 |
I was in the District the other day for something. And I saw bright comfortable looking tents in the street. It was amazing. I thought it was some artists display or something. And then it hit me. These were the District of Columbia's homeless, in actual shelters!
 |
In the final chapter of James Galbraith's book "The Predator State", titled "Paying For It", James Galbraith talks about Bretton Woods, how the United States opened itself up to becoming an open economy by turning over it's money supply to becoming the reserve currency of the "free world." The context of that was that the two previously dominant World Powers; France and Britain had failing economies during World War II. Their vast colonial empires had done as little for their masses as the previous vast colonial powers of the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and Belgians; while the USA had emerged triumphant from World Wars. We agreed to save those countries, their economies and the "free world" from complete collapse.
The New Democrats/Third Way People have a distinctive ideology that pay lip service to Franklin Delano Roosevelt but in actually contradict the ideology he expressed later in life. FDR lived a long life, even so even his earlier ideas represented a faith in markets that was tempered by a respect for the limits of Markets as a solution to problems. Right Wing Cons went after him as soon as it looked like their great fear of Communism had receded under the Banner of Ronald Reagan and his subversive recast of FDR's 4 Freedoms.
 |
|
| See: Reagans Subversion of four freedoms post |
In February of this year I critiqued an article by Tim Worstall, 2/3/2015, of Forbes:
In my post I pointed out that his arguments were not supported by the Facts, but what I missed is that; even if Worstall's arguments were correct. There is a moral argument why a "labor market" is not a mere tinker toy to play with and try to fit into the Free Market mold.
For one thing as James Galbraith points out, referring to John Maynard Keynes (that savant who's been slandered and ignored for these past 35 years) noted; "There is no supply curve for labor",..."and that is essentially the entire story."
Back in 2007 James K. Galbraith wrote a book called "The Predator State." In chapter 11, titled "The inadequacy of Making Markets Work" he starts out with a pithy recap of where we are:
"Marxism used to be the hard-boiled left-wing dissident's creed, a doctrine founded on class conflict and the romance of working-class revolution. Unfortunately there were actual Marxist countries; "real existing socialism" took care of that romance. Meanwhile, Keynes and his allies in the progressive movement offered ways to reconcile the capitalists and the workers to avoid the calamity of revolution and the tyrannies that follow, through regulation and the management of total demand."
|
|
At the end of Chapter 8, "What the Rise in Inequality is Really About"; in his book "The Predator State" James Galbraith notes that:
"public policy"..."can create oligarchs", but also that it can "destroy them." [inequality-and-oligarchy.html]
| Today was a report in Slate about corrupt crime labs which reminded me that one of the lousiest Supreme Court decisions I've seen in recent years which was Herrera Versus Collins. |
|
Our System that is supposed to be about Justice is corrupt and inept (and thus unjust) when it allows evidence from sloppy crime labs to stand as reported in the slate article concerning the Dookhan scandal up in Boston:
"Over her nine-year career, Dookhan tested about 60,000 samples involved in roughly 34,000 criminal cases." [Slate]
This is pretty awful, but what is really galling is the comment in the slate article:
"despite the fact that there were between 20,000-40,000 so-called “Dookhan defendants” (depending on whether you accept the state’s numbers or the American Civil Liberties Union’s), fewer than 1,200 had filed for postconviction relief.*" [Slate]
Most of these defendants remain jailed because despite their tainted evidence, prosecutorial power is so strong that they fear prosecutorial retaliation!:
