Archive | February, 2014

Larry Summers and Paul Krugman have recently identified the phenomenon of stagnation.  Given that they are giants in today’s economic policy conversation, their views have naturally received enormous attention.  That attention is very welcome because the issue is so important.  However, there is also a danger that their dominance risks crowding out other explanations of […]

In one of his last important public discourses, popularly known as the Golpe de Timón speech, the late President Hugo Chávez told a joke about an indigenous tribe and a priest.  The priest baptized the indigenous people giving them Christian names, held communion, and told them not to eat meat on Friday but rather fish […]

As protests have been taking place in Venezuela for the last couple of weeks, it is good to check on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Empire’s “stealth” destabilizer.  What has the NED been up to in Venezuela? Before going into details, it is important to note what the NED is and is […]

Venezuela’s latest round of violent protests appears to fit a pattern and represents the tug-and-pull nature of the country’s divided opposition.  Several times over the past 15 years since the late, former president Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, the political opposition has launched violent protests aimed at forcing the current president out of office. […]

All the leaders and many of the active members of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSWU) — arbitrarily held responsible for the violent 18 July 2012 incident in the Manesar works of Maruti Suzuki India Ltd in the province of Haryana — 148 of them, repeatedly denied bail, are in jail since August of that […]

  Numsa General Secretary’s Presentation to the Cape Town Press Club, February 11, 2014 I speak to you today with a powerful and united mandate from 341,150 metalworkers. They made their views extremely clear in our workers’ parliament in December last year — the parliament we called the Numsa Special National Congress.  In that parliament […]

Jan Toporowski: It is . . . possible to identify in The General Theory and Kalecki‘s work key ideas that they had in common.  The first is that in a capitalist economy output and employment are determined by business investment, so unless investment is high enough the economy is unlikely to be at full employment.  […]

A new report by In the Public Interest, available at www.inthepublicinterest.org/article/criminal-how-lockup-quotas-and-low-crime-taxes-guarantee-profits-private-prison-corporations, documents the increased use of private prisons to house the large and growing population of incarcerated Americans.  We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, five to seven times that of comparable countries.  See my article “Lawyers, Jails, and the Law’s Fake Bargains,” […]

After three and a half seasons, HBO’s Treme concluded in December, and last week the entire series became available as a box set.  The show started with low ratings that got lower as time went on, never won many awards, and divided critics.  But as time passes and more audiences discover the show, it may […]

I have become a card-carrying, tax-paying moderate, thanks to a study I found in Politico.com.  In this study, psychologists Kaitlin Toner and Mark Leary discovered that the more extreme politicians’ views are, the more they think they’re right.  In fact, politicians’ “belief superiority” — the certainty that their own viewpoints are correct — was linked […]

There are many TV talk shows in Germany, sometimes hot, often vacuous.  But the one on January 16th hit the roof, with far more people watching it afterwards via Internet than at the time it was aired.  And their comments, by the thousand, were mostly pounded away in great anger! A main cause of such […]

There are many TV talk shows in Germany, sometimes hot, often vacuous.  But the one on January 16th hit the roof, with far more people watching it afterwards via Internet than at the time it was aired.  And their comments, by the thousand, were mostly pounded away in great anger! A main cause of such […]