StickWithANose

Between propagandistic “documentaries” scaring the uninformed and economically illiterate and a President who willing adopts right-wing narratives as being responsible and “post-partisan”, it is becoming increasingly clear that the next big fight in the American republic will center around our ballooning debt and the ill-advised austerity proposals being bandied about for addressing that debt. Looks [...]

The public intellectuals inhabiting what passes for the Commons here in the U.S. are, for the most part, a pitiful group. They display not only a shocking lack of research and analysis skills but also an almost complete inability to think outside of their own perceptions and ideological dispositions. Digby coined the term ‘The Village’ [...]

Last week, I pointed readers toward this tragic story of Chinese laborers committing suicide en masse in which I attempted to link those suicides with the concept of Alienation. This week, Bloomberg has published an article that does a far better job at making that connection… albeit unwittingly.
Ah Wei has an explanation for Foxconn Technology [...]

Yves Smith appears to be channeling Immanuel Wallerstein in this insightful discussion of the disconnect between policy-makers in D.C. and the economic realities of the nation.
[T]he real problem may be that all these approaches [Keynesian and Austrian economic theory] are past their sell-by dates, helpful around the margin but insufficient to provide lasting relief to [...]

This weekend’s must read comes from the always sharp Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism. Yves builds off of this piece by Simon Schama in the Financial Times to discuss the possibility of a societal backlash against the [on-going] greatest transfer of wealth in human history from ordinary citizens to the financiers of Wall Street [...]

Dean Baker points out the uncomfortable realities facing a nation of consumers hell-bent on producing nothing. While the NYT tells us that economists hope that Americans will pick up the pace of their consumption, Baker notes that the tens of millions of Baby Boomers* on the cusp of retiring are not even remotely prepared to [...]

I was reading this wonderful rant by Matt Taibbi on the hollow utopianism that is Randian Objectivism when I was struck by the fact that even Taibbi is mis-representing the SEC charges against Goldman Sachs.
The case in question involves a hedge fund financier, John Paulson, who went to Goldman with the idea of a synthetic [...]

In popular discourse, it has become commonsensical that America’s expanding waistline and overall poor health is the result of the highly processed foods we eat and our propensity to sit on our backsides in front of the tee vee. However, there is a growing line of research that ties health outcomes to economic polarization. Could [...]