“Just say no”

Massey’s single-entry bookkeeping system

The Massey Energy Company, which killed 29 miners on 5 April 2010, apparently kept two sets of books—one in which they recorded safety problems, and another they showed to federal inspectors. That was among the conclusions of a large team of federal investigators, who spent a year sifting through more than 84,000 pages of documents, [...]

Economist of the day

The Eurocrats, led by the ECB, are now using this crisis to ram through their vision of Europe, which is fundamentally anti-labor and pro capital.  That explains why the markets are celebrating today. But it lays the groundwork for more hostility and conflict in the future. Wasn’t this precisely what the European Union was designed [...]

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Protest of the day

Selling the city

We seem to be in the midst of a gigantic PR campaign for “the city,” to judge by the recent spate of books celebrating the idea of the city and selling particular kinds of cities (some of which are reviewed by Nicholas Lemann [behind pay wall]). We’re being bombarded with Ed Glaeser’s free-market city, Elijah [...]

Rewriting the history of the financial crisis

Phil Angelides, chairperson of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which conducted the official inquiry into the nation’s financial and economic crisis, sees history being rewritten by the winners. They say that winners get to write history. Three years after the meltdown of our financial markets, it’s clear who is winning and who is losing. Wall Street [...]

Costs of war

Measuring the costs of war should have been conducted by mainstream economists. But they haven’t done it. So, the task has fallen to the Costs of War project by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, a multidisciplinary team led by political scientist Neta C. Crawford and anthropologist Catherine Lutz.* Mainstream economists often defend what [...]

Protest of the day

And more, from Athens and Manila. . .

Radical positions on the minimum wage?

Is Michele Bachmann’s support for abolishing the Federal minimum wage a radical position? Greg Sargent thinks so. I wanted to try to determine just how radical — and important and revealing — her position really is. It turns out that almost no GOP presidential candidates in history have held this position — not even Barry [...]