Category: Worth A Look

The Federal Reserve is a leviathan that overshadows the world economy, dominating it, controlling the flow of money, affecting all our lives.

The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913 in reaction to the bank runs, bankruptcies and financial chaos caused by the Panic of 1907. The stated purpose of the Act was to create a stable monetary system to bring financial stability to the United States and prevent such economic crises as the Panic of 1907 from occurring again. Sixteen years after the passage of the Act, under the Federal Reserve's watch, the nation experienced the worst financial collapse in our history and descended into our deepest and darkest depression–the Great Depression–a crisis far worse than the Panic of 1907 by orders of magnitude.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: The Tyranny of the Federal Reserve”

In Killing the Host, economist Michael Hudson exposes how finance, insurance, and real estate (the FIRE sector) have seized control of the global economy at the expense of industrial capitalism and governments. The FIRE sector is responsible for today's extreme economic polarization (the 1% vs. the 99%) via favored tax status that inflates real estate prices while deflating the “real” economy of labor and production.  Hudson shows in vivid detail how the Great 2008 Bailout saved the banks but not the economy, and plunged the U.S., Irish, Latvian and Greek economies into debt deflation and austerity. Killing the Host describes how the phenomenon of debt deflation imposes punishing austerity on the U.S. and European economies, siphoning wealth and income upward to the financial sector while impoverishing the middle class.

Published by CounterPunch, 2015.  356 pages.

2015 A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the “Mexican Drug War”

The “War Against Drugs”: who started it, and why? What are its consequences in real terms, not mere statistics, for the people most affected by it? One hundred thousand deaths later-with the vast majority of those killed innocent citizens, such as the 43 teachers college students murdered in Guerrero-the solution to peace requires a radical rethinking of how America, and its neighbors, approach the illegal drug trade.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Books on Mexico and the United States — DHS, NAFTA, Border, Immigration, Merged Cultures & Bandit Zones”

Too Many Secrets: What Washington Should Stop Hiding (Review by Ron Wyden and John Dickas in Foreign Affairs)

From Dick Cheney's man-sized safe to the National Security Agency's massive intelligence gathering, secrecy has too often captured the American government's modus operandi better than the ideals of the Constitution. In this important new book, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., who was chief counsel to the U.S. Church Committee on Intelligence uses examples ranging from the dropping of the first atomic bomb and the Cuban Missile Crisis to Iran Contra and 9/11 to illuminate this central question: how much secrecy does good governance require? Schwarz argues that while some control of information is necessary, governments tend to fall prey to a culture of secrecy that is ultimately not just hazardous to democracy but antithetical to it. This history provides the essential context to recent cases from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden. Democracy in the Dark is a natural companion to Schwarz's Unchecked and Unbalanced, co-written with Aziz Huq, which plumbed the power of the executive branch—a power that often depends on and derives from the use of secrecy.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Democracy in the Dark The Seduction of Government Secrecy”

2016 (forthcoming): Postcapitalism, A Guide to Our Future  In this bold and prophetic book, Mason shows how, from the ashes of the crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable economy.

2012: Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere, The New Global Revolutions  Economic crisis, social networking and a new political consciousness have come together to ignite a new generation of radicals.

2010: Meltdown, The End of the Age of Greed  Meltdown is the gripping account of the financial collapse that destroyed the West’s investment banks, brought the global economy to its knees, and undermined three decades of neoliberal orthodoxy.

Does the universe embody beautiful ideas?

Artists as well as scientists throughout human history have pondered this “beautiful question.” With Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek as your guide, embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. In fact, every major advance in his career came from this intuition: to assume that the universe embodies beautiful forms, forms whose hallmarks are symmetry—harmony, balance, proportion—and economy. There are other meanings of “beauty,” but this is the deep logic of the universe—and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring.

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