Economics

  • 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…

  • Secrets of the Temple.1: More Than A Doorstop

    The operations of the Federal Reserve board are notoriously shrouded in mystery.  Technocratic decisions on monetary policy that supposedly need to be protected from the fickle pressures of politics are carried out by an appointed board of governors who like to operate behind closed doors.  William Grieder set out to demystify this institution in the…

  • The Democratic Cliff

    The current metaphor of “the fiscal cliff” marks the return of a few common tropes in American politics.  First is the latest incarnation of what Naomi Klein has referred to as the Shock Doctrine, the use and sometimes manufacturing of “crisis” situations to force people to accept right wing / neoliberal policies that legislative bodies…