Set For Life

Oddly enough this ended up in my Spam:

Attention:

My name is Mr Ibrahim Abdullahi Lamorde the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission(EFCC) New Executive Officer in Nigeria. I was until  my appointment the Director of Operations of the EFCC. I understand you were expecting your fund sum to be wired to your bank account for so long but your expectation was not met.

I am contacting you to let you know the truth because i know how far you must have gone in trying to get your funds paid out to you under  the leadership of the erstwhile Chairperson Mrs Farida Waziri. Which  has caused you to pay huge sums of money into wrong hands most  especially to Fraudsters who frequently impersonate the identity of real Government and Bank Officials to help make themselves and their  scam appear legitimate.

I will be ready to help in delivering your fund sum to you with your honest and sincere co-operation with my Office.

Sincerely,
Mr Ibrahim Lamorde,
Chairman,
EFCC.

Free at last.

Now That's A Recovery

Via we learn that the top 1 percent absorbed 93 percent of the wealth created during the recent "recovery." Let's hear it for expansionary austerity and Neoliberalism more generally.

What's The Matter With Republicans

Gerald Ford, by today's standards, was a moderate Republican. However, he carried within him the seeds of all that is wrong with the Republicans and the Neoliberals more generally. He hated pleasure and, consequently, failed to understand that there is more to life. How do we know? His

habitual lunch: “a ball of cottage cheese, over which he pours a small pitcherful of A.1. Sauce, a sliced onion or a quartered tomato, and a small helping of butter-pecan ice cream.” Eating was, Ford said, “a waste of time.”

Anyone who thinks like that ought not be allowed to vote let alone run a country.

Consider this epic assault on humanized economyfrom the NYT. It's no doubt true that if Germany undertook to "liberalize" its national economy it would become more "efficient," where efficient stands for increased poverty among the workers with a larger percentage of wealth going to a sliver of Germans. We know this to be true because it is the Neoliberal response to the success of the post-War prosperity caused by the mild social democracy then rampant.

It makes much more sense to insist that Germany give over its commitment to imposing Neoliberal austerity on the rest of the world in the hopes that more social democracy will again lead to a prosperous and happy society.

Bankocracy

Via comes evidence thattThe Irish have all the good economists:
The good stuff starts after the weird song dealio.

Economic Growth

Way back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, American workers lived in factory towns, earned little, and worked when and how they were told to. The long drawn out process of limiting owners and managers power over workers took a combination of labor unions, political radicalism, and the pragmatism of TR's brand of progressivism. Today we learn that for the fast-talking exploiter of today economic "growth" means a reversion to the worst of 19th-century industrial capitalism:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

Leave aside the horrific working conditions, the rampant and unabated pollution, and the quotidian corruption that attends this systematic exploitation of workers and ask your self what the cost of waiting a week for Apple would have been.

History Remains a Discipline; Economics is a Bunch of Blather

Over to Naked Capitalism there is a two part series on economics and how it got that way. One interesting point is that 

the grey- beards summarily expelled both philosophy and history from the graduate economics curriculum; and then, they chased it out of the undergraduate curriculum as well. This latter exile was the bitterest, if only because many undergraduates often want to ask why the profession believes what it does, and hear others debate the answers, since their own allegiances are still in the process of being formed. The rationale tendered to repress this demand was that the students needed still more mathematics preparation, more statistics and more tutelage in ‘theory’, which meant in practice a boot camp regimen consisting of endless working of problem sets, problem sets and more problem sets, until the poor tyros were so dizzy they did not have the spunk left to interrogate the masses of journal articles they had struggled to absorb.

In other words, if you want to assure that you will be wrong for evermore on any issue of importance assume that you are now and for evermore right and that this righness arose without and prolonged period of intellectual struggle.

Crooks

Remember the SEC/Citigroup case a judge threw out because, on the whole, he found it too lenient and wanted an admission of guilt? Instead of going to trial and convicting, the SEC is appealing the ruling. Why? Because:

The S.E.C. has long contended that it must settle most cases rather than take them to trial because its limited resources cannot afford much litigation. In addition, the commission says it frequently achieves in its settlements much the same result that it could hope to obtain in court, without enduring the expense of a trial.

It's the first half of the equation, not enough money to pursue crooks, rather than the I don't think we could have got more money half, that explains why prosecution for financial fraud is at a 20 year low.

This situation is, if you are wondering, by design.

It's Not the Intellecutal Dishonesty;It's the Faux Heroism

Over to Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram mocks Greg Mankiw for prizing method over substance and, to prove his liberal bona fides, mocks Marxists for the same reason. Leaving the latter alone and agree with the former, I would like to highlight this bit of silliness from Mankiw. On the day of the now famous walkout of his overly large course, 750 students in a class at an Ivy seems idiotic and counterproductive, he mentions that

[t]he university administration, which had heard about the planned protest, sent several police officers to sit in my class for the day as a precautionary measure. Luckily, they weren’t needed.

He feared, it would seem, for his life. Those violent nudniks who know nothing of the intricacies of a fictitious science might well have stormed his podium and torn him limb from limb in an excess of rage at being unnaturally privileged.

With a grasp of reality as keen at that, it's no wonder he's an economist.

Market's Don't Exist

Paul Krugman wonders why the "markets went wild" on what he thinks is a "nonevent." The answer is that the markets didn't, because they don't exist. A bunch of people who, recent events have proved, ought not be allowed around sharp objects took the opportunity of a something or another happening to try and make more money actually took the opportunity of something or another happening to make more money. Economics isn't a science and, even more so, investment in stock markets isn't based on science; it's based on, let's call it, the Madoff principle of cheating someone else so that a smaller circle of people can make money by shuffling bits of paper around. Time for a change.

Now I Understand

Herman Cain, whose intellectual negligibility is as boundless as he ego, was fine corporate whatchamacallit; however, as has become abundantly clear  he knows next to nothing about everything other than making a buck. I was, consequently, shocked to find that he

joined the board of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank and became its chairman in 1995 and 1996—the most impressive item on his résumé.

I really do think that this fact explains the idiocy of creating an economic system in which failure is rewarded and hard work punished. A bunch of dunderheads took over the government and gave their dunderheaded pals a bunch of money so that they could all enjoy the dunderhead christmas.

Economic Chaos Explained

By an Irishman no less



via

And There You Have It

via

Racoons Sans Beetles

From TPM we hear of a Republican candidate for Senate who thinks that

[t]he raccoons figured out the beetles are in the bucket," Bruning said. "And its like grapes in a jar. The raccoons - they're not stupid, they're gonna do the easy way if we make it easy for them. Just like welfare recipients all across America. If we don't send them to work, they're gonna take the easy route.

Some quick points: First there are no jobs. There have been ever fewer decently paying jobs since Regan. There has been ever less "welfare" and ever more "workfare" since Regan. Workfare, I learned last night, includes "training" people for all manner of gainful employment. Like detasseling corn, which as "workfare" means that the trainees get no pay but rather "workfare" payments, which is another way of saying the state  operating as capital's business manager organizes the reserve labor army thus decreasing the "fixed" cost of labor. Neoliberalism, it can't be said enough, hates people.

Economics Explained

The task of economics
Is to propagate a bluff:
That the poor have too much money
And the rich have not enough.

source