Archive for the ‘Blog Post’ Category
How to (Really) End This Depression: a Response to Paul Krugman
In the May 24 New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman writes, “The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve; all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending.” He continues, “… The strong measures that would all go a long ...Read more.
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.
Don’t Take Away My Oxycodone!
It feels like a large splinter jammed under my left thumbnail. From my thumb and forefinger, the skin burns in a strip up to my elbow. Recent shoulder surgery has left nerve damage, not uncommon. During the day, it’s a distraction; at night, much worse. Before bedtime, I swallow two 5 mg oxycodone. At 3 ...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.
Pearidge, Trauma; 99 to 1; and The Self-Made Myth
The evening before Easter, well wined and dined at a fine Italian restaurant, we have returned to my mother’s house in DC. My brother and I are extracting our 92-year-old mother from his giant Chevy Tahoe. We turn, and there is my husband Tom, crumpled in the gutter, a pool of blood spreading under his ...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.
