Capitalism

  • Corporate Welfare.4: Avoid Amazon

    Salon.com published a piece today with the provocative title, “Amazon is worse than Walmart.” Their argument centers on the notion that Amazon’s business strategy for years has been to accept near-perennial losses on a quarterly and yearly basis in exchange for achieving a near monopoly size “market share.” Walmart, by contrast, actually makes a profit.…

  • Corporate Welfare.3: Welfare Wings

    Today the Real News Network, who I encourage you to support during their current drive to win a matching gift, is reporting that “the Michigan strategic fund has decided to issue $450 million in bonds for a new stadium for the Detroit Red Wings, 44% of which will be financed publicly,” while the city is…

  • Corporate Welfare.2: Subsidizing Sallie Mae

    Continuing this series on the publicly funded nature of so called private enterprise in this country…. Sometimes subsidies know how to disguise themselves.  Blackwater’s defense contracts bring them direct cash payments for no-bid contracts.  But student lenders like Sallie Mae get their government cheese in the form of regulations on interest rates.  In a double…

  • Corporate Welfare.1: Blackwater’s Warfare Welfare

    (This is the first in a new series of posts about how corporations that claim to generate profit in the private sector are heavily subsidized by taxpayers in ways that I could only wish fields like education and healthcare were.  For an overview on that, see “Free Lunch:  How the Richest Americans Enrich Themselves at…

  • Secrets of the Temple.2: Double Dutch

    (This is a follow up to the post Secrets of the Temple.1: More Than a Doorstop, dated 1/13/13.) As I wrote in my first post on William Greider’s history of the Federal Reserve board, one of the aims of “Secrets of the Temple” is to question whether Ronald Reagan really was the primary source of…

  • The Interpretation of Dreams

    I don’t usually watch the Olympics much.  Not because I don’t enjoy the events, but because NBC usually feels compelled to shovel forklifts of “human interest” stories down your throat with brief breaks taken for cursory athletic performances.  So I wasn’t surprised when I checked in on the Olympics briefly this summer and didn’t see…

  • Debt.4: What’s good for General Motors and what’s good for America

    Sometimes the mark of a good book is how it crops back up in your mind a few months or years or even many years after you first read it.  I wrote 3 posts about the book Debt by David Graeber back in February & March.  There have been several occasions since then when the…

  • To the victor go the spoils…

    The record producer Joe Boyd visited a studio in a former eastern block country shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The engineers there proudly showed off what they thought was a state of the art newly acquired reverb unit they had acquired from some western engineers who visited their studio.  When Boyd asked…