Lynn Parramore: How MBA Programs Drive Inequality

Business school students are taught to extract resources instead of creating value.

Over the last several decades, American business executives have made decisions that have exacerbated the inequality that chokes prosperity for the country. They have misallocated resources and they have awarded themselves mind-boggling compensation packages while workers have suffered stagnant wages and increasing job insecurity. The stats are shocking: In 1965, a typical CEO took in about 20 times what an average employee earned, while the latest figures from the AFL-CIO put current CEO pay at 373 times what the average worker makes. (Amazingly, according to a forthcoming paper for the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) by Matt Hopkins and William Lazonick, even that ratio is grossly underestimated because it is based on grant-date fair value estimates of what stock options and stock awards might be worth, rather than how much CEOs actually take home when they exercise stock options and when stock awards vest).

The Media Against Jeremy Corbyn

The British media has launched an unprecedented campaign of disinformation against Jeremy Corbyn.

by Ronan Burtenshaw

The British media has never had much time for Jeremy Corbyn.

Within a week of his election as Labour Party leader in September, it was engaging in a campaign the Media Reform Coalition characterized as an attempt to “systematically undermine” his position. In an avalanche of negative coverage 60 percent of all articles which appeared in the mainstream press about Corbyn were negative with only 13 percent positive. The newsroom, ostensibly the objective arm of the media, had an even worse record: 62 percent negative with only 9 percent positive.

This sustained attack had itself followed a month of wildly misleading headlines about Corbyn and his policies in these same outlets. Concerns about sexual assaults on public transport were construed as campaigning for women-only trains. Advocacy for Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies was presented as a plan to “turn Britain into Zimbabwe.” An appeal to reconsider the foreign policy approach of the last decade was presented as an association with Putin’s Russia.

Leaked Document Reveals Alarming New Environmental Threats of TTIP

By Sierra Club

This morning, as the most recent round of trade negotiations between the U.S. and European Union (EU) began in Brussels, the Guardian reported a leaked document from the EU that reveals its intentions to include new, dangerous language in the proposed energy chapter of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

A Sierra Club analysis of the leaked TTIP proposal finds that it would:

• Require the U.S. and the EU "to eliminate all existing restrictions on the export of natural gas in trade between" the two parties;

Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn Keep Confounding the Elite

Sanders and Corbyn have rekindled the mass desire for a functioning democracy.

By Paul Rosenberg / Salon

Comparisons between Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are nothing new. Both are idiosyncratic, outsider social democrats—“grumpy old socialists” some say—who’ve risen to prominence representing popular views abandoned by elites, particularly elites of the institutional center-left parties in each of their countries. Both were seen as fringe candidates when they first stepped forward last year and elites just can’t wait to re-marginalize them again—but that may not be so easy, both because of who they are and because of what they represent.

Comparisons first kicked into gear when Corbyn won election as Labour leader, naturally gaining Sanders’ congratulation, though naysayers were commonplace, even then. Then, when Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, comparisons intensified—their supporters, for one thing, were strikingly similar.

Paul Krugman: Cheap Money Talks

What with everything else going on, from Trump to Brexit to the horror in Dallas, it’s hard to focus on developments in financial markets — especially because we’re not facing any immediate crisis. But extraordinary things have been happening lately, especially in bond markets. And because money still makes the world go ’round, attention must be paid to what the markets are trying to tell us.

Specifically, there has been an extraordinary plunge in long-term interest rates. Late last year the yield on 10-year U.S. government bonds was around 2.3 percent, already historically low; on Friday it was just 1.36 percent. German bonds, the safe asset of the eurozone, are yielding minus — that’s right, minus — 0.19 percent. Basically, investors are willing to offer governments money for nothing, or less than nothing. What does it mean?

Paul Krugman: All the Nominee’s Enablers

A couple of weeks ago Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, sort of laid out both a health care plan and a tax plan. I say sort of, because there weren’t enough details in either case to do any kind of quantitative analysis. But it was clear that Mr. Ryan’s latest proposals had the same general shape as every other proposal he’s released: huge tax cuts for the wealthy combined with savage but smaller cuts in aid to the poor, and the claim that all of this would somehow reduce the budget deficit thanks to unspecified additional measures.

Given everything else that’s going on, this latest installment of Ryanomics attracted little attention. One group that did notice, however, was Fix the Debt, a nonpartisan deficit-scold group that used to have substantial influence in Washington.

Paul Krugman: Trump, Trade and Workers

Donald Trump gave a speech on economic policy last week. Just about every factual assertion he made was wrong, but I’m not going to do a line-by-line critique. What I want to do, instead, is talk about the general thrust: the candidate’s claim to be on the side of American workers.

Of course, that’s what they all say. But Trumponomics goes beyond the usual Republican assertions that cutting taxes on corporations and the rich, ending environmental regulation and so on will conjure up the magic of the marketplace and make everyone prosper. It also involves posing as a populist, claiming that getting tough on foreigners and ripping up our trade agreements will bring back the well-paying jobs America has lost.

Truth is in danger as new techniques used to stop journalists covering the news

SAGE

London, UK (July 11, 2016). The truth is being suppressed across the world using a variety of methods, according to a special report in the 250th issue of Index on Censorship magazine.

Physical violence is not the only method being used to stop news being published, says editor Rachael Jolley in the Danger in Truth: Truth in Danger report. As well as kidnapping and murders, financial pressure and defamation legislation is being used, the report reveals.