Economy/Economics

On Tuesday June 23, the Special Decolonization Committee of the United Nations heard 30 petitioners who came to denounce from various perspectives the colonial situation of Puerto Rico. For the 34th time the UN committee approved a resolution requesting that the United States allow Puerto Rico to exercise its right to self-determination and independence. In 1953, the U.S. and colonial administrators lied to the UN in order to get Puerto Rico off the list of territories which still had not achieved self-determination.

Defaults are difficult.  But even more so is austerity.
— Joseph E. Stiglitz and Martin Guzman, Huffington Post, June 30, 2015

This is a test. Will the internationalist banksters force extraction of their ill-gotten interest payments to bail out their reckless derivative trades gone wrong, or will a sovereign country abandon the chains of financial elite coercion and renounce their IMF and ECB debt? Make no mistake about it, Greece has lived high on the hog for decades and has serious internal problems. There is no free ride. However, the pain from the coming default is necessary to shed the yoke of a failed European Union construct.

Paul Samuelson, serving as advisor to Presidents Kennedy and LBJ, was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He said the ultimate goal of economic science is to improve the living conditions of people in their everyday life. That goal should be an easy one to put into practice in a modern economy, but it is immediately beset with problems in the twenty-first century.

In the wake of the Pope’s recent encyclical, Laudato Si, in which he calls for action on climate change and other environmental challenges, Mike Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Oakland-based energy and environment think-tank The Breakthrough Institute, along with Mark Lynas, campaigner and author of The God Species, have put together a response entitled “A Pope Against Progress.” Herein, I want to focus on this piece as a means of broader response to the general project of ‘ecomodernism’, recentl

I had to whip up my courage to go to the Ukraine. There was a recent spate of political killings in the unhappy and lovely land, and the perpetrators never apprehended; among those killed was Oles Buzina, a renowned writer and a dear friend. Two years ago, well before the troubles, we had a drink under a chestnut tree in a riverside café. Buzina was in his forties, rather tall and slim, had a narrow sarcastic face of Mephistopheles, a bald head, a hint of moustache and a bad temper.

A currency crisis is coming to the US and it’s only a matter of when, not if. Many have been warning about it for years, from politician Ron Paul to economist Peter Schiff to many other voices in the alternative media. It’s a mathematical certainty, and a question of when, not if. Recent events, within the US and abroad, are beginning to indicate that it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. No one knows exactly when; there are way more predictions that don’t come true than those that do.

… society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good–by means of his conscience.
—from Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin

George Osborne’s, Britain’s Chancellor of the exchequer, plan to enshrine permanent budget surpluses in law will chime favourably with many people. The reason is simple; most of us look at financial matters in terms of our family finances. The argument that as a family: “wouldn’t you want to pay your debts and live within your means” is a very appealing proposition. However, there is a fundamental difference between running a household budget and a government budget.

Two recent reports suggest that Israel could face catastrophic consequences if it fails to end the mistreatment of Palestinians under its rule, whether in the occupied territories or in Israel itself.
The Rand Corporation’s research shows that Israel could lose $250 billion over the next decade if it fails to make peace with the Palestinians and violence escalates. Ending the occupation, on the other hand, could bring a dividend of more than $120 billion to the nation’s coffers.