Archive for the ‘ Capitalism ’ Category
Grayson has just introduced a four-page bill that would extend Medicare to any American who chooses to buy in at cost. Sheer brilliance. [ READ MORE ]
[Straight from Metafilter] Tishman Speyer Properties is defaulting on its $5.4 billion, high profile acquisition of the enormous Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in Manhattan, resulting in million in losses for investors and possibly “signaling the beginning of what is expected to be a wave of commercial-property failures”. The failure is the result of an aggressive [ READ MORE ]
Next week Bradley Birkenfeld, a former UBS banker, begins a forty month sentence, a punitive vengeance by the rich men and women whose illegal Swiss bank accounts he revealed to the US government. Fourteen thousand multimillionaires and, we know, billionaires had illegal accounts for years. They hold positions of authority in the United States. And the [ READ MORE ]
Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but Chomsky has a new article in Boston Review. [ READ MORE ]
This time series map of US unemployment before and during the current Great Recession is fairly dismaying. It looks like a smokers lung over twenty years. The Plains states appear relatively unaffected, however. I presume this is due to lower populations and dependence on agriculture, for which demand is fairly steady. [ READ MORE ]
Douglas Rushkoff recently presented a fifteen minute talk entitled Radical Abundance. The basic premise is intriguing. The introduction of government monopolized currency in the Middle Ages was a technique for keeping power in the hands of the aristocracy, since it gave them control over the relative scarcity of currency and thus the ability to extract [ READ MORE ]
The Agricultural Department has released a report that roughly 15% of American households have trouble putting food on the table at some time during the year. Fifteen percent! In one of the richest nations history has ever seen. And that just counts the poverty generated here! [ READ MORE ]
The link. And a contextual comment from another contributor: Just wanted to pass this along to situate the article in the movement that brought the UN Rapporteur and the way the tour was used as a movement building tool. Here’s a link to the movement’s mission blog http://restorehousingrights.org, The civil society portion of the tour was [ READ MORE ]
The NYTimes reports today on the stress and damage middle class families often experience when the breadwinners lose their jobs. Among other things, it can impact the children’s self-esteem and long-term earnings potential. This is certainly tragic, but compare this to those disadvantaged groups in our societies who have experienced this for generations. It suggests [ READ MORE ]
A&L Daily has a couple of articles today on localism. One, by Joel Kotkin, suggests that Americans are becoming less geographically mobile. The second, a defense of Christopher Lasch’s thought by Russell Arben Fox, that implies that society requires an essentially religious belief in the ability and will of highly localized populations to organize for [ READ MORE ]
See if you can find the square for feeding everyone in the world for a year in this Billion Dollar Gram. [ READ MORE ]
The last three months have been the worst ever for home foreclosures, a third of a million. No wonder the Dow is over 10,000 and Goldman-Sachs is enjoying peak performance. [ READ MORE ]
The NYTimes has an article on the boutique-y chain stores opening up in limited geographical areas (i.e., neighborhoods) in Brooklyn. The idea is more like the development of an open-air brandname mall than franchise replication. Rather than sell the same good or service elsewhere, the store owner diversifies into related niches in the same area, [ READ MORE ]
So Glenn Beck’s conspiracy theories now position Frances Fox Piven as the conduit from Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives to Obama and the liberal left…uh…sorry, the “radical left fringe”. [ READ MORE ]
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