Rethinking the Economy

It’s time, says Robert Reich, to drop a Top Hat on the corruption spewed by the market:
In the words of lobbyist Lauren Maddox, “The policy process is an extension of the market battlefield.”
The answer is not necessarily found in broader or stricter “ethics rules” barring specific gifts to politicians. Such rules may have [...]

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According to Wired’s Spencer Reiss, Copenhagen is too little too late:
The really inconvenient truth: We’re toast. Fried. Steamed. Poached. More so than even many hand-wringing carbonistas admit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, C02 that’s already in the air or in the pipeline will stoke “irreversible” warming for the next 1,000 years. [...]

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Normally I’m too cynical to get pissed off when I read the news. But reading about how Wall Street’s looting local taxpayers made me so furious I’ve been stewing over how we let ourselves get so screwed. What would’ve happened if Obama had cut a tougher deal right at the start?
Take the bailout of [...]

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What happens when an economic model can’t straightforwardly deal with the role of power in the economy? You get bizarre ideas like the one presented in the New York Times.
Gretchen Morgenson, one of the smartest business writers around, asks what we’re going to do about the financial regulators who completely failed us.
Even though calamitous [...]

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Matthew Yglesias says the folks pushing the public option need to calm down. Without the public option,
It wouldn’t be an ideal health plan or the best bill you can imagine. But it’s no exaggeration to say that it would be the greatest progressive legislative accomplishment in four decades, and that’s nothing to sneer at.
In the [...]

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In an aggressively global economy, do we really have any power anymore? If we try to change the rules in the US, won’t business just outsource everything to China?
Actually, according to BusinessWeek, Europe just showed us we’ve got a lot more power than you think. Europe’s in the middle of passing a bunch of new [...]

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There’s one thing Democrats and Republican politicians agree on when it comes to healthcare reform: digitizing healthcare records could be a godsend. When it works, it can improve patient care, reduce medical errors, and save billions of dollars a year — a crucial consideration given the threat that skyrocketing healthcare costs pose to our economic [...]

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We need to remove from the investment banking and the commercial banking industries a lot of the practices and prerogatives that they have so lovingly possessed. If they are too big to fail, they are too big to be allowed to be as gamey and venal as they’ve been — and as stupid as they’ve [...]

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An interesting article by Newsweek’s Sharon Begley about how Greenpeace acts as a check on corporations by helping companies interested in protecting the environment and smacking upside the head companies that aren’t — in short, by Stacking the Deck in Favor of the Good Guys:
As [Kimberly-Clark] CEO Thomas Falk began a speech to [...]

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If a lioness wants to catch more gazelles, she could practice sneaking up on them. She could work on her sprinting skills. In short, she could increase her odds of succeeding according to the current rules.
But if a lioness was a business, she’d have another option. She could try to get a law passed discouraging [...]

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