RSA Animate has created an excellent piece of animation based on David Harvey’s lecture on the causes of the current global economic meltdown, “Crises of Capitalism.” As a lecture, Harvey’s critique of the various standard explanation for the current crisis and placement of the implosion into a historical context is worth listening to on its [...]

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Bob Herbert looks at the past decade of U.S. domestic and foreign policy and finds it wanting. Well, duh; but he draws from the malaise a reasonable conclusion that strikes at the heart of both Bushy ur-conservatism and Obama’s Middle Path: we have given up. We are submitting to this debacle with the same pathetic [...]

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Driving the kids home from kung fu, I heard this on the car radio. The financial industry poured $500 million into lobbying lawmakers on the new financial reform bill. And it was money well spent. Mike Konczal is being ironic, of course. After counting the ways financial lobbyists have weakened reform legislation, Konczal concludes, “This [...]

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Of the various ONOZ!1 raised by lay (non-)economists, Charles Krauthammer booga-boogaz the VAT threat. Let me shorter: The high cost of Obamacare (sic) will force the U.S. government to levy a Value-Added Tax regime, turning us into German Diaper Babies or Vichy French Mimes or something. Well, I am certainly a lay (non-)economist, so naturally [...]

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Kentucky GOP senator Jim Bunning screwed over 1.2 million jobless Americans with one filibuster. And that ain’t all: “This means that construction workers will be sent home from job sites because federal inspectors must be furloughed.”Federal projects shut down include more than $38 million in project funding for Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest and Fernan [...]

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