BruceMcF's blog

Economic Populist: Pick Grand Bargain! Get Recession! Hurray!

Submitted by on

Burning the Midnight Oil for Economic Populism

Let's do a quick run-down of the last couple of decades of US economic history.

(1) Inflate a residential property and internet start-up bubble. The long-term unsustainable expansion in credit provides the national income growth that starts the chattering classes talking about the "Great Moderation".

(2) The dotcom bubble bursts, and recovery from the dotcom bubble rests on further inflation of the residential property bubble.

Topic: 

3

You Can't Steal a Gift: Peer to Peer Politics by gmoke

Submitted by on

Essay by gmoke, reposted by permission, from the European Tribune

November 6, 2012, the MIT Center for Civic Media and Department of Urban Planning had a conversation on "Peer to Peer Politics" with Steven Johnson, author of Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked World moderated by Aaron Naparstek, visiting scholar at MIT's DUSP, and featuring Harvard Law School's Yochai Benkler, Susan Crawford, and Lawrence Lessig. Video of the event online.

To my mind, the discussion was less about the electoral politics we usually associate with that word and more about how peer-to-peer [P2P] networks are already being used among diverse populations for civic activities and many other things. When Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay, paraphrased Kevin Kelly by saying "The internet was built by love. It's a gift," (The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed), I thought of the idea and the story behind the title of the book You Can't Steal a Gift about jazz players Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Hinton, and Nat King Cole by Gene Lees (Lincoln, NE: Univ of NE Press, 2001 ISBN 0-8032-8034-3):

Phil Woods: "I was in Birdland, stoned, as I often was in those days. Dizzy and Art Blakey kidnapped me. Took me home to Dizzy's and sat me down and said, 'What are you moaning about? Why don't you get your own band?'...
 
"I asked them if a white guy could make it, considering the music was a black invention. I was getting a lot of flak about stealing not only Bird's music but his wife and family as well [Woods was married to Chan, Charlie Parker's widow]... And Dizzy said, 'You can't steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.'"

Topic: 

3

LQD: The Blue Dogs Are A Spent Force... Until You See How They've Ditched The White Sheets And Hoods And Morphed Into The New Dems

Submitted by on

Lazy Quote Diary, from DownWithTyranny

Key quote:

Friday, The Hill reported that the conservative, corporate-oriented New Dems are planning "to fill the power vacuum created by the recent and rapid decline of the Blue Dog Coalition," without even mentioning that half the Blue Dogs who managed to survive are new Dems. 

Topic: 

3

Economic Populist: CBO, on the public dime, peddles BS to the public.

Submitted by on

Burning the Midnight Oil for Economic Populism

Yves Smith at the excellent and insightful Naked Capitalism has recently been taking at a close look at the role of the Congressional Budget Office, the vaunted "CBO", in the "fiscal cliff" scam that the corporate aristocracy is attempting to perpetrate on us mere commoners.

Topic: 

3

Economic Populist: Capping Bush Tax Cuts fixes over half of fiscal problem

Submitted by on

Burning the Midnight Oil for Economic Populism

Among the many things entirely lost in the mainstream media coverage of the "fiscal cliff" are the nature and magnitude of the country's fiscal challenge. The magnitude is why it is not a crisis, and the nature is why we would be better off "just doing nothing" ~ letting the whole Bush tax cuts expire and scrapping the zombie spending cuts ~ is better than the vast majority of "fixes" floating around in the mainstream media.

Topic: 

3

Passing the time waiting for silly season to end ...

Submitted by on

... now, that isn't ME, I've got an essay to write this afternoon, work to do on the fight to save the Newcastle NSW rail line, class on Monday, and poll watching to do Tuesday for the Ohio Green party ...

... but the last few weeks of the election season can easily drown out serious work on policy issues, and even for people who are working on this or that campaign (the recent spike in electioneering essays lets us know that is also happening among some VotS folk) ...

Topic: 

3

The Other Two Americas

Submitted by on

Burning the Midnight Oil for the Progressive Change Coalition

To the right is the breakdown of the country that the big Red and Blue electoral college maps on election day will hide. In "Revolving Red", totaling 130 electoral votes, are the states that could conceivably decide the election. In "Bolted On Blue," totaling 408 electoral votes, are the states that cannot conceivably decide the election.

Topic: 

0

Why Is Europe's Economy Imploding?

Submitted by on

The European Union is in a world of hurt right now, as economies go. The crises in Greece and elsewhere are becoming famous, and latest confidence surveys from Germany (pdf) suggest Germany is risking recession.

The problem? The system was built broken, based on unfounded fantasies about how real world economies actually work. Or, as John Maynard Keynes said nearly a century ago:

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

Topic: 

0
Subscribe to RSS - BruceMcF's blog