Too-big-to-fail banks: Heads they win, tails we lose
Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism and Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone dissect the corrupt nexus between our financial system and our political system:
Source: http://billmoyers.com/segment/matt-taibbi-and-yves-smith-on-the-follies-of-big-banks-and-government/
Gar Alperovitz on the new economy movement
Just beneath the surface of traditional media attention, something vital has been gathering force and is about to explode into public consciousness.
Read about it here.
Rent-seeking in America
Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz defines rent-seeking as “using political and economic power to get a larger share of the national pie, rather than to grow the national pie” – and he says that America today has become a rent-seeking society. Hear him interviewed here (the 7:40-8:55 interval for the rent-seeking passage), discussing on his new book, The Price of Inequality.
Fatter Cats
Check out the astonishing rise in CEO pay in the United States:
Source: http://telltalechart.org/
Too hot for TED?
Something funny happened when millionaire Nick Hanauer’s was invited to give a TED talk on income inequality in America. He advocated higher taxes on the rich – including people like himself. Then the good people at TED decided his talk was too “political.” They decided not to post it. Here’s an excerpt from Hanauer’s non-talk:
We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an eco-systemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.
Read the full text of Hanauer’s non-talk here.
See his powerpoint slides here.
Read the backstory here.
People’s Guide to the Federal Budget
New from the National Priorities Project:
The only thing stronger than money in politics is an informed electorate.
Find the report here.
Colbert: United Against Them
Stephen Colbert finds common ground between liberals and conservatives: blame immigrants for climate change.
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
Work less, live better
“One has to recapture the idea that there is something called a good life to which wealth is a means…”
Source: http://www.youtube.com/social/blog/neweconomics-org.
Mainstream amnesia
Econ4 team member Gerald Epstein writes for TripleCrisis on the “Memento syndrome” in orthodox macroeconomics:
Like the protagonist in the movie Memento, who has no memory but is trying to solve the mystery of his wife’s murder, and has to remind himself every minute about what happened the minute before by writing notes and even tattooing himself , mainstream macroeconomists’ write themselves articles and books after every crisis and they then promptly forget what they wrote (no tattoos as far as I know).
I believe there is a reason for this: the mainstream never changes its underlying theory which is based on the erroneous ideas that financial markets are, by and large, perfectly self-governing and efficient and that the market economy has strong self-equilibrating forces that always bring the economy back to full employment… Since they won’t change their basic framework, they have nowhere to put the new information they get after each crisis. So, they forget it just as soon as they can… The tragedy is that it is these same economists who still control the elite economics departments, the main economics journals and hold the key policy making and research positions in our public institutions such as the Federal Reserve. Their stranglehold must be broken if we are going to break the Memento syndrome that is hindering sensible economics and economic policy.
Read his piece here.
