Study Linking US Sanctions to Venezuelan Deaths Buried by Reuters for Over a Month
Reuters has continued to portray the severe impact of US sanctions as an allegation that only Maduro and other Venezuelan officials have made.
Japan Facing Nightmare Scenario of Longer Lives, Low Unemployment, Less Crowding
Running out of people might seem a strange concern for a country that is ten times as densely populated as the United States.
‘Women Take Home Less Money Than They’ve Rightfully Earned’
“There is stigma—still—about the value of women’s work, and that when women enter fields, the pay actually goes down.”
Deborah Vagins on Gender Pay Gap, Nusrat Choudhury on the New COINTELPRO
When the subject is the fact that women continue to be paid less than men for the same work—and women of color still less—such a lot of the conversation is not about how we can fix the problem quickly and concretely, but about whether the numbers really say what they seem to.
Federal Reserve ‘Independence’ Means It’s Free to Serve the Financial Industry
While the New York Times is right to warn about filling the Fed with people with no understanding of economics, it is wrong to imagine that we have in general been well-served by the Fed in recent decades, or that it is necessarily independent in the way we would want.
The Homeless 8-Year-Old Chess Champion and Other Horrific ‘Uplifting’ Stories
Any of these stories could have been used as a gateway to discuss many of the crippling economic and social problems the US is facing. But under neoliberalism, every problem is understood through an individualist lens.
Factchecking WaPo’s Factchecker on Sanders and the Trillion-Dollar Bailout
Contrary to the Washington Post factchecker, Bernie Sanders seems on pretty solid ground when including the Fed loans in the total cost of the Wall Street bailout.
Worry About the Old, Not the Rich, HuffPost Tells Readers
There continues to be a large market for pieces saying the big conflict in the US is generational rather than class. The HuffPost made its latest contribution this week.
New York Times Provides Cover for Austerity Cranks
Incredibly, instead of pointing out that the advocates of austerity have been shown wrong, most reporting continues to treat their policies as being credible, and in fact often works to hide evidence of its failure.
US Media Erase Years of Chavismo’s Gains
Venezuela’s years of social gains have been almost entirely written out of media coverage of the effort to overthrow the Venezuelan government by the US, Canada and their right-wing partners in Venezuela and the region.
CBS’s Horror Stories on National Debt Aren’t Actually All That Scary
The “economic textbooks” CBS cites in its warning on debt seem not to be very reliable.
US Media Ignore—and Applaud—Economic War on Venezuela
The US media chorus supporting a US overthrow of the Venezuelan government has for years pointed to the country’s economic crisis as a justification for regime change, while whitewashing the ways in which the US has strangled the Venezuelan economy.
When Media Say ‘Working Class,’ They Don’t Necessarily Mean Workers—but They Do Mean White
If you’ve seen a piece on the impact of the working class on the midterm elections, it has most likely dealt specifically with working whites. But the media focus distorts the composition of this class, racial and otherwise.
It’s OK to Criticize the Fed—Even for Presidents
Political figures have every right in the world to complain if the Fed is being overly concerned about inflation at the cost of slower growth and higher unemployment.
‘A Hidden History Runs Through Our Social Movements in This Country’
“There’s a long tradition in American economic history, and the economic history of the world, of cooperative enterprise, businesses owned and governed by the people they serve.”
‘We Would Have Had the Most Dramatic Financial Reform You’d Ever Seen’
So anyone who cares about inequality, if they really care about inequality, they should really be upset about the bailout, because that was a great opportunity to get rid of a lot of the inequality.
Dean Baker on Bank Bailout, Nathan Schneider on the Next Economy
Looking back and looking forward on the financial crisis.
Media Econ 101
There are certain economic ideas and values that corporate media either leave unchallenged or aggressively promote
Jeff Bezos’ Paper Tells You Not to Worry About Those Billionaires
Insofar as people get incredibly wealthy from being successful in earning rents at the expense of others in the economy, rather than generating wealth, they are very much like counterfeiters.
Soaring Cost of Clues Leaves Thomas Friedman Apparently Unable to Buy One
In a period of record-low productivity growth, Thomas Friedman tells us the robots are taking all the jobs. Hey, no one ever said you had to have a clue to write for the New York Times.
