Economy/Economics

bad Jews acting badly; education’s leaders a la Walmart; culture bought and paid for by whitey

[The] self-alienation [of humanity] has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
– Walter Benjamin1

In recent years, a new kind of economy based on the age-old practice of sharing is flourishing across North America and Europe, and is now rapidly spreading in popularity throughout the Middle East and other world regions.

Here is one perspective on what the future has in store for us:

We have already returned to the levels of income inequality of the 1920s, and the concentration of wealth is heading toward the ratios of the 1890s. The social relations of the future, writes Piketty could resemble Jane Austen’s world, in which a tiny group of the wealthy employed vast armies of poorly paid servants.

This piece was first published online in Frontline on April 16, 2014.
Can it be true that capitalists prefer crisis over growth? On the face of it, the idea sounds silly. According to Economics 101, everyone loves growth, especially capitalists. Profit and growth go hand in hand. When capitalists profit, real investment rises and the economy thrives, and when the economy booms the profits of capitalists soar. Growth is the very lifeline of capitalists.
Or is it?
What motivates capitalists?

A study by professor Linda J. Blimes of Harvard University concludes that the cost to the US of the Iraq and Afghan wars, taken together, will be between $4 and $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs. The cost so far is $2 trillion.

It is a sea change, the kind of transformation that the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter said was caused by “gales of creative destruction.” In his model, systems change when new ideas, products, and technologies bring about the destruction of the old.

Statistics are the magic, and the manna, of the economist. They are less reliable than weather forecasts; the meteorologist has a better chance of forecasting rainfall than an economist of forecasting economic growth. Things get even more testy over the issue of Gross Domestic Product, that great calculator of a nation’s economic output. The proof, in this case, lies outside the pudding, rather than in it.

Egypt is forming an economic dependence on funds from Saudi Arabia and the UAE that spells economic disaster for the vast majority of ordinary Egyptians who will be left paying the price.
As Egypt inches towards the first anniversary of the July 3 overthrow of president Mohamed Morsi, the economy continues to flounder. The military-backed government promised stability, but it won’t deliver this through reverting to failed Mubarak-era policies and relying on handouts from Gulf Security Council (GCC) states.

Taxation for what, for whom, for them, for gutted and eviscerated communities via nihilism vis-a-vis the entire casino capitalism and its banksters …?  
NPR rarely hits it right, but while working at my “other” job with developmentally disabled adults, I heard this piece on a singer-doctor-multilingual social justice thinker. It was okay, for NPR, but the interview accidentally culled a piece around new urbanism, the poor, the greenie weenie, Coder creeps I rail against ALL the time.