Washington Consensus

  • Pretty Bubbles Turning Into Grime

    Michael Hudson has a new book out so I thought it was high time I posted some thoughts I’ve been meaning to write up about his last one, The Bubble and Beyond. I’ve posted before about Hudson’s 1973 classic Superimperialism, whose analysis of the economic strategy of American Empire was followed by a terrific 1977…

  • Dirty Harry Does Diversity.2: Indicting Invictus

    (Like the original Magnum Force, this post is a sequel to the first Dirty Harry.) Of all of Clint Eastwood’s “Sympathy for the Other” movies, Invictus was the most popular in the Land of the Liberals.  J. Edgar (gays), Million Dollar Baby (women), and Gran Torino (SE Asians) all did well but received more criticism than…

  • Sunday Paper with the BPF: Ahhh, Mindfulness

    Well, I don’t really read a Sunday newspaper anymore.  Either they’ve been driven out of business by the internet or intellectually eviscerated by corporate centralized ownership.  But I’ve been kicking back and checking out some posts on the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) website after renewing my membership today.  Among them was a piece with a…

  • Corporate Welfare.8: Twitter Takes

      There’s a new story out today from Julia Wong of In These Times about how Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco “have become a symbol of gentrification and displacement for housing activists and community organizations in the city. ” I asked a friend of mine who had moved from the Bay Area to New York fairly recently…

  • Corporate Welfare.6: Pulling a Fast One

    UC Berkeley’s Labor Center has published a new study on the role public subsidies play in the business model of fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s.  Like the other corporations in this series of posts, it turns out that these firms surreptitiously pocket billions in public subsidies while preaching the doctrine of…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…