Here’s a presentation by economist Brad DeLong I’ve been sending around to my friends. He really does explain the whole rotten economic mess in clear, understandable terms.
Category: Class War
See the difference?
Watch this interview with the president of Iceland about the IMF.
More on Dublin rally
Despite bitterly cold weather, an estimated 50,000 Irish citizens yesterday rallied at Dublin’s General Post Office, center of the 1916 Easter uprising, to protest the proposed International Monetary Fund’s proposed bailout of banking losses. Many of those losses were incurred by reckless and possibly criminal behavior by bank managers and for some reason, the politicians think the citizens should pay for it, not the bankers:
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) has said that the country cannot afford to pay the terms of the proposed €85 billion EU/IMF bailout package.
Addressing the large-scale rally against the Government’s planed austerity measures in Dublin today, the general secretary of Congress David Begg said that Dáil must not accede to the terms on offer under the proposed agreement – with which he drew parallels to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I.
“Does anybody in this country or in Dáil Éireann think that we can as a people afford to pay 6.7 per cent on money that we did not ask for in the first place and that is being forced upon us to bail out the banking system in Europe which is in hock to this country for €509 billion”.
“We can’t pay that money and we won’t pay that money”.
Speaking in front of the GPO in O’Connell Street, Mr Begg said that the 1916 proclamation, which was read initially from the same spot, had spoken of help “from our gallant allies in Europe”.
“Well our gallant allies in Europe have arrived 95 years too late and uninvited and instead of guns to help the revolution they have brought economic weapons of mass destruction”
Mr Begg said that gardaí had officially estimated the attendance at today’s march and rally at more than 100,000. However the Garda Press Office put the figure at up to 50,000.
Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, who was the master of ceremonies at the rally, led the crowd in a minute’s chant of “Out” to the Government.
He said that the Government’s economic recovery plan was not about saving Ireland but rather represented “a plan to save the Irish elite”.
Mr O’Toole said that a Government with no mandate would do a deal with people nobody had ever elected
“We know what this deal is. On the one side we will borrow yet more billions to bail out the bankers and the other side of this deal is that this society is supposed to declare war on the poor and vulnerable”.
He said that it would involve a savage assault on the minimum wage, cuts in welfare which would further impoverish those who were already struggling to survive as well as attacks on basic services.
Mr O’Toole said that while this was happening “the elite which caused this catastrophe will protect its own interest”.
“We will still have people driving around in black cars on over €200,000 per year claiming to be the representatives of this democracy”.
“Under the Government’s four-year plan a single person earning €40,000 per year will pay exactly the same amount of extra tax as someone earning €300,000 per year”.
He said that working people in Ireland did not mind making sacrifices. He said that they made sacrifices every day for their children, for their families and for their communities. However he said that they did not want to be the sacrifice
“We are here today to say that we are not economic units whose only function is to behave ourselves and to pay off the gambling debts of our masters, we are not children who must take our medicine or be sent to bed without our supper, we are not subjects, we are citizens and we want our republic back”.
Migrant workers
Taibbi
Really good interview. Go read the whole thing.
Foreclosuregate
The thing that no one seems to mention is that Wall Street bankers and mortgage companies, confronted with a record number of transactions to go with those record profits, never even considered simply hiring enough people to actually handle the paperwork.
Funny, huh.
Tom Toles
There is no “rest of the trick.”
Wake up
Rage Against The Machine:
Pushing back
DUBLIN — After a week that brought Ireland a pledge of a $114 billion international rescue package and the toughest austerity program of any country in Europe, thousands of demonstrators took to Dublin’s streets on Saturday to protest wide cuts in the country’s welfare programs and in public-sector jobs.
The protests centered on a milelong march along the banks of the River Liffey in central Dublin to the General Post Office building on O’Connell Street, site of the battle between Irish republican rebels and British troops in the Easter Uprising in 1916 — an iconic event that many in Ireland regard as the tipping point in Ireland’s long struggle for independence.
The choice of venue for the protests by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, coordinating the march through the city, reflected the mood of anger, dismay and recrimination in the wake of the economic shocks of the past 10 days. Those shocks have been the culmination of two years in which the Irish economy has shrunk by about 15 percent, faster than any other European economy.
Before that, Ireland enjoyed more than a decade of unprecedented prosperity, so the rescue package being worked out by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union and the austerity program the Dublin government has been forced to adopt to secure the bailout loans have come as a deep jolt.
Among other things, the austerity package will involve the loss of about 25,000 public-sector jobs, equivalent to 10 percent of the government work force, as well as a four-year, $20 billion program of tax increases and spending cuts like sharp reductions in state pensions and the minimum wage. One Dublin newspaper, the Irish Independent, estimated that the cost of the measures for a typical middle-class family earning $67,000 a year would be about $5,800 a year.
The ensuing political turmoil has raised questions about the ability of the government of Prime Minister Brian Cowell to secure backing for the austerity package when it is presented to Parliament on Dec. 7. The coalition government was weakened last week by a split between the Fianna Fail party, which Mr. Cowen leads, and its main coalition partner, the Green Party, and a stunning loss by Fianna Fail in an election Friday for a parliamentary seat that reduced the government majority to two.
High profits, no jobs
They really have a nice little capitalist system, don’t they? Glad that’s working out for them!
Not far from where Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke grew up, a revolution inside a Campbell Soup Co. plant explains why U.S. corporations are piling up profits — with little need to hire more people.
Workers such as “Big John” Filmore, a 28-year Campbell veteran, huddle every day with management in situation rooms before their shifts to find ways to save money for the company. Rising productivity is helping boost profit margins here in Maxton, North Carolina, where 858 workers turn out a billion meals a year, and at most of the 243 non-financial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index with rising profit margins.
Companies slashed 8.5 million jobs during the worst recession since the Great Depression, while also slowing capital investment plans. Campbell, the world’s largest soup maker, DuPont Co., the third-biggest U.S. chemical maker, and United Parcel Service Inc., the world’s largest package-delivery business, are asking workers to help save cash by working smarter with existing technology. A potential cost: Efficiency gains reduce the chances recession-casualty jobs will come back.
“When the productivity growth comes, then watch out because that is when companies start not needing so much labor,” Edmund Phelps, a Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate, said in an interview.
Some 142 non-financial companies in the S&P 500 had improvements in operating margins of three percentage points or more from the final three months of 2007, when the previous expansion peaked, compared with the most recent quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg as of yesterday.