Europe's Zero-Sum Dilemma EUROPE’S DEBT crisis is threatening a political order that has been built up over the course of more than a half century. It is still entirely possible—indeed likely—that the European single currency will not survive the crisis. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has predicted that if the euro collapses, the European Union will crumble with it. The destruction of the EU would, in turn, remove the organization around which postwar European politics has been constructed. Even if both the EU and the single currency survive, the current crisis is likely to extract an economic and political price that makes a mockery of many of the original hopes invested in the European Union. The founding fathers of the EU—men such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman—built their project around a brilliant and simple proposition.
6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying All of a sudden, it's like you can't make huge amounts of money without people getting all pissed off about it. And it's only going to get worse -- with the election coming up and the weather getting warmer, this whole "Occupy" movement is probably going to come back strong. The 1 percent will feel even more besieged than before. "What the hell?" you're probably thinking, if you're somehow both rich and reading an article with this title, "I didn't crash the economy!" You might even be tempted to take to a microphone, to defend yourself and your wealthy friends. #6. "The amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 ... and so by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over ..." -- Congressman John Fleming Pictured here with his poverty. "It is hard to ask more of households making $250,000 or $300,000 a year. -- Senator Chuck Schumer What They Think They're Saying: "Come on, we're all in this together! What We Hear: Getty"This stuff?
Not What the Doctor Ordered: 20 Million Could Lose Employer Coverage In all the hand-wringing over the last two months for Obamacare by “liberal” apologists, little has actually been said about the actual effects of the law. True, whether or not Obamacare is beneficial has little if anything to do with its constitutionality. (And the actual Constitutional issues involved, however valid, have little to do with the cynical politics behind the Supreme Court’s right-wing block in the case.) But you’d think if someone was gonna go to bat for a law, they’d at least acknowledge the law’s merits. Hence one story that caught my eye in March: “20 million could lose employer coverage under Obama health care overhaul.” As many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-sponsored coverage in 2019 under the health care legislation signed into law by President Obama in March 2010… Of course, this one very disturbing study is hardly the Alpha or Omega on Obamacare. Perhaps you have a different conclusion of Obamacare based on the evidence.
Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide | Economy May 4, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement’s political impact. We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide” Chomsky says. We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24. LF: Let’s start with the big picture. NC: There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. LF: And politically…? NC: Again there are differences. In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. The Republican Party has pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a traditional political party.
Robert Barro: Stimulus Spending Keeps Failing Mainstream Economics is a Cult Neoclassical Economics Is Based on Myth Neoclassical economics is a cult which ignores reality in favor of shared myths. Economics professor Michael Hudson writes: [One Nobel prize winning economist stated,] “In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions.”This attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting the material world in which real people live….Typical of this now widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize: “Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them… The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. “Our models show there is no chance of water”
Special Report: Crisis forces dismal science to get real Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals? The recent scandals at Barclays Plc, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other banks might give the impression that the financial sector has some serious morality problems. Unfortunately, it’s worse than that: We are dealing with a drop in ethical standards throughout the business world, and our graduate schools are partly to blame. Consider, for example, the revelations about two top executives at the elite consulting firm McKinsey & Co., which has avoided public vilification despite the transgressions of its former employees. McKinsey director Anil Kumar, -- a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School -- pleaded guilty to providing insider information to hedge-fund manager and fellow Wharton alumnus Raj Rajaratnam. Rajat Gupta, a graduate of Harvard Business School who served for nine years as McKinsey’s worldwide managing director, was convicted of insider trading in the same case. Economics and Greed Free Competition
ppola Comment: The shoebox swindle It's morning in the charming little village of Britham. A man - let's call him John - goes into his local bank. "I want to borrow £1000", he says. "Let's see what we can do", says the bank manager. After close inspection of John's payslips and a few phone calls to local shops and tradesmen to check that John has always paid his bills and paid for his goods, the bank manager agrees to give him the loan. "l'll just sort that out for you now", he says. He disappears through the door into the back office. "Here you are", he says. John takes his shoebox to the bike shop to buy his son a bike for his birthday. Fred doesn't have £500 cash in the till, but he has another shoebox with an official bank stamp saying "£500" that someone gave him earlier. John takes the new shoebox to the grocer, where he buys his week's shopping and hands the shoebox over in payment. Armed with the shoebox that John gave him, Fred goes to the wholesaler to replenish his bike stocks. "I'VE BEEN SWINDLED!" "How much?"
Wealth doesn't trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals | Business | The Observer The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy. James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system. Comedian Jimmy Carr became the public face of tax-dodging in the UK earlier this year when it emerged that he had made use of a Cayman Islands-based trust to slash his income tax bill. "These estimates reveal a staggering failure," says John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network.
L.A. calls for end to 'corporate personhood' This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details. At a packed City Council meeting that included remarks from a man in a top hat with fake money tucked in the pocket of his suit, Los Angeles lawmakers Tuesday called for more regulations on how much corporations can spend on political campaigns. The vote in support of state and federal legislation that would end so-called "corporate personhood” is largely symbolic. But activist Mary Beth Fielder, who spoke in favor of the resolution, called it “a symbol that’s going to be heard around the world.” The council resolution includes support for a constitutional amendment that would assert that corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights, and that spending money is not a form of free speech. City Council President Eric Garcetti, the resolution's sponsor, said such actions are necessary because “big special interest money” is behind much of the gridlock in Washington. He blamed a 2010 U.S. For the record, 3:36 p.m.
Iran and the Petrodollar Threat to U.S. Empire Iran poses a far more serious threat to the U.S. than its disputed nuclear aspirations. Over the last few years, Iran has unleashed a weapon of mass destruction of a very different kind, one that directly challenges a key underpinning of American hegemony: the U.S. dollar as the exclusive global currency for all oil transactions. It began in 2005, when Iran announced it would form its own International Oil Bourse (IOB), the first phase of which opened in 2008. The IOB is an international exchange that allows international oil, gas, and petroleum products to be traded using a basket of currencies other than the U.S. dollar. Then in November 2007 at a major OPEC meeting, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for a “credible and good currency to take over U.S. dollar’s role and to serve oil trades”. China and India are by far the most significant players, with Russia playing a supporting role. There is only so much the U.S. can do if China continues to do business with Iran. U.S.