Capitalism

by Chris Becker The HBO series Chernobyl wasn’t about the dangers of nuclear power but rather the ability of societies at large to lie, obfuscate, conceal and pass off individual responsibility to create huge “mistakes”.

by Chris Becker This is big.

By David James.

An intriguing proposal about how to rethink the global financial system is the notion of debt free money.

  The global financial crisis and its subsequent repercussions were the inevitable consequence of governments’ abrogating their responsibility to govern.

  The angst of the day is the prospect that low growth will become a permanent feature of the world economy.

  An intriguing discussion was had on the Radio National breakfast program this week about the conclusions to be drawn from the demise of Gunns, Tasmania’s biggest paper and pulp mill.

Surely the greatest misnomer in modern times is the term “financial de-regulation”.

For the last couple of years, in the wake of the financial crisis, the banking and finance community has darkly warned about the dangers of over regulating the sector.

Doubts are growing about the efficacy of quantitative easing.

Paul Krugman appeared on CNBC overnight and the results were fascinating as his Keynsian views went head-to-head with an ideological distaste for government.

The argument advanced by the historian Philip Bobbitt that a transition is occurring in world politics from the nation state to the market state has long appealed as a snapshot of what is occurring in world politics.

Find below Joe Hockey’s recent speech on “the End of the Age of Entitlement”.

In the movie Margin Call, which is broadly about the financial crisis and the insidiousness of the financial sector, one of the characters laments about how he used to be an engineer who did useful things like build bridges (he calculates that one he built saved people thousands of years of travel time).

A talk by the futurist Ray Kurzweil was recently played on the ABC in which he talked about the accelerating rate of innovation when it becomes part of what is broadly termed the information technology industry.

A fascinating article has been written by Eliot Spitzer for The Slate which details the massive lying that went on during the GFC.

There has been much debate about the need to revive Keynesianism, government stimulation of the economy versus austerity.

Binary thinking is always easy.

If nothing else, the European crisis is bringing us back to a timeless reality: power is what matters in human affairs.

We’ve heard quite a bit about the new ‘two-strikes’ rule on executive pay in the media since an amendment to the Corporations Act, to toughen executive remuneration conditions, was passed in July.

We live in hyper-metarialist times, both financial materialism and scientific materialism.

It is a measure of how un-self critical modern economics has been, that the Marxists are starting to appear to be making the most sense of the current crises.

I must admit, beyond writing a story about why we might want to carry the Occupy Wall Street banner downunder a few weeks ago, I haven’t shown a lot of interest in the various “Occupy” movements in Australian cities.