Author Archive
New Issue; Police and Occupy; etc.
(1) May/June Issue: I finally sent our May/June issue to the printers on Friday. It will take a while for print subscribers to get it, but e-subscribers got their full-color pdfs on Friday. (Not an e-subscriber? sign up here.) And I posted John Miller’s column, Taxing the Rich, from Right to Left, comparing Romney, Obama, ...Read more.
Social Security, Tuna Fish Economics, Philly Schools
(1) Misreporting Social Security: You may have noticed dire headlines about a recent report from the Obama administration about the (ill) financial health of Social Security and Medicare, e.g. the New York Times‘s Social Security’s Financial Health Worsens. There’s a great piece at the Campaign for America’s Future by RJ Eskow about how the ...Read more.
Krugman/Keen Kerfuffle
Quite the online kerfuffle happened last week between New York Times columnist and economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and Australian left economist Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics (see over above), of the blog Steve Keen’s Debt Watch, and of one of the articles in our book The Economic Crisis Reader, “The ‘Credit Tsunami’” (the ...Read more.
Trayvon Martin, Fear of Crime, and Mass Incarceration
This is the first of a series of guest posts we’ll be running by Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative; this post originally appeared at PPI’s website last week. The recent killing of unarmed African-American 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida by a leader of a Community Watch program is sparking an overdue ...Read more.
Greece/Eurozone panel; Dying for Growth; Links
(1) Panel discussion with Mark Weisbrot, Jeffrey Frankel, and Richard Parker: I went to the panel discussion that D&S co-sponsored at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (I had lobbied for it to be held somewhere more welcoming to non-academics) on Greece and the eurozone crisis. The discussion was interesting, but I found it ...Read more.
Left Forum, Mark Weisbrot, etc.
(1) Left Forum: Left Forum 2012 was a big success and a lot of fun. Most of my time was spent at the D&Stable at the book exhibit, which involved, as usual, lots of great conversations with forum attendees (and we recruited lots of new subscribers). But I also spoke on a panel organized by ...Read more.
Goldman and Greece, etc.
(1) Goldman Sachs and Greece: A piece in Bloomberg about how Goldman made a “secret loan” to Greece in 2001 involving currency swaps and interest-rate swaps. This ended up costing Greece billions of euros. Interest-rate swaps have caused trouble for lots of municipalities (as the SEIU report I linked to the other day documents). We’ll ...Read more.
New Issue! Plus Links
(1) May/June Issue: We have sent our May/June issue to our e-subscribers, and we’ve sent the issue to our printers; the magazine will print and ship to print subscribers next week. We have just posted our rather splashy cover article, Way Beyond Greenwashing: Have Corporations Captured “Big Conservation”?, by Jonathan Latham, to the website. Here ...Read more.
Women and Work in the News
Our current cover story, Different Anti-Poverty Programs, Same Single-Mother Poverty, by long-time D&S author and UMass-Boston economist Randy Albelda, is turning out to be especially timely, as a spate of stories about women and work have been in the news. (The image above is the cartoon Barry Deutsch did for our upcoming March/April issue; Barry ...Read more.
Budget; Foreclosure Agreement; Occupy the SEC
(1) Obama’s Budget: Two items worth checking out: veteran Boston-area organizer Mike Prokosch had a great piece on Common Dreams called Starve the Beast–The Pentagon. A nice re-purposing of the tired Reagan-era slogan. The other is a nicely critical piece on the budget in the Financial Times by Jeffrey Sachs, An American budget for the ...Read more.
