What's Missing from the Iraq Debate

Iraqis.

BY MARC LYNCH | MARCH 21, 2013

The outpouring of commentary surrounding the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war can feel like déjà vu all over again. The political battle lines have changed very little over the past decade: Mostly, those who opposed the war decry the invasion, and its supporters defend it. There have been plenty of (often very good) diagnoses of what went wrong, but the parallel push for intervention in Syria and war with Iran suggests that few lessons will actually be learned from the war.

But here's one surprising detail about the flood of retrospectives: They have almost exclusively been written by Americans, talking about Americans, for Americans. Indeed, many Iraqis fail to see the point of commemorating the disastrous war for the benefit of the American media. 

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

Anu Partanen, Dec 29 2011, 3:00 PM ET

The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.

Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Dean Baker: Neither the NYT nor Washington Post Has Heard About Unemployment

It's apparently hard to find out about the state of the U.S. economy in the nation's capital. That is the only way to explain the fact that in their articles on the budget passed by the Senate last night neither the NYT or Washington Post said one word about how the budget would affect the economy over the next decade.

This one should have been pretty basic and simple. As tens of millions of graduates of intro economics classes know, GDP is equal to the sum of consumption, investment, government spending and net exports. Currently, annual GDP is close to $1 trillion below its potential according to the estimate from the Congressional Budget Office because private sector demand plunged following the collapse of the housing bubble.

Secrets of the right-wing conspiracy playbook

The debate over immigration and the border is a classic example of how the extreme right manipulates real issues 

By David Neiwert

The extremist right in America has always fed on real grievances that go either unaddressed or are mishandled by the mainstream system—by government, and in particular the federal government. In the 1980s and ’90s, they channeled discontent with badly malfunctioning federal farming and land-use policies in rural America into uprisings like the Posse Comitatus and Patriot/militia movements and their various offshoots, such as the Montana Freemen. This led to armed standoffs with federal agents and varying waves of domestic terrorism, all of it emanating from the American heartland.

What these extremists always tell their audiences is that there are simple reasons for their current miseries—inevitably, it is a combination of a secret cabal of elite conspirators running society like a puppet show at the top, crushing the middle-class working man from above, while a parasitic underclass saps his strength from below. This usually plays out, in the worldview of right-wing extremists, as being part of a secret conspiracy to enslave ordinary working people and destroy America.

The Price of Evil at JPMorgan Chase

By Richard Eskow | March 20, 2013

$16 billion.

That’s how much JPMorgan Chase has paid in fines, settlements and other litigation expenses in the last four years alone.

More than half of that amount, $8.5 billion, was paid out in fines and settlements as the result of illegal actions taken by bank executives.

$8.5 billion is almost 12 percent of the net income the mega-bank brought in during the same period.

Paul Krugman: Treasure Island Trauma

A couple of years ago, the journalist Nicholas Shaxson published a fascinating, chilling book titled “Treasure Islands,” which explained how international tax havens — which are also, as the author pointed out, “secrecy jurisdictions” where many rules don’t apply — undermine economies around the world. Not only do they bleed revenues from cash-strapped governments and enable corruption; they distort the flow of capital, helping to feed ever-bigger financial crises.

One question Mr. Shaxson didn’t get into much, however, is what happens when a secrecy jurisdiction itself goes bust. That’s the story of Cyprus right now. And whatever the outcome for Cyprus itself (hint: it’s not likely to be happy), the Cyprus mess shows just how unreformed the world banking system remains, almost five years after the global financial crisis began.

Selling the Store: Why Democrats Shouldn’t Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table

by Robert Reich

 

Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.

This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans — who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.
 

Glenn Greenwald: The persecution of Barrett Brown - and how to fight it

The journalist and Anonymous activist is targeted as part of a broad effort to deter and punish internet freedom activism

Aaron's Swartz's suicide in January triggered waves of indignation, and rightly so. He faced multiple felony counts and years in prison for what were, at worst, trivial transgressions of law. But his prosecution revealed the excess of both anti-hacking criminal statutes, particularly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the fixation of federal prosecutors on severely punishing all forms of activism that challenge the power of the government and related entities to control the flow of information on the internet. Part of what drove the intense reaction to Swartz's death was how sympathetic of a figure he was, but as noted by Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor in the DOJ's computer crimes unit and now a law professor at GWU, what was done to Swartz is anything but unusual, and the reaction to his death will be meaningful only if channeled to protest other similar cases of prosecutorial abuse:

"I think it's important to realize that what happened in the Swartz case happens in lots and lots of federal criminal cases. . . . What's unusual about the Swartz case is that it involved a highly charismatic defendant with very powerful friends in a position to object to these common practices. That's not to excuse what happened, but rather to direct the energy that is angry about what happened. If you want to end these tactics, don't just complain about the Swartz case. Don't just complain when the defendant happens to be a brilliant guy who went to Stanford and hangs out with Larry Lessig. Instead, complain that this is business as usual in federal criminal cases around the country - mostly with defendants who no one has ever heard of and who get locked up for years without anyone else much caring."

Prosecutorial abuse is a drastically under-discussed problem in general, but it poses unique political dangers when used to punish and deter online activism. But it's becoming the preeminent weapon used by the US government to destroy such activism.

Tell Your Senators to Defend Social Security and Medicare by Supporting These Amendments

By Richard Eskow | March 21, 2013

This week two Senate budget amendments could affect the future of everybody reading these words – presuming we live long enough to reach our retirement years.

That’s not an overstatement:  The Sanders-Harkin-Hirono Amendment would prevent the government from cutting Social Security benefits, an idea which both sides in the “Grand Bargain” negotiations seem to like far too much for comfort. The Stabenow Amendment would ban the privatization of the Medicare system through the Ryan/Republican “voucher” scheme.*

The 21st-Century Version of Slavery Is Widespread In America 

By Steven Rosenfeld

March 18, 2013  |  A 21st-century version of slavery—captive labor—is rampant at the bottom of the U.S. economy, and Washington politicians and business lobbies want to keep it that way, or even expand it as part of the immigration reform talks now in Congress.

Under a system of “legalized slavery,” foreign workers are routinely thrown in massive debt, cheated out of wages, housed in squalid shacks, held captive by brokers and businesses that seize passports, Social Security cards and return tickets, denied healthcare, rented to other employers (including the military), and sexually harassed and threatened with firing and deportation if they complain, according to two detailed reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center [3] and the National Guestworker Alliance [4]. The reports are based on sworn testimony gathered for lawsuits.

The H-2B visa program [5] that brought 83,000 foreign guestworkers to the U.S. in 2011 for non-farm work has become a stalking ground for some of the worst abuses in American capitalism, according to recent [3] reports [6] by anti-poverty law groups. These reports describe in excruciating detail how predatory capitalists in many manual labor-based industries (supplying national brands like Walmart) lure and prey upon foreigners whose jobs average [5] less than $10 an hour with little regard for human rights, labor law or legal consequence.

Murrey Marder, Early McCarthy Skeptic, Dies at 93

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: March 19, 2013
By certain journalistic lights, the reporter Murrey Marder was an editor’s nightmare. He wrote slowly and squeezed against deadlines. He debated with editors. His articles were long, often complicated and never laid claim to stylish writing.

But by another, more important standard, Mr. Marder, who died on March 11 at 93, was an ace. In nearly 40 years at The Washington Post, he embodied the role of public watchdog, becoming an emblem of meticulous, thorough news gathering when his persistence in laying bare the lies and exaggerations of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade helped bring McCarthy to ruin.  

ALEC Is Now Deciding What You Eat 

Tuesday, 19 March 2013 15:07 
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Show | Report 

ALEC is back.

The Conservative corporate-friendly group funded in part by the Koch brothers and responsible for the infamous Stand Your Ground and Voter Suppression ID laws, and a slew of other corporate-friendly laws, now doesn't want you to know about the food that you're eating.

The way they come up with all this is that a couple of times a year they get corporate lobbyists and executives together in a fancy hotel or resort with mostly Republican state representatives and state senators. The ratio is roughly one-to-one of lobbyists to elected officials.
 

Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil

By Antonia Juhasz, Special to CNN

March 19, 2013 -- Updated 1507 GMT (2307 HKT)


Editor's note: Ten years ago ,the war in Iraq began. This week, we focus on the people involved in the war and the lives that changed forever. Antonia Juhasz, an oil industry analyst, is author of several books, including "The Bush Agenda" and "The Tyranny of Oil."


(CNN) -- Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil.


It has been 10 years since Operation Iraqi Freedom's bombs first landed in Baghdad. And while most of the U.S.-led coalition forces have long since gone, Western oil companies are only getting started.


Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq's domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms.

Gailbraith and Panitch: Is a New "New Deal" Possible? 

Wednesday, 20 March 2013 11:44  
By Paul Jay, The Real News Network | Interview and Video 

James K. Gailbraith and Leo Panitch discuss the 80th anniversary of the election of FDR and the significance of the New Deal.

TRANSCRIPT:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
It's been 80 years since the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. On the occasion of that, we are doing a series of interviews with various economists, discussing, debating the significance of the New Deal. And in this series we're going to ask the overall question: is a new New Deal possible given today's politics?

Now joining us to discuss this first of all is Professor James K. Galbraith. He's the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Government and Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He's the author of the book The Predator State, and more recently Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis.

Why the Trader Joe's Model Benefits Workers--And the Bottom-Line

Companies that invest in higher salaries for low-level employees find success in a competitive market.

By Sophie Quinton
Updated: March 21, 2013 | 11:07 a.m.
March 19, 2013 | 1:16 a.m.
The average American cashier makes $20,230 a year, a salary that in a single-earner household would leave a family of four living under the poverty line. But if he works the cash registers at QuikTrip, it’s an entirely different story. The convenience-store and gas-station chain offers entry-level employees an annual salary of around $40,000, plus benefits. Those high wages didn’t stop QuikTrip from prospering in a hostile economic climate. While other low-cost retailers spent the recession laying off staff and shuttering stores, QuikTrip expanded to its current 645 locations across 11 states.

Many employers believe that one of the best ways to raise their profit margin is to cut labor costs. But companies like QuikTrip, the grocery-store chain Trader Joe’s, and Costco Wholesale are proving that the decision to offer low wages is a choice, not an economic necessity. All three are low-cost retailers, a sector that is traditionally known for relying on part-time, low-paid employees. Yet these companies have all found that the act of valuing workers can pay off in the form of increased sales and productivity. 

America's Three-Tiered Justice System

Wednesday, 20 March 2013 00:00  
By Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis 

Big shots are above the law, the government now admits, but a three-tiered justice system has Congress churning out new bills to keep the prison industry booming.

"Equal Justice under Law," is the motto inscribed on the frieze of the United States Supreme Court building.

Sticklers for semantics say that the modifiers "equal" and "under law" in the Supreme Court's motto are redundant, because justice by definition is equal treatment under a system of written and publicly accessible rules. Whether that is the case is precisely what is at issue in America today.

America Is STILL Paying For The Civil War

Mike Baker, Associated Press | Mar. 19, 2013, 7:34 AM

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.

 

Invasion of Iraq, 10 years later

The Center for Public Integrity

On the evening of March 19, 2003 — ten years ago — U.S. warplanes bombed a site in Baghdad that military officials believed was the hideout of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Although the failed attempt to kill him was followed two days later by hours of missile and bomb strikes, and then a ground invasion, it was an inauspicious start to a war that would lead to a lengthy U.S. occupation of Iraq and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. treasury. Almost 4,500 American troops were killed in the conflict and more than 32,000 were wounded.

Five years ago, in an effort to hold accountable the officials who led the United States into the Iraq war and orchestrated the war’s expansion, the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism combed through thousands of statements made by those officials about the war. The “Iraq; The War Card” project found hundreds of falsehoods, demonstrating that the policy underpinnings of the conflict were based in large measure on poor understanding, at best, or a manipulative public relations campaign, at worst.

Are Health Costs Really Slowing? And What Does it Mean If They Are?

Mar 19, 2013

[This post is based on Chapter 5 of the Council of Economic Advisers new Economic Report of the President.]

The fact shown in the first chart below—a decline in the rate of health spending per person—is becoming pretty widely known.  What’s not known is whether this trend will stick.  As I suggest below, based on the new ERP chapter, I think at least some of it will, and if it does, it signals one of the more important economic developments of our time, with far reaching implications for fiscal policy (and for jobs and growth too, but I’ll speak to that in a different post).

Paul Krugman: Giving Credence to the Wrong People

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, is feeling dyspeptic — not for the first time — over a Washington Post article published earlier this month suggesting that slow growth is the new normal in the United States. In a recent online post, Mr. Baker wondered why we should listen to people who have been wrong about everything so far. But it’s actually worse than he said.

In the Washington Post article, the case for slow growth forever is mainly made by quoting Kevin Warsh, a former governor at the Federal Reserve.

Lesson of JPMorgan’s Whale Trade: Nothing Was Learned

by Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica, March 19, 2013, 1 p.m.

People have learned their lesson.

We've been told that so many times since the near-death experiences of the financial crisis. Bankers and regulators have flipped roles: Now it's the bankers who are cautious and their overseers who are aggressive.

Details of JPMorgan Chase's multibillion-dollar trading loss — brought to light by a riveting and devastating report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations — demonstrate what a sham that is. Bankers aren't acting cautious and chastened. Risk managers aren't in the ascendance on Wall Street. Regulators remain their duped and docile selves.

Direct Deposit and Social Security: Not so Nice for Those who Owe

posted by Nathalie Martin

Jonathan Ginsberg posted an interesting article on the National Association of Chapter 13 trustees web site this weekend, that will be relevant to many of our readers as well. Social security is now requiring all beneficiaries to set up direct deposit, which means the resulted funds could become available to executing creditors if there are any funds from any other source in the account as well. You might recall my blog about this some time back, which contains cites to some of the relevant law.

As my previous blog explains, Federal law provides that Social Security payments are exempt from garnishment from civil creditors. If, for example, a credit card lender sues you and obtains a judgment, that creditor cannot ask Social Security to withhold funds from your government check. While these protections do not apply with equal force to the IRS collecting a tax debt or a creditor collecting child support, all other creditors are not to touch social security funds under any circumstances.

Secretive U.S. Amendment Would Weaken Biotech Oversight

By Carey L. Biron

WASHINGTON, Mar 19 2013 (IPS) - Food safety advocates, environmentalists and health professionals here are engaging in a fervent last-minute campaign to highlight a controversial legislative amendment they say would gut the ability of both the judiciary and the federal government to regulate genetically modified agricultural products.

The U.S. Senate is slated to vote early this week on amendments to a massive, “must pass” bill that would fund the U.S. government’s operations beyond Mar. 27 to the end of this fiscal year. That bill – a piece of stopgap legislation known as a continuing resolution – is so important that leaders in the U.S. Senate had previously suggested that they would not include any potentially controversial amendments.
 

The Shame of America’s Gulag

By Chris Hedges


If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.
 
Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo, both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called “a prison within a prison.” Before being released in 2009, Lutalo was in the management control unit for 22 of the 28 years he served for the second of two convictions—the first for a bank robbery and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity, he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell, writing, meditating and tearing up newspapers to make collages that portrayed his prison conditions.  

Corporate-Backed Trans-Pacific Partnership Shrouded in Secrecy  

Tuesday, 19 March 2013 09:15
By Sam Knight, Truthout | News Analysis

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a multilateral trade deal currently being hammered out by the United States and ten other countries, could end up affecting every human being and dollar of wealth on the planet. The extent to which it will is clear to no one, apart from negotiators. But the deal, in its current form, has been in the works since 2010, involves Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam, and is open to all 21 countries in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) region. US Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk, who just left his post in early March, and other top negotiators have said that they would welcome China, and recent reports in the Japanese and Australian media indicate that Japan is set to join. Thus, even the most minor of edits to the draft text could end up making or breaking people from Brisbane to Bangor. But legislators around the world are being kept in the dark about what they're voting on until the deal is hammered out; it's expected to be completed this year. When it's finished, if the experience of Congress here is any indication, legislators will be feeling extraordinary pressure from corporate lobbyists and their heads of state to accept the deal without a fuss.

Dean Baker: Capitalism, Steven Pearlstein, and Morality

The Washington Post had a major column by Steve Pearlstein on the front page of its Outlook section headlined, "Is Capitalism Moral?" The piece notes the sharp upward redistribution of income over the last three decades and asks whether we should just being willing to accept market outcomes.

Of course this question is absurd on its face. The upward redistribution of the last three decades was the result of deliberate government policies designed to redistribute income upward; it was not the natural workings of the market.
 

Oh no! It’s Climategate Three

by Paul Brown

 

In 2009, shortly before the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, hackers published a haul of climate scientists’ emails. That was Climategate One. Two years on came another batch, and a few days ago a third. Do they tell us anything about the science – or, perhaps, about the hackers? This Comment offers a few possible pointers.

Black ops” is what the military call it – using false radio messages, news releases and newspapers, leaflets, and creating conspiracy theories so the enemy is confused, demoralized and loses the stomach for the fight.

How Americans Lost the Right to Counsel, 50 Years After 'Gideon'

By Andrew Cohen

You have a right to an attorney in a criminal case, even if you cannot afford one. The Supreme Court said so half a century ago. But today that precious right is systematically ignored or undermined.

Next Monday, America will quietly mark one of the most profound anniversaries in its legal history. Exactly 50 years ago, on March 18, 1963, the United States Supreme Court unanimously announced in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Sixth Amendment guarantees to every criminal defendant in a felony trial the right to a lawyer. "Reason and reflection," Justice Hugo Black wrote, "require us to recognize that, in our adversary system of criminal justice, any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided to him."

The Gideon decision, heralded in its own time, has profoundly changed America's criminal justice system ever since. In the past half century since the ruling, the constitutional right to counsel has ensured that millions of criminal suspects -- the guilty, the innocent, and the somewhere-in-between -- have been aided by earnest, capable lawyers. The mandate of Gideon has forced prosecutors to be fairer and more honest in their dealings with defendants. It has burdened trial judges with additional pretrial motions. As a result of all of that, in a justice system designed to test evidence rather than seek truth, the Gideon ruling undoubtedly has resulted in more accurate results at trial.

America’s Latest Phony Fiscal Crisis

By Simon Johnson - Mar 17, 2013

In most countries that experience a fiscal crisis, there is no ambiguity about the situation.

The government is unable to sell debt at a reasonable interest rate. This probably coincides with a broader shift out of domestic assets, as smart investors read the writing on the wall or in the newspapers. The currency collapses and, often, inflation accelerates. The government is forced to slash spending and, cap in hand, asks for help from the world’s least popular ambulance service: the International Monetary Fund.

No part of this description fits the modern U.S. Rates on government debt are very low, the currency isn’t depreciating rapidly and inflation seems stable. There is no imaginable circumstance under which the U.S. would need to borrow from the IMF. Yet this great land of innovation has undeniably invented its unique kind of fiscal crisis.

Paul Krugman: Marches of Folly, From Iraq to the Deficit

Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond
to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that
attack.

Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake — that the case for war was weak and
possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too
likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.
 

7 Things You Need to Know About the Shocking Cyprus Bailout Crisis That Has Everyone Freaked Out

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

March 17, 2013  |  Editor's Note: The parliamentary vote on the bailout has been delayed until Tuesday.

In a small island nation far, far away, the financial shit is hitting the fan. A new bailout package in the euro zone comes with terms that are causing a tsunami of anxiety across Europe and beyond. Here’s what’s happening and why it matters.

1. What the heck is going on?

Since 2008, the Greek economy has gone from bad to worse. As Greece’s economy collapsed, the European and Greek banks that held the nation’s debts should have been told to eat their losses, write off the debts, and replace their managements. Instead, the European Union stepped in to engineer one bailout after another. The prices for the bailouts were high: austerity policies that didn’t work. The result everywhere is that national income has fallen steeply, while the countries fall further into debt.

Cypriot banks got into trouble from their exposure to neighboring Greece. Finance ministers from euro countries and representatives from the IMF and the European Central Bank came up with a radical plan for a bailout to Cyprus’ banks: In exchange for €10 billion ($13 billion) in rescue money, creditors would impose a one-time tax of 6.75 percent on all bank deposits under €100,000 ($131,000) and 9.9 percent over that amount, while Cyprus cut government spending and raised revenues. The decision to make depositors pay was a stunning departure from past EU-led bailouts.

Government Debt and Deficits Are Not the Problem. Private Debt Is.

By Michael Hudson

(Remarks by Prof. Michael Hudson at The Atlantic’s Economy Summit, Washington DC, Wednesday, March 13, 2013)

There are two quite different perspectives in the set of speeches at this conference. Many on our morning panels – Steve Keen, William Greider, and earlier Yves Smith and Robert Kuttner – have warned about the economy being strapped by debt. The debt we are talking about is private-sector debt. But most officials this afternoon focus on government debt and budget deficits as the problem – especially social spending such as Social Security, not bailouts to the banks and Federal Reserve credit to re-inflate prices for real estate, stocks and bonds.