history they were with us, murdering the scholars and storytellers and mystics of every tribe they ever conquered.
Even the sympathizers don’t always get it. I’m sure I get a lot of things wrong too, but here’s one thing I do understand: Change doesn’t begin with policy. It begins with perception. And you don’t change things by asking. You change them by acting.
Young Americans are a generation betrayed. Official unemployment is more than 25% for those aged 16-19. That means the real figure is much worse, especially in minority communities and depressed parts of the country. But jobs are scarce for everyone. College students are graduating with record levels of student debt before entering the worst job market for graduates in recent memory.
Right now Wisconsin is serving as the prototype for United States 2.0, a newly reconstituted nation where corporations have all the rights of personhood without any of the responsibilities—and people have all the duties of personhood without any of the rights. Welcome to your future. They’re preparing it for you right now in America’s heartland.
Could it be that there is no intelligence without a body? That there’s only computation? That cognition is the byproduct of biological processes, and never the driver of them?
There are a lot of things to be thankful for in this world, and I’ve got a pretty good list: A loving family, the glittering splendor of the cascading galaxies, Eddie Hinton’s guitar solo on the Staples Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” ... you know, the usual stuff. But here’s something you may not think warrants much gratitude this November: The wisdom and common sense of the American people.
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