Rushed home from The Korean's with my Globe and Mail only to find that the dolts who run the joint have given over two full pages of the Opinion section to the hyperventilating hack Sarah Kendzior. You'll recall that last winter Sarah was trying to get a NYT boycott going because the paper of Krugman, Freidman, and Maureen Dowd had, at least in her mind, become a shameless conduit for pro-Trump propaganda.
While the Times seems to have weathered the boycott, I'm thinking of organizing a boycott of the Globe if they keep forking over valuable space to D-list American public intellectuals.
Sarah's two-page yawner is titled "The path of most resistance," and not surprisingly, it's mostly about Sarah. Did you know Sarah wrote a book? Did you know Sarah lives in Missouri? Did you know she likes to take her kids to National Parks?... Those are just a few of the things Sarah wants you to know about her.
So while she's driving around America on her epic (went to almost half the states!) camping trip - book promo tour, she also found time to stop here and there to rally "the resistance," which seems to be mostly middle-age white women who still can't get their heads around the fact that Trump is President and Hillary isn't.
She stopped in Knoxville Tennessee just before a scheduled gathering of neo-Nazis at the U of T campus, "a recruiting ground for white supremacists..." That leads to a five paragraph rumination on "the unhealed scars of history, and the callousness of elites who treat white supremacists as intellectual contrarians."
Here's a report on the neo-Nazi meeting from knoxnews.com. Forty- five people showed up. The University of Tennessee Knoxville campus has over 28,000 students. Looks to me like that white-nationalist recruiting is an even bigger flop than Kendzior's New York Times boycott!
She's still got a bee in her bonnet about newspapers in New York, wondering why they used to cover Trump but now they cover up for him instead. She's not naming names, though. Maybe she got a STFU letter from the Times legal department.
Anyway, things are looking pretty horrendous in Trump's America. In fact, it's so bad that "...there's a kind of horror that shakes you to your core, when you start believing in the devil because of what you witness, and in hell because you want comfort."
Yup, Trump's America is so frightfully toxic it's got Americans pining for the comforts of hell!
Come on, Globe and Mail! Surely you can do better than this?!
Showing posts with label Paul Krugman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Krugman. Show all posts
Saturday, September 29, 2018
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Some thoughts about Greece
The sky-is-falling crowd pretty much sees a Greek default as being the end of the world as we know it.
Bullshit!
I'm with the American Nobel laureates Krugman and Stiglitz; go ahead and pull the plug. Borrowing more from the EU just gets you in deeper.
Don Pittis and Laura Wright at CBC have postulated that Greece borrowed too much money and spent it stupidly. There is some truth to that.
Greece is one of only four NATO nations that spends two percent of GDP on defence, a charter requirement for members of the NATO gang.
If and when Russia or China offers a bailout package the NATO romance will be over anyway.
For far too long it has been a point of pride among the ruling class in Greece, the oligarchs if you will, to brazenly boast of the fact that they don't pay taxes. That's an attitude that filtered through to the middle classes and even the working class.
We're Greeks. We don't pay tax. Let's borrow a few billion more euros...
Not hard to see where that was going to end.
Another dead end was making tourism a pillar of the economy. The tourism industry is a mugs game, predicated on prostrating yourself before the drunken louts of the Continent looking for a cheap holiday. Mass tourism humiliated Greece long before the "troika" did.
Defaulting on the national debt will not be the end of the world. Greece is revered as the cradle of democratic norms of governance. Stepping away from the toxic trap of troika hegemony is the first step on the road to making Greece whole again.
Bullshit!
I'm with the American Nobel laureates Krugman and Stiglitz; go ahead and pull the plug. Borrowing more from the EU just gets you in deeper.
Don Pittis and Laura Wright at CBC have postulated that Greece borrowed too much money and spent it stupidly. There is some truth to that.
Greece is one of only four NATO nations that spends two percent of GDP on defence, a charter requirement for members of the NATO gang.
If and when Russia or China offers a bailout package the NATO romance will be over anyway.
For far too long it has been a point of pride among the ruling class in Greece, the oligarchs if you will, to brazenly boast of the fact that they don't pay taxes. That's an attitude that filtered through to the middle classes and even the working class.
We're Greeks. We don't pay tax. Let's borrow a few billion more euros...
Not hard to see where that was going to end.
Another dead end was making tourism a pillar of the economy. The tourism industry is a mugs game, predicated on prostrating yourself before the drunken louts of the Continent looking for a cheap holiday. Mass tourism humiliated Greece long before the "troika" did.
Defaulting on the national debt will not be the end of the world. Greece is revered as the cradle of democratic norms of governance. Stepping away from the toxic trap of troika hegemony is the first step on the road to making Greece whole again.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Top Harvard economists get caught making stuff up and nobody cares
Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff are the Crosby and Ovechkin of economics.
A few years ago they wrote a book that provided the indisputable proof that the likes of Angela Merkel et al need to justify the austerity enema.
Economies just can't grow if they have too much debt.
That's music to the ears of slash and burn right-wing politicians everywhere.
"See! Your pension and your wage and your benefits are crippling the economy! We gotta cut back now!!!!... "
So along comes an economics student a few years later and tries to replicate their theoretic models. He tries and he tries with no success.
Finally he respectfully requests their original data. They oblige.
And their model still doesn't work!
In other words, the link between their research and their conclusion is mostly imaginary.
One would like to think that the revelation of such nefarious hijinx would result in outrage, opprobrium, loss of tenure... something.
Instead, it has resulted in next to nothing. Krugman writes about it in his blog and that's about the extent of the outrage and opprobrium.
There are of course very sound reasons why mainstream media are happy to let this story float by.
Mainstream media is owned by the same folks who think your pension and your wages are way too generous.
More austerity please!
A few years ago they wrote a book that provided the indisputable proof that the likes of Angela Merkel et al need to justify the austerity enema.
Economies just can't grow if they have too much debt.
That's music to the ears of slash and burn right-wing politicians everywhere.
"See! Your pension and your wage and your benefits are crippling the economy! We gotta cut back now!!!!... "
So along comes an economics student a few years later and tries to replicate their theoretic models. He tries and he tries with no success.
Finally he respectfully requests their original data. They oblige.
And their model still doesn't work!
In other words, the link between their research and their conclusion is mostly imaginary.
One would like to think that the revelation of such nefarious hijinx would result in outrage, opprobrium, loss of tenure... something.
Instead, it has resulted in next to nothing. Krugman writes about it in his blog and that's about the extent of the outrage and opprobrium.
There are of course very sound reasons why mainstream media are happy to let this story float by.
Mainstream media is owned by the same folks who think your pension and your wages are way too generous.
More austerity please!
Monday, April 1, 2013
Smackdown for David Stockman
David Stockman was Ronald Reagan's budget gnome for four years, and parlayed the experience into a million dollar book deal.
He's caused a bit of a ruckus with an article in the NYT on the weekend.
Paul Krugman called the piece pathetic and embarrassing.
The Wall Street Journal provides links to numerous skoffing skeptics.
The Washington Post calls it a "spittle-filled diatribe."
With slams like that it's obviously worth reading!
Stockman's thesis is that capitalism is being, or has been destroyed by the clique of insiders who run big banks and the political infrastructure that does such a manifestly poor job of regulating them.
On that point I agree. Whether that's going to cause the imminent implosion of the US economy I don't know. The status quo works quite well from the point of view of the 1%. I'm guessing they'll figure out how to keep the ship afloat.
I do think that Stockman makes some suggestions that would definitely improve the lot of the 99% though. Here's a quote;
...this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.
It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.
That's some good sound advice. Break the link between government and the lobby industry? Can't happen soon enough.
Undo the Citizens United ruling and admit that corporations aren't people after all? Self-evident common sense to the 99%.
Get rid of the non-productive economic activity that has overtaken the financial sector in the last thirty years? Long overdue!
No wonder the establishment media are tripping over themselves in their haste to condemn the man.
He's caused a bit of a ruckus with an article in the NYT on the weekend.
Paul Krugman called the piece pathetic and embarrassing.
The Wall Street Journal provides links to numerous skoffing skeptics.
The Washington Post calls it a "spittle-filled diatribe."
With slams like that it's obviously worth reading!
Stockman's thesis is that capitalism is being, or has been destroyed by the clique of insiders who run big banks and the political infrastructure that does such a manifestly poor job of regulating them.
On that point I agree. Whether that's going to cause the imminent implosion of the US economy I don't know. The status quo works quite well from the point of view of the 1%. I'm guessing they'll figure out how to keep the ship afloat.
I do think that Stockman makes some suggestions that would definitely improve the lot of the 99% though. Here's a quote;
...this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.
It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.
That's some good sound advice. Break the link between government and the lobby industry? Can't happen soon enough.
Undo the Citizens United ruling and admit that corporations aren't people after all? Self-evident common sense to the 99%.
Get rid of the non-productive economic activity that has overtaken the financial sector in the last thirty years? Long overdue!
No wonder the establishment media are tripping over themselves in their haste to condemn the man.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Economists rule the world
That's the heading of an article by Eytan Avriel on the Haaretz website today.
I found the article remarkable for a couple of reasons.
In the first instance, Avriel posits some sort of community of economists who are in agreement with an hegemonic world-view that favors the status quo in the existing global order.
One need look no further than Paul Krugman's writing in that erstwhile bastion of status quo-ery, the New York Times, to see that such is not the case.
Defenders of the status quo tend to have more access to media bully-pulpits because, after all, the owners of big media have a vested interest in exactly that. Krugman with his Nobel medal is permitted the Times platform because his name lends prestige to the paper. While Krugman is an exception, that exceptionality also destroys Avriel's argument.
Also of interest was a passing reference to the Milken Institute. What was interesting about it was that apparently sufficient time has passed that it is now permissible to refer to Milken without the once-obligatory aside to his 98 count indictiment on fraud and racketeering charges in 1989. The dirty laundry has been well aired-out and cleansed with the passage of time.
Milken was one of the architects of the "Rumpelstiltsken economy" that overtook America in the last quarter of the 20th century. Why get rich building a company from the ground up when you can get richer faster by buying one that someone else spent a lifetime building up and then gutting it?
All the straw-spinners in all the hedge funds today owe a huge debt to Michael Milken.
Finally, after a decidedly downbeat lament over our prospects under the further rule of the dismal scientists, Avriel concludes that we don't actually have to let them rule.
There's a faint shadow still lingering of something called "democracy", and while it has been everywhere co-opted and corrupted, Avriel sees hope in the broad-based social protest movements that have swept much of the world over the past year.
On that point I couldn't agree more.
Occupy democracy!
I found the article remarkable for a couple of reasons.
In the first instance, Avriel posits some sort of community of economists who are in agreement with an hegemonic world-view that favors the status quo in the existing global order.
One need look no further than Paul Krugman's writing in that erstwhile bastion of status quo-ery, the New York Times, to see that such is not the case.
Defenders of the status quo tend to have more access to media bully-pulpits because, after all, the owners of big media have a vested interest in exactly that. Krugman with his Nobel medal is permitted the Times platform because his name lends prestige to the paper. While Krugman is an exception, that exceptionality also destroys Avriel's argument.
Also of interest was a passing reference to the Milken Institute. What was interesting about it was that apparently sufficient time has passed that it is now permissible to refer to Milken without the once-obligatory aside to his 98 count indictiment on fraud and racketeering charges in 1989. The dirty laundry has been well aired-out and cleansed with the passage of time.
Milken was one of the architects of the "Rumpelstiltsken economy" that overtook America in the last quarter of the 20th century. Why get rich building a company from the ground up when you can get richer faster by buying one that someone else spent a lifetime building up and then gutting it?
All the straw-spinners in all the hedge funds today owe a huge debt to Michael Milken.
Finally, after a decidedly downbeat lament over our prospects under the further rule of the dismal scientists, Avriel concludes that we don't actually have to let them rule.
There's a faint shadow still lingering of something called "democracy", and while it has been everywhere co-opted and corrupted, Avriel sees hope in the broad-based social protest movements that have swept much of the world over the past year.
On that point I couldn't agree more.
Occupy democracy!
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