Article Artículo
Washington Post Runs Front Page Piece Exposing Wasteful Program Costing 0.00008 Percent of Federal BudgetDean Baker / December 28, 2013
Article Artículo
Economists Work for Money: Those Who Defend Wall Street Profit from ItDean Baker / December 28, 2013
Article Artículo
Interest Rates Will "Begin" to Rise: NYT Gives Pretty Questionable Investment AdviceDean Baker / December 28, 2013
Article Artículo
NPR Failed to Correct President Obama's Error: Net Exports Have Not Been a Boost to the Economy in 2013Dean Baker / December 27, 2013
Article Artículo
Washington Post Reports on How Greedy Geezers Are Stealing from the YoungDean Baker / December 27, 2013
Article Artículo
WaPo Turns Reality on Its Head: Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Not About Freer Flow of CommerceDean Baker / December 25, 2013
Article Artículo
Washington Post Didn't Get the Memo: Health Care Exchanges Don't Need Young PeopleDean Baker / December 25, 2013
Article Artículo
Robots and Economic Luddites: They Aren't Taking Our Jobs Quickly EnoughDean Baker / December 24, 2013
Article Artículo
Paul Krugman Was Right About Bitcoin and I Said It FirstDean Baker / December 24, 2013
Article Artículo
When It Comes to Bashing Obamacare They Just Make Things Up at the WSJDean Baker / December 23, 2013
Article Artículo
Inequality: Government Is a Perp, Not a BystanderDean Baker
Truth Out, December 23, 2013
Dean Baker / December 23, 2013
Article Artículo
The Bernanke LegacyDean Baker
The Guardian, December 23, 2013
Dean Baker / December 23, 2013
Article Artículo
Bill Keller's Center-Left Is the Reason We Are Growing Less RapidlyBill Keller gives us some holiday fun by getting almost everything completely wrong in contrasting the left-left (Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio) with his friends, the center-left. There are so many profoundly ill-informed assertions that it might be hard to know where to begin if Keller didn't make it so easy. Keller tells readers:
"The center-left (I’m somewhat oversimplifying these categories) agrees on the menace of inequality, but places equal or greater emphasis on the fact that the economy is not growing the way it did for most of the last century. The sluggish growth means that not only are the poorest stuck at the bottom, but the broad middle is in economic decline."
The amazing part of the story is that Keller's center-left heroes are precisely the reason why the economy is not growing the way it did for most of the last century. Keller perhaps missed it, but it was the center-left that set the economy on a bubble driven growth path in the 1990s. The demand generated by the stock bubble was used to fill the hole created both by lower consumption spending due to the upward redistribution of income and the exploding trade deficit which resulted from Clinton's high dollar policy.
Keller's center-left friends also pushed financial deregulation so that their Wall Street friends could get ever richer at the expense of the rest of us. This deregulation facilitated the build-up of the housing bubble, the collapse of which gave us the current downturn from which we have still not recovered.
Given the origins of current weak growth in the policies of his center-left friends it is more than a bit bizarre that Keller would lecture the left-left about the need for stronger growth, as when he tells readers:
"The center-left — and that includes President Obama, most of the time — sees the problem and the solutions as more complicated."
Okay, that should be enough to get the gist of Keller's piece, now for some specifics. He outlines the left-left agenda:
Dean Baker / December 23, 2013
Article Artículo
Bitcoin Mining: Textbook Example of Rent-Seeking and Waste in the Financial SectorDean Baker / December 22, 2013
Article Artículo
NYT Goes for the Gold in the Find Bad Things to Say About Obamacare GameDean Baker / December 21, 2013
Article Artículo
Washington Post Gets Carried Away on Revised Third Quarter GDP ReportDean Baker / December 21, 2013
Article Artículo
Latin America and the Caribbean
Outrage Following Honduran Colonel‘s Attack against U.S. Human Rights DefenderLast week, Colonel German Alfaro, the commander of Operation Xatruch III in Honduras’ Aguan Valley, personally denounced Annie Bird, co-director of the U.S. and Canada-based human rights NGO Rights Action, on TV and radio, alleging among other things that she is engaging in “destabilization work” in the Aguan. The accusations, which were also covered in La Tribuna and Tiempo newspapers, came just after Bird accompanied campesinos in the Aguan to the Attorney General’s office to file human rights complaints, including some against Honduran soldiers. Alfaro also said he was opening an investigation into Bird’s activities.
In response, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a statement yesterday condemning Alfaro's accusations. This was followed by a statement today signed by representatives of 33 human rights, labor, faith-based and other organizations, including the AFL-CIO, Sisters of Mercy, and the Washington Office on Latin America calling on the State Department to denounce Alfaro's comments.
HRW's Americas Director Jose Miguel Vivanco also urged the U.S. government to condemn Alfaro's accusations:
Given its ongoing cooperation with Honduran security forces, the US government should use all the tools at its disposal to call a halt to verbal attacks on activists by senior Honduran military officials[.] Whether directed at human rights defenders or campesino leaders, such accusations only add to a climate of fear and intimidation.
Alfaro’s statements fit into an ongoing pattern of violence, intimidation and threats against human rights defenders in Honduras, both foreign and domestic, that has including the kidnapping by armed men of two European human rights defenders in July; threats and public accusations against American and Canadian human rights defenders and electoral observers ahead of and during the elections; and threats and public denunciations of Honduran human rights defenders like Bertha Oliva and Victor Fernandez.
CEPR / December 20, 2013