Archive for December, 2009
Ponzi Collapses Nearly Quadrupled in '09 (AP)
From the Associated Press: By CURT ANDERSON, AP Legal Affairs Writer Curt Anderson, Ap Legal Affairs Writer —Mon Dec 28, 9:33 pm ET MIAMI—It was a rough year for Ponzi schemes. In 2009, the recession unraveled nearly four times as many of the investment scams as fell apart in 2008, with “Ponzi” becoming a buzzword ...Read more.
Appeal to Our Blog Readers
Dear Regular Visitors to the D&S blog: If you read postings to the D&S blog via an RSS feed rather than by visiting the D&S website, you may not know that we are having a 35th anniversary fundraising effort. We are calling it our “Anti-Capital Campaign,” both because we want to put D&S on a ...Read more.
$57,077.60, Surging by the Minute (Jo Comerford)
Tom Engelhart’s last post of the year over at TomDispatch, is In Nightmares Begin Responsibilities: Why War Will Take No Holiday in 2010. It’s a great one! Here’s a tidbit: In Afghanistan, here’s what we know. The president is surging at least 30,000 troops into that country, reportedly accompanied by a surge of up to ...Read more.
Krugman vs. Hudson on Samuelson
I was alerted by this post on Naked Capitalism to a back-and-forth between Paul Krugman and Michael Hudson on Paul Samuelson. It started when, on Dec. 14th, the day after Samuelson died, Counterpunch re-published a paper by Michael Hudson from back in 1970, shortly after Samuelson was awarded the recently-established Nobel Prize in Economics. Here’s ...Read more.
Bernanke, Time, Senate Banking Committee
Well the New York Times website is reporting that the Senate Banking Committee just approved Ben Bernanke for a second term as Fed chair. This comes just after Time magazine announced that Bernanke is its Person of the Year for 2009. We know that this designation doesn’t necessarily mean that the magazine endorses the person ...Read more.
Howard Dean: Kill the Senate Health Care Bill
From a Vermont Public Radio broadcast from Tuesday: (Host) Former Governor Howard Dean is back at the center of the health care reform debate in Washington. Dean says the time has come for Senate Democratic leaders to kill the current health care reform bill because it’s no longer worth supporting. Dean is upset that the ...Read more.
Who Really Saved The Global Economy?
According to this Observer article, it was the global drugs lords: their money laundering activities provided the required marginal capital to keep flowing in the interbank markets at the height of the crisis, when more legitimate players were glued to the sidelines, so that the whole shebang didn’t go down. Thanks to Yves Smith at ...Read more.
Stop Usury Now (William Greider)
From The Nation (but: do not take this as an endorsement of Martha Coakley—some of us voted against her in the primaries): William Greider | December 10, 2009 The Democratic party brushed aside the question of usury last spring when Congress decided not to impose any limits on the ruinous interest rates charged by major ...Read more.
Left of Obama
Caught a broadcast today on a Boston NPR station of an Intelligence Squared–US debate over the proposition: “Obama’s economic policies are working effectively.” Nothing that was said on either side was especially remarkable. What was remarkable, though, was that two of the three members of the “disagree” panel—James Galbraith and Eliot Spitzer—were taking Obama on ...Read more.
More Sit-Ins for Single-Payer, Thurs. Dec. 10th
The Mobilization for Health Care for All, about which we have blogged several times, is having another Day of Action for single-payer this Thursday, December 10th, on the occasion of International Human Rights Day. I hope some regular D&S blog visitors can participate in these sit-ins! Here is the Mobilization’s press release: We are making ...Read more.
