May 2012
3 posts
2 tags
Welcome to the Asylum
By Chris Hedges
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall...
April 2012
21 posts
3 tags
Global Corporate Capitalism is an Economic...
ARUNDHATI ROY
Though capitalism is meant to be based on competition, those at the top of the food chain have also shown themselves to be capable of inclusiveness and solidarity. The great Western Capitalists have done business with fascists, socialists, despots and military dictators. They can adapt and constantly innovate. They are capable of quick thinking and immense tactical cunning.
But...
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Romney's Fiscal Fantasy
By Lawrence Summers
The Romney campaign has been very clear about what the former governor is promising: $5 trillion in tax cuts on top of extending the Bush tax cuts, with those benefits heavily weighted toward the country’s wealthiest taxpayers. Romney himself has acknowledged the lack of details, stating in reference to his tax plan that “frankly, it can’t be scored.” I have been party for...
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“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is...”
– Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
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The Illusion of Choice
Source: Frugal dad
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Inequality may lead to rage against the machines
By Sebastian Mallaby
Citigroup just hired a brilliant consultant called Watson to build out its digital banking. This very same Watson also advises healthcare companies such as WellPoint and, in his time off, took the top prize last year on Jeopardy!, the television quiz show. According to his friends, Watson has other corporate gigs that he is coy about, and will soon earn more than $1bn...
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How Will Romney Pay For Tax Cuts? Wouldn't You...
Mitt Romney has proposed massive new tax cuts and promised to balance the federal budget. How will he achieve these seemingly contradictory goals?
For now, he isn’t saying. And, in fact, his campaign has been sending out vague and somewhat conflicting signals about where the money would come from to finance his rate cuts and other tax reductions.
When Romney rolled out his latest revenue plan...
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Taxed by the Boss
By David Cay Johnston
(Reuters) - Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers - and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.
The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations,...
3 tags
Born This Way
By Sasha Issenberg
At the vanguard of this movement is Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist whose best-selling new book,The Righteous Mind, collects his own experiments—testing biases, prejudices, and preferences—and the work of like-minded colleagues to unmask much of our political “thinking” as moral instinct papered over, post facto, with ideological rationalization. We may tell ourselves...
5 tags
The Second Economy
by W. Brian Arthur
Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically. They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. On the surface, this shift doesn’t seem particularly consequential—it’s almost something we take for granted. But I believe it is causing a revolution no less important and dramatic than that of the railroads. It...
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Why Poorer States Aren't Buying What Romney's...
By Walter Dean Burnham andThomas Ferguson
The county maps and polls testifying to the importance of income in predicting the Romney vote within states (the latter have been oddly missing in some newspaper presentations) all suggest that the Republican Party is now divided fairly sharply along class lines as well as religious ones. In the general election, this may be important. Right now GOP...
3 tags
Who ate my job?
It is tempting to think of the globalisation of the labour market as a zero-sum game in which Mrs Kamal in Pakistan is benefiting at the direct expense of Ms Vetter in America. But economists point out that such calculations suffer from the “lump of labour fallacy”—the belief that there is only a fixed amount of work to go round. A better explanation, they say, is the theory of comparative...
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How Wealth Reduces Compassion
Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people...
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“And this is my theory of Romney: He’s not conservative, but he’s not moderate...”
– Michael Tomasky
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What Export-Oriented America Means
TYLER COWEN
It’s not just that Silicon Valley and the Pentagon and our universities give the United States a big edge with smart machines. The subtler point is this: The more the world relies on smart machines, the more domestic wage rates become irrelevant for export prowess. That will help the wealthier countries, most of all America. This logic works on both sides. America is using less...
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Drug-smuggling nanoparticles target tumours
Drug-smuggling nanoparticles could be the latest recruits in the fight againstcancer. The first results from early-stage trials show that cancer drugs couriered by nanoparticles may reduce the size of tumours in humans.
Researchers from BIND Biosciences in Boston filled nanoparticles with the cancer drug docetaxel and injected them into the blood of 17 people who had cancers that are normally...
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“If more Americans sought care abroad, it wouldn’t just save them money; it could...”
– James Surowiecki
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“But even in the emerging world order, the U.S. is likely to have much more...”
– WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
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Print-your-own-robots developed in US
Printed-on-demand robots might be a reality before the end of the decade if a US-based project achieves its goals.
Researchers aim to build a desktop technology that would allow an average person to design and print a machine within 24 hours.
The team says that making it easier to create specialised robots could have a “profound impact on society”.
The effort is being funded by a...
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The End of Creativity?
I sometimes wonder whether our remix, remake culture of po-mo pastiche, self aware and often sarcastically referential, isn’t just the inevitable result of exponential population growth- how much sonic room is still available for innovative rock musicianship? This difficulty runs even deeper though. Technology might be left in Pandora’s box as a means of future innovation, possibly in...
