krebscycle

  • It is all about me, after all.

    Fred de Boer has an essay up on his admiration for Ron Paul and how the mean people berate him about it. Fourteen paragraphs – not including updates. Here’s some starting phrases/sentences for each paragraph – except for the 4 that do not begin with I or we. When I…

  • Left behind – the US “left” wanders off to nowhere

    originally published at The People’s View. Dean Baker is widely seen as “to the left” of Barack Obama and Obama’s famously (among some people) evil “neoliberal” economic team. But Baker, like Robert Reich and to some extent Paul Krugman, are deeply committed to a orthodox economics ideology that is essentially…

  • Why do we need private depository banks? (updated)

    Banks make money via statistics that allow them to lend out most of the money they have on deposit and keep just a small “reserve” in cash. Suppose 1000 people all deposit $1000 getting say %1 interest and the bank lends $900,000 to other people getting %8 interest while keeping…

  • Vanguardism and the left

    Originally published as “Fight the People” in ThePeoplesView. In 1967, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a hugely successful political organization – with chapters in even some of the most conservative universities and a key role in a multi-racial diverse movement against the Vietnam war that united pacifists…

  • The unacceptable naivete of the liberals: Dean Baker edition

    First published in People’s View I had an argument with Dean Baker ( here and here) about a passage of his which illustrates why the “progressive"  economists have been so utterly useless for the last 30 years.  If President Obama had been doing his job, he would have immediately begun…

  • Reciprocity versus charity

    Is equality passé? We think not. The welfare state is in trouble not because selfishness is rampant (it is not), but because many egalitarian programs no longer evoke, and sometimes now offend, deeply held notions of fairness–notions that encompass both reciprocity and generosity but that stop far short of unconditional…

  • Marx and Lincoln’s Re-election

    The far right is obsessed with this – making it all the more interesting. Here is the First International’s letter congratulating Lincoln on his re-election. When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, “slavery” on the banner of Armed…

  • Trickle-Down Keynesianism

    According to Professor Krugman and his many internet acolytes, cutting any government spending in our poorly performing economy would be a disaster because all government spending is stimulative. If that’s the case, the near doubling of the Federal budget under George W. Bush and the parallel rise in state spending…

  • Slavoj Žižek for the win

    Slavoj Žižek for the win

    My opinion is that the left is not able to offer a true alternative to global capitalism. – in LRB response to critics Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008 Above is Žižek’s response to critics of his earlier article which begins with: One of the clearest lessons of…

  • Tough questions from the “liberal” press – The Atlantic edition

    Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic to complain about the crappy journalism in the 60 minutes interview of the President. That’s an easy critique to make. The questions were stupid. But Friedersdorf then does something more difficult: he proposes alternative questions that are far worse. Here’s Friedersdorf setting the stage:…