by George Washington’s blog | July 2, 2014 Preface: Two weeks ago, well-known economist Tyler Cowen (a professor at George Mason University) argued in the New York Times that wars – especially “major wars” – are good for the economy. Cowen joins extremely influential economists like Paul Krugman and Martin Feldstein – and various talking heads – in promoting this idea. Also, many congressmen assume…
The American Interest Niall Furguson Published on June 9, 2014 Political Economy & The State Networks and Hierarchies Fritz Lang’s silent movie classic Metropolis (1927) depicts the downfall of a hierarchical megacity. Metropolis is a city of skyscrapers. At the top, in their penthouse C-suites, lives a wealthy elite led by the autocrat Joh…
By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya June 01, 2014 Global Research A natural gas deal between Russia and China was in the works for a long time, so why all the fuss over its unveiling? One has to look beyond the headlines when considering world events. The ballyhoo that is made of many of these events is…
Washington’s Blog May 20, 2014 Did the Fed Take Drastic and Covert Action to Hide a Large Country Dumping U.S. Bonds? That’s what former Assistant Treasury Secretary and Wall Street Journal editor Paul Craig Roberts alleges: Is the Fed “tapering”? Did the Fed really cut its bond purchases during the three month period November 2013…
Mike Krieger Liberty Blitzkrieg blog May 11, 2014 During this week’s Senate hearings, Janet Yellen was asked by Senator Bernie Sanders if the U.S. was a capitalist democracy or has morphed into an oligarchy. While readers of this site already know the answer to this question, which was recently proved empirically by aPrinceton and Northwestern…
RSA Animate – Crises of Capitalism 28 Jun 2010 In this short RSA Animate, Marxist geographer David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism, towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane. View his full lecture at the RSA.…
Global Research April 25, 2014 Danny Schechter For years, it was a term only used in connection with those big bad and sleazy Mafioso-type businessmen in Russia. Russia had Oligarchs; we didn’t. That became a big difference between the official narrative of what separated our land of the free and the home of the brave…
Steve Watson Infowars.com April 21, 2014 A recent scientific study by Princeton and Northwestern universities, which has gone somewhat under reported in the mainstream media, concludes that the US is now a fully fledged oligarchy. The paper, entitled Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens, notes that America is no longer even…
Eric Zuesse Global Research April 14, 2014 A study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the U.S. is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the study’s opening question, “Who governs? Who really rules?” in this country, is:…
Washington’s Blog January 7, 2014 Bernie Madoff has said all along that JP Morgan knew about – and knowingly profited from – his Ponzi schemes. So JP Morgan has agreed to pay the government $2 billion to avoid investigation and prosecution. While this may sound like a lot of money, it is spare sofa change for a big bank…