Archive for May, 2009
Wells Fargo's Counter-Stimulus Strategy
Roger Bybee’s feature in our current issue shows how big corporations are taking the financial crisis and recession/depression as an opportunity to eliminate jobs in the United States. ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, is trying to shut down two steel mills, one in Hennepin, Ill., and one in Lackawanna, N.Y., despite the fact that ...Read more.
Card-Check Is Dead (Liza Featherstone)
From Slate’s The Big Money blog: Card-Check Is Dead Unions are surprisingly bad at politics. By Liza Featherstone | Posted Thursday, May 21, 2009 – 11:18am Last Thursday, President Obama pronounced “card check” dead, saying that the current Employee Free Choice Act didn’t have the votes to pass but that a “compromise” could work. By ...Read more.
U.S. May Add New Financial Watchdog
From today’s Washington Post; hat-tip to LF: Consumer Agency Under Consideration By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Binyamin Appelbaum and David ChoWashington Post Staff WritersWednesday, May 20, 2009 The Obama administration is actively discussing the creation of a regulatory commission that would have broad authority to protect consumers who use financial products as varied as mortgages, credit ...Read more.
All That Glitters Is Goldman Sachs
Robert Zevin, president of Robert Brooke Zevin Associates and the founder of the socially responsible investment movement in the United States, wrote this talk for a recent event celebrating the 35th anniversary of Dollars & Sense. Bronchitis kept Robert from presenting the talk himself, but he sent the following message via his associate, Dan Thorn, ...Read more.
Science Fiction From Below
On Saturday I got to see a terrific new movie, Sleep Dealer, written and directed by Alex Rivera. It’s lefty science fiction, and deals with immigration, global sweatshops, militarism, and the corporatization/privatization of water resources, among other topics. The degree to which it is only barely fiction is a little scary. I recommend it highly. ...Read more.
A Monetary Reformer in Kindergarten
I stumbled on this nice piece over at Global Research: A Monetary Reformer in Kindergarten by Richard C. Cook | Global Research, May 14, 2009 This morning I went to a nearby urban public school to read a story to the kindergarten class my wife teaches. The story was Hansel and Gretel, one of the ...Read more.
Michael Greenberger on Derivatives
C-Span had a nice segment on Friday with Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland, on derivatives. He characterizes derivatives as like bets, and many of them as essentially bets on other people’s misfortune. The callers’ questions are great too. His answer to the last question, in which the caller raises the ...Read more.
Ethanol Snake Oil
BusinessWeek has an exposé on the pitfalls of ethanol. *It isn’t better for the environment than oil; *It saves little energy if any; *It decreases fuel efficiency; *It increases the cost of food around the globe. And now, as the EPA is mulling rule changes that would mandate an increase in the percentage of ethanol ...Read more.
'Sham' Bailouts Help Speculators
Naked Capitalism has a couple of nice posts about comments made by Michael Patterson, head of a private equity firm, to the Telegraph that reflect very poorly on TARP. Here is the story from the Telegraph (which has since been yanked from their site, apparently because Patterson objected to it; it is preserved at zerohedge.blogspot.com): ...Read more.
Steelworkers Attack ArcelorMittal
From yesterday’s WSJ; find background on the situation in this feature article in our current issue. The CEO of ArcelorMittal—the largest steel firm in the world—is Lakshmi Mittal, who is one of the richest people in the world. He is so rich that, as Roger Bybee reported in his feature article for us, he spent ...Read more.
