While it is by some criteria the richest country on the planet, the US now has 1.5 million children without a home, 50 million people without health insurance, and growing communities of people living in the sewers underneath its glittering cities. This short documentary called Poor America, produced by the BBC, is a revealing, disturbing, but refreshingly frank look at just how bad times are in the US.
Support Wikileaks
Economics
Video: The Story of Broke
Annie Leonard has done it again. The Story of Broke is a nice follow-up video to her massive hit the Story of Stuff. It focuses on the economic choices that sustain the dinosaur economy and the political choices people have to create a sustainable future. She has a real talent for taking a complex issue, boiling it down to its essentials, and presenting it in a lively and entertaining fashion. You can watch the Story of Broke either on her website or here.
Video: Capitalism is the Crisis
This description for Capitalism is the Crisis comes from the website for the film: The 2008 “financial crisis” in the United States was a systemic fraud in which the wealthy finance capitalists stole trillions of public dollars. No one was jailed for this crime, the largest theft of public money in history. Instead, the rich forced working people across the globe to pay for their “crisis” through punitive “austerity” programs that gutted public services and repealed workers’ rights. Austerity was named “Word of the Year” for 2010. This documentary explains the nature of capitalist crisis, visits the protests against austerity measures, and…
What real journalism looks like
Just imagine how much better things could be if journalists like Vincent Browne and Amy Goodman were the norm rather than the exception.
Cancer and economic development
The World Cancer Research Foundation has published a ranking of countries in terms of cancer rates. The list, and a brief discussion of it, can be found in this article published in the Guardian. Interestingly, the top twenty positions on the list are dominated by OECD nations and the full list suggests a fairly strong correlation between cancer rates and a country’s level of economic development: in general (and with few exceptions, such as Singapore), the greater the level of economic development in a country, the higher the incidence of cancer in the population. There is already an abundance of…
Even the IMF is now questioning capitalism
Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and former chief economist at the IMF recently published two interesting articles on Project Syndicate: Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable? and Rethinking the Growth Imperative. The articles, which are worth reading in full, are not at all what one would expect from a former chief economist at the IMF. Here are a few excerpts: From Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable?: It is ironic that modern capitalist societies engage in public campaigns to urge individuals to be more attentive to their health, while fostering an economic ecosystem that seduces many consumers into an extremely…
Economic and environmental crises
Interesting comments from Naomi Klein on the Occupy Wall Street movement. She makes a connection between the economic and environmental crises that is worth repeating–that they are really two sides of the same crisis or two consequences of a single cause, namely, corporate capitalism. A system based on greed and growth inevitably destroys its own base, whether that be the workers on whose spending power the economic system depends or the natural ecosystem on which all life depends.
Less inequality during the Roman Empire than in the US today
Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen recently analyzed papyri ledgers, biblical passages, and previous scholarship to conduct a study on the ancient Roman Empire and found that the top one percent of income earners in ancient Rome controlled 16% of society’s wealth. Per Square Mile, a data analysis blog by writer Tim De Chant, took the study and compared it to contemporary income disparity in the US and found that the Romans had less inequality than the Americans currently have. Some Quotes: Over the last 30 years, wealth in the United States has been steadily concentrating in the upper economic echelons. Whereas the…
Dani Rodrik on economics
Dani Rodrik, author of The Globalization Paradox and professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, wrote an interesting article on contemporary economics called Occupy the Classroom? which comments on the Harvard students who walked out of an economics class taught by Greg Mankiw. While the students complained that the introductory economics course “propagates conservative ideology in the guise of economic science and helps perpetuate social inequality,” Rodrik insists that it is only at the undergraduate level (or in media reports) that economics conveys that impression. In Rodrik’s view, that appearance of conservative ideology evaporates at the graduate level. Consider the following: “Let…
Chain gangs are cheaper
As one could expect, Alabama’s tough new immigration law induced a large percentage of immigrants to flee the state. However, the Alabama legislators responsible for the new immigration law apparently either thought otherwise or simply underestimated the consequences this law would have for the agricultural sector, which is heavily reliant on low-waged Hispanics to do the hard labor and now struggling to replace the lost labor force. But fear not, for John McMillan, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries knows the solution to this problem. He suggests: […] that inmate labor through the state’s work-release program offers a…
The network of global corporate control
Unfortunately, though there are many books and articles written on the tight grip multinational corporations have on global governance, there is relatively little empirical research conducted on this matter. This recently published paper by Swiss researchers however provides some practical empirical evidence and background research on the network of global corporate control: Abstract: The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along…
Executive earnings higher than paid taxes
The data presented in a recent New York Times article entitled “Where Pay for Chiefs Outstrips U.S. Taxes” is incredible (and yet somehow not very surprising): At least 25 top United States companies paid more to their chief executives in 2010 than they did to the federal government in taxes, according to a study released on Wednesday. How can the corporate sector maintain any credibility in the face of these data. How disillusioned must the public be not to see or do something about this problem? Even if someone did actually believe the trickle-down claim that keeping the corporations wealthy will eventually raise…
Democracy Now
Democracy Now News Feed
- U.N. Photo Collection Shows Gaza War Through the Lens of Palestinian Journalists April 19, 2024
- "Fear and Terror": Gaza Photographer Ahmed Zakot on Documenting the Carnage of Israel's Assault April 19, 2024
- Over 100 Arrested at Columbia After Univ. President Orders NYPD to Clear Pro-Palestine Student Protest April 19, 2024
- "No Palestinian Is Safe": Renowned Feminist Scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian Arrested in Jerusalem April 19, 2024
- Headlines for April 19, 2024 April 19, 2024
- Israel Considers Attacking Iran and Invading Rafah as Netanyahu Seeks Lifelines to Stay in Power April 18, 2024
- Columbia Students Risk Arrest, Suspension to Maintain Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Campus April 18, 2024