Friday, Jan 27th 2012
Programs to Help Banks Are Seen as Open to Fraud - NYTimes.com
The Treasury Department’s most ambitious plans to rescue troubled banks — partnerships between the government and private investors, backed by the Federal Reserve — are inherently vulnerable to fraud and should not be started without stronger safeguards, a top government investigator warned in a [...]
Lawmaker Is Said to Have Agreed to Aid Israeli Lobbyists - NYTimes.com
One of the leading House Democrats on intelligence matters was overheard on telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency agreeing to seek lenient treatment from the Bush administration for two pro-Israel lobbyists who were under investigation for espionage, current and former government officials [...]
The Irish Economy | AIB Re-Cap Announcements
Karl Whelan thinks that AIB’s plan to raise more Tier 1 Capital by selling assets such as M&T is based on an accountancy gimmick - reigning in on previous ‘goodwill’. Also see his previous post.
The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital - Monthly Review
A must read article on the economy:
“Baran and Sweezy were not alone among mid-century economists, especially those conversant with Keynes, in arguing that advertising was an important weapon in battling stagnation. As K. W. Rothschild explained in The Economic Journal in 1942, advertising not only stimulated effective [...]
Updated on 5th of May 2009 to take account of the fact that I have since verified that the explanation about OECD tables being ‘problematic’ was provided to Sarah by a press officer in the Dept. of Finance. I have also modified a section which may have implied that the other claims about Ireland’s generous [...]
Steve Keen’s lecture at the Fabian Forum
In this recorded lecture at the Fabian Forum in Australia on the global financial crisis Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics suggests that the current crisis is worse than the Great Depression. His 2001 book challenged the conventional view of neo-classical economists who, he says, ignore money and credit [...]
Paul Sweeney has an excellent post on progressive-economy.ie today about the bid by the Babcock & Brown execs to buy Eircom. Drawing on a chapter in his own book Selling Out? Privatisation in Ireland, Sweeney argues that this is another nail in the coffin of liberal economics and that the original sale of the state [...]
This American Life | Scenes From a Recession
This American Life is always worth listening to, but this one is really worth it:
“The economy works in mysterious ways. This week, we highlight the unusual circumstances our economic drought has left us in, and the newly hatched plans being made to survive it: including a partially-renovated condo [...]
k-punk: Anticapital after containerisation
Containers and their drivers. Fall fan Mark of K-Punk is talking about containerisation of the city:
Firstly, the Institute is certainly right: the interview with David Harvey at Red Pepper is essential reading, but Harvey’s argument about the “right to the city” - “in the last 30 years an immense amount of the [...]
Hitler’s Co-Conspirators - The Atlantic (May 2009)
Three decades of scholarship (a good deal of it undertaken by Kershaw, as well as by the historian David Bankier, in his innovative study The Germans and the Final Solution) reveal that from the very onset of the war, it was impossible not to know the Jews’ fate. Soldiers [...]
