Granny Goodness and Her Walmart Fascism ARE Perpetual Austerity and Inequality

truthdig  |  Thomas Frank’s writing about electoral politics and its impact on American culture has been published for decades in such venues as Harper’s Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and in his 2004 book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” In his latest book, “Listen Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?,” the journalist and political analyst tackles the question of what changed within the Democratic Party to make it become a “liberalism of the rich.”

“The Democratic Party itself has changed,” Frank told Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer during an episode of “Scheer Intelligence” earlier this year. “What’s changed about them is the social class that they answer to, that they respect, that they come from.”

The trend has gotten worse.

“Democrats look at Wall Street, and they see people like themselves,” he said in an interview with Scheer during the Democratic National Convention in July. 

On Tuesday night, Frank joined Scheer at the University of Southern California to discuss “Listen, Liberal” and his analysis of Hillary Clinton during this election cycle, from her public views on inequality in United States to her promises to tamp down greed on Wall Street. 

Frank offered critiques of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the average working-class American, the Clintons—who signed off on welfare reform that proved discriminatory—and the two-party system. He said:

Hillary has changed her position on issues many, many times over the years, and some of the things she’s done that her husband did that she had a hand in—she was a close adviser to her husband as president—have been disastrous, had catastrophic effects on people—welfare reform, for example. Every time Hillary says—and she says it a lot—that her whole life has been about protecting children, there’s an enormous counterexample, which is welfare reform, or what they called reform. They abolished the welfare system in this country, Hillary and her husband did. This is one of the cruelest things [...] It was a New Deal program that they abolished. It was a cruel thing, it was more or less an overtly racist thing, and to do that to the poorest and weakest members of society—at the time, it just turned my stomach. And it’s a little creepy that Hillary sees fit to represent herself as the great defender of poor women and children because she manifestly is not. And that’s one of many contradictions in Hillary Clinton’s record.

If you read the biographies of Hillary Clinton, if you watch a speech by Hillary Clinton, if you watch the presentation of her life story that they had at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary’s story is all about virtue. She is good with a capital G. When she gave her acceptance speech at the convention, she was wearing all white. She likes to dress in all white; she is Joan of Arc. That is how she sees herself. Her favorite saying that she quoted at the convention, it’s this Methodist thing: Do all the good you can, all the ways you can, to all the people you can, for as long as ever you can. She’s good, she’s so good, she’s so virtuous, her heart’s in the right place, and every biography of her emphasizes this intense sense of her goodness, her virtues—her overpowering, 100-proof virtue. ... She is intensely good. And yet, look at Libya, look at the welfare system in this country.

no chip too foul to use in the political-economic game for control of the world's largest oil reserves..,

NYTimes |  This nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high. Now that prices have collapsed — they are around a third what they were in 2014 — the consequences are casting a destructive shadow across the country. Lines for food, long a feature of life in Venezuela, now erupt into looting. The bolívar, the country’s currency, is nearly worthless.

The crisis is aggravated by a political feud between Venezuela’s leftists, who control the presidency, and their rivals in congress. The president’s opponents declared a humanitarian crisis in January, and this month passed a law that would allow Venezuela to accept international aid to prop up the health care system.

“This is criminal that we can sit in a country with this much oil, and people are dying for lack of antibiotics,” says Oneida Guaipe, a lawmaker and former hospital union leader.

But Mr. Maduro, who succeeded Hugo Chávez, went on television and rejected the effort, describing the move as a bid to undermine him and privatize the hospital system.

“I doubt that anywhere in the world, except in Cuba, there exists a better health system than this one,” Mr. Maduro said.

Late last fall, the aging pumps that supplied water to the University of the Andes Hospital exploded. They were not repaired for months.

So without water, gloves, soap or antibiotics, a group of surgeons prepared to remove an appendix that was about to burst, even though the operating room was still covered in another patient’s blood.

Even in the capital, only two of nine operating rooms are functioning at the J. M. de los Ríos Children’s Hospital.

on the deck of the Titanic, no one is weaker and more expendable than elderly pensioners...,

democracynow |  Well, Amy, we all know what Ponzi growth is—right?—what a Ponzi scheme is. It’s when you pretend to be growing your income on the basis of unsustainable debt. And the more debt you take, the more you pretend that you’re growing. But then you have to have even more unsustainable debt in order to maintain this illusion. Now, what is Ponzi austerity? Once these bubbles burst, the only way you can continue to pretend that you’re solvent is through even more debt, that will be utilized in order to repay or to pretend to repay the previous debts. And if you’re going through a period of belt tightening to impress creditors that you’re doing the right—the good Protestant thing, which is, you know, to be parsimonious and to tighten your belt, you have austerity, which continuously reduces national income, because when you reduce pensions, when you reduce investment, when you reduce all the determinants of aggregate demand, income of the nation shrinks. And you keep tightening that belt through more pension cuts, more reductions in public health and so on, and public education, and you keep on taking new unsustainable loans in order to pretend that you’re not insolvent. That’s Ponzi austerity for you.

AMY GOODMAN: Yanis Varoufakis, we’re going to continue this conversation after break. Professor Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece, now teaching economic theory at the University of Athens. His new book is titled And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future. We’ll be back with him in a minute.

Austin Indiana the HIV Capital of America

medicalxpress |  Jessica and Darren McIntosh were too busy to see me when I arrived at their house one Sunday morning. When I returned later, I learned what they'd been busy with: arguing with a family member, also an addict, about a single pill of prescription painkiller she'd lost, and injecting meth to get by in its absence. Jessica, 30, and Darren, 24, were children when they started using drugs. Darren smoked his first joint when he was 12 and quickly moved on to snorting pills. "By the time I was 13, I was a full-blown pill addict, and I have been ever since," he said. By age 14, he'd quit school. When I asked where his care givers were when he started using drugs, he laughed. "They're the ones that was giving them to me," he alleged. "They're pill addicts, too."

Darren was 13 when he started taking pills, which he claims were given to him by an adult relative. "He used to feed them to me," Darren said. On fishing trips, they'd get high together. Jessica and Darren have never known a life of family dinners, board games and summer vacations. "This right here is normal to us," Darren told me. He sat in a burgundy recliner, scratching at his arms and pulling the leg rest up and down. Their house was in better shape than many others I'd seen, but nothing in it was theirs. Their bedrooms were bare. The kind of multigenerational drug use he was describing was not uncommon in their town, Austin, in southern Indiana. It's a tiny place, covering just two and a half square miles of the sliver of land that comprises Scott County. An incredible proportion of its 4,100 population – up to an estimated 500 people – are shooting up. It was here, starting in December 2014, that the single largest HIV outbreak in US history took place. Austin went from having no more than three cases per year to 180 in 2015, a prevalence rate close to that seen in sub-Saharan Africa.

Exactly how this appalling human crisis happened here, in this particular town, has not been fully explained. I'd arrived in Scott County a week previously to find Austin not exactly desolate. Main Street had a few open businesses, including two pharmacies and a used-goods store, owned by a local police sergeant. The business with the briskest trade was the gas station, which sold $1 burritos and egg rolls. In the streets either side of it, though, modest ranch houses were interspersed among shacks and mobile homes. Some lawns were well-tended, but many more were not. On some streets, every other house had a warning sign: 'No Trespassing', 'Private Property', 'Keep Out'. Sheets served as window curtains. Many houses were boarded up. Others had porches filled with junk – washing machines, furniture, toys, stacks of old magazines. There were no sidewalks. Teenage and twenty-something girls walked the streets selling sex. I watched a young girl in a puffy silver coat get into a car with a grey-haired man. I met a father who always coordinates with his neighbour to make sure their children travel together, even between their homes, which are a block apart. Driving around for days, knocking on doors looking for drug users who would speak with me was intimidating. I've never felt more scared than I did in Austin.

The mystery of Austin is only deepened by a visit to the neighbouring town of Scottsburg, the county seat, eight miles south. It's just a bit bigger than Austin, with a population of about 6,600, but it's vastly different. A coffee shop named Jeeves served sandwiches and tall slices of homemade pie, which you could eat while sitting in giant, cushiony chairs in front of a fireplace. A shop next door sold artisanal soap and jam. The town square had a war memorial and was decorated for Christmas. The library was populated. The sidewalks had people and the streets had traffic. There were drugs in Scottsburg, but the town did not reek of addiction. The people didn't look gaunt and drug-addled. No one I asked could explain why these two towns were so different, and no one could explain what had happened to Austin. But a new theory of public health might yet hold the answer. Known as syndemics, it may also be the one thing that can rescue Austin and its people.

The term syndemics was coined by Merrill Singer, a medical anthropologist at the University of Connecticut. Singer was working with injecting drug users in Hartford in the 1990s in an effort to find a public health model for preventing HIV among these individuals. As he chronicled the presence of not only HIV but also tuberculosis and hepatitis C among the hundreds of drug users he interviewed, Singer began wondering how those diseases interacted to the detriment of the person. He called this clustering of conditions a 'syndemic', a word intended to encapsulate the synergistic intertwining of certain problems. Describing HIV and hepatitis C as concurrent implies they are separable and independent. But Singer's work with the Hartford drug users suggested that such separation was impossible. The diseases couldn't be properly understood in isolation. They were not individual problems, but connected.

Singer quickly realised that syndemics was not just about the clustering of physical illnesses; it also encompassed nonbiological conditions like poverty, drug abuse, and other social, economic and political factors known to accompany poor health.

Hepatitis C is Curable, Just Not For You...,

CNN |  Hepatitis C-related deaths reached an all-time high in 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday, surpassing total combined deaths from 60 other infectious diseases including HIV, pneumococcal disease and tuberculosis. The increase occurred despite recent advances in medications that can cure most infections within three months.

"Not everyone is getting tested and diagnosed, people don't get referred to care as fully as they should, and then they are not being placed on treatment," said Dr. John Ward, director of CDC's division of viral hepatitis. 

At the same time, surveillance data analyzed by the CDC shows an alarming uptick in new cases of hepatitis C, mainly among those with a history of using injectable drugs. From 2010 to 2014, new cases of hepatitis C infection more than doubled. Because hepatitis C has few noticeable symptoms, said Ward, the 2,194 cases reported in 2014 are likely only the tip of the iceberg.

"Due to limited screening and underreporting, we estimate the number of new infections is closer to 30,000 per year," Ward said. "So both deaths and new infections are on the rise." 

"These statistics represent the two battles that we are fighting. We must act now to diagnose and treat hidden infections before they become deadly, and to prevent new infections."

Princeton Study finds that ALL net employment growth in the US from 2005-2015 was in "Alternative Work Arrangements"

reddit | In case anyone is wondering (from the article)alternative work arrangements – defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers.

The point is, companies are not hiring employees. They are filling roles with subcontractors from temp agencies (which have been exploding in size). These temporary workers have no job security, often no benefits (having to buy health insurance out of their pay for example), no way in hell they are getting stuff like stock options. And on average they get paid substantially less than the employees they replace. 

US population in 2006 was ~300M and in 2014 about ~320M. People above 65 years of age was 12.4% and 14.4% respectively - which comes to 37.2M and 46.08M old people respectively. (Source http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.65UP.TO.ZS/countries/US?display=graph)

US labor figures for age 65+ group seems to be 5.325M in 2006 and 7.971M in 2014 (Source http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNU02000097)

So the employment rate of 65+ group has gone from 14.31% in 2006 to 17.29% in 2014.

The old people's 'no-option-but-have-to-continue-working' rate has gone up by 3% from 2006 to 2014. Maybe people are finding it more difficult to retire in this hard-to-save economy and maybe this will only worsen as we move more away from the baby-boomer generation and move further deep into this bubble economy.

EDIT relevant data - life expectancy in 2006 was 77.9 and peaked at 78.8 in 2012.

hundreds of thousands to lose SNAP benefits...,

cbpp |  Across the country, food banks and other organizations that serve the needy are preparing for long lines as childless adults begin losing SNAP (formerly food stamps) benefits due to the return in over 20 states of a three-month time limit for able-bodied adults.  Federal law limits adults aged 18-49 who aren’t raising minor children to three months of SNAP out of every three years unless they’re working at least 20 hours a week or participating in a job training program at least 20 hours a week.  More than half a million people will lose SNAP over the course of the year due to the time limit.

The time limit is “going to increase hunger among some of the most vulnerable Mississippians,” says Matt Williams of the Mississippi Center for Justice.  “I think it will further stress service providers who are already trying to fill a gap in the available food assistance programs, and I think we will see their resources stretched to the max with increased demand.”  In Mississippi alone, 50,000 people may lose benefits this year due to the time limit, the state estimates.

In New York State, Erica Santiago of the Food Bank for Westchester predicts, “We're not going to run out of food, but it may mean that people get three days’ worth instead of seven days’ worth. . . .  This will also impact people who aren't losing their benefits — there's a trickle down effect.”

Under the time limit, people can lose benefits even if they are looking for and can’t find work, or if no spots are available in a job training program.  The time limit “was based on the assumption that there are work programs to help these people and there are no programs. They cost too much,” Lucy Potter of Greater Hartford Legal Aid in Connecticut says.

The time limit is especially difficult for people with barriers to work, such as limited education and skills.  Most childless adults aren’t eligible for other forms of government assistance, and their incomes while receiving SNAP average less than one-third of the poverty line.

out of touch, losing control, and facing an imminent discontinuity...,

kunstler |  Health care is now such a blatant, odious, and ruinous racket that it is a little hard to believe that it hasn’t ignited an outright revolution or, at least, a workplace massacre in some insurance company C-suite. It is a well-known fact that most Americans don’t even have $500 to pay for a car repair. How are they supposed to cope with a $5,000 deductible health insurance incident? Answer: they can’t. Their mental health is destroyed in the process of attempting to fix their physical health. Not uncommonly, they have to declare bankruptcy after a routine appendectomy or a visit to the emergency room to set a broken arm. Sometimes, they don’t even bother to go to the doctor, seeing clearly how this plays out. The pharmaceutical industry has, of course, been allowed to convert itself into a simple extortion racket. Got an unusual kind of cancer? We have something that might help. Oh, it costs $43,000 a month….

What kind of a polity allows this cruel and indecent grift to go on? Why, the Obama administration, which allowed the health insurance company lobbyists and their colleagues in Big Pharma to “craft” the Affordable Care Act — the name of which must be the biggest public lie ever floated.

It’s interesting to see how a parallel fraud is playing out in higher ed. I submit the reason that college presidents are not pushing back against the Maoist coercions of the undergraduate social justice warriors is because the marvelous theater of the gender, race, and “privilege” melodrama is a potent distraction from the sad fact that college has turned into a grotesquely top-heavy and high-paying administrative racket offering boutique courses in fake fields (Dartmouth College: WGSS 65.06 Radical Sexuality: Of Color, Wildness, and Fabulosity… Harvard University: WOMGEN 1424:  American Fetish) in order to pander to their young customers (students) conditioned to tragic “oppression” sob stories. All in the service of paying huge salaries + perqs to the dynamic executives running these places.

Then there is banking, a.k.a. the financial system, certainly the greatest racket of rackets, since the fumes it’s running on — combinations of ZIRP, QE, and “forward guidance” (happy talk) — is all that there is to maintain the illusion that “money” remains a reliable gauge of value. Finance is the racket that will go down first and hardest, and when it does, all the other rackets currently running will go up in a vapor. That elephant will storm into the room before the political conventions, and when it does, it will usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.

the secret shame of middle-class americans...,

theatlantic |  In my house, we have learned to live a no-frills existence. We halved our mortgage payments through a loan-modification program. We drive a 1997 Toyota Avalon with 160,000 miles that I got from my father when he died. We haven’t taken a vacation in 10 years. We have no credit cards, only a debit card. We have no retirement savings, because we emptied a small 401(k) to pay for our younger daughter’s wedding. We eat out maybe once every two or three months. Though I was a film critic for many years, I seldom go to the movies now. We shop sales. We forgo house and car repairs until they are absolutely necessary. We count pennies.

I don’t ask for or expect any sympathy. I am responsible for my quagmire—no one else. I didn’t get gulled into overextending myself by unscrupulous credit merchants. Basically, I screwed up, royally. I lived beyond my means, primarily because my means kept dwindling. I didn’t take the actions I should have taken, like selling my house and downsizing, though selling might not have covered what I owed on my mortgage. And let me be clear that I am not crying over my plight. I have it a lot better than many, probably most, Americans—which is my point. Maybe we all screwed up. Maybe the 47 percent of American adults who would have trouble with a $400 emergency should have done things differently and more rationally. Maybe we all lived more grandly than we should have. But I doubt that brushstroke should be applied so broadly. Many middle-class wage earners are victims of the economy, and, perhaps, of that great, glowing, irresistible American promise that has been drummed into our heads since birth: Just work hard and you can have it all.

If there is any good news, it is that even as wages have stagnated, a lot of things, especially durable goods like TVs and computers, have been getting steadily cheaper. So, by and large, has clothing (though prices have risen modestly in recent years). Housing costs, as measured by the price per square foot of a median-priced and median-sized home, have been stable, even accounting for huge variations from one real-estate market to another. But some things, like health care and higher education, cost more—a lot more. And, of course, these are hardly trivial items. Life happens, and it happens to cost a lot—sometimes more than we can pay.

Yet even that is not the whole story. Life happens, yes, but shit happens, too—those unexpected expenses that are an unavoidable feature of life. Four-hundred-dollar emergencies are not mere hypotheticals, nor are $2,000 emergencies, nor are … well, pick a number. The fact is that emergencies always arise; they are an intrinsic part of our existence. Financial advisers suggest that we save at least 10 to 15 percent of our income for retirement and against such eventualities. But the primary reason many of us can’t save for a rainy day is that we live in an ongoing storm. Every day, it seems, there is some new, unanticipated expense—a stove that won’t light, a car that won’t start, a dog that limps, a faucet that leaks. And those are only the small things. In a survey of American finances published last year by Pew, 60 percent of respondents said they had suffered some sort of “economic shock” in the past 12 months—a drop in income, a hospital visit, the loss of a spouse, a major repair. More than half struggled to make ends meet after their most expensive economic emergency. Even 34 percent of the respondents who made more than $100,000 a year said they felt strain as a result of an economic shock. Again, I know. After the job loss, the co‑op board’s rejections, the tax penalties, there was one more wallop: A publisher with whom I had signed a book contract, and from whom I had received an advance, sued me to have the advance returned after I missed a deadline. (Book deadlines are commonly missed and routinely extended.)

In effect, economics comes down to a great Bruce Eric Kaplan New Yorker cartoon that was captioned: “We thought it was a rough patch, but it turned out to be our life.”

capitalism will devour democracy unless...,

libertyblitzkrieg |  The IMF’s austerity package is inhuman because it will destroy hundreds of thousands of small businesses, defund society’s weakest, and turbocharge the humanitarian crisis. And it is unnecessary because meaningful growth is much more likely to return to Greece under our policy proposals to end austerity, target the oligarchy, and reform public administration (rather than attacking, again, the weak).

To give a monstrously exaggerated but terribly instructive parallel of the IMF’s logic, if Greece is nuked tomorrow the economic crisis ends and its macroeconomic numbers are “fixed” as long as creditors accept a 100 percent haircut. But, if I am right that our numbers added up just as well, while allowing Greece to recover without further social decline, why did the IMF join Berlin to crush us in 2015?

For decades, whenever the IMF “visited” a struggling country, it promoted “reforms” that led to the demolition of small businesses and the proletarisation of middle-class professionals. Abandoning the template in Greece would be to confess to the possibility that decades of anti-social programs imposed globally might have been inhuman and unnecessary. 

To recap, the Wikileaks revelations unveil an attrition war between a reasonably numerate villain (the IMF) and a chronic procrastinator (Berlin). We also know that the IMF is seriously considering bringing things to a head next July by dangling Greece once more over the abyss, exactly as in July 2015. Except that this time the purpose is to force the hand not of Alexis Tsipras, whose fresh acquiescence the IMF considers in the bag, but of the German Chancellor. 

Will Christine Lagarde (the IMF’s Managing Director with ambitions of a European political comeback) toe the line of her underlings? How will Chancellor Merkel react to the publication of these conversations? Might the protagonists’ strategies change now that we have had a glimpse of them? 

While pondering these questions, I cannot stem the torrent of sadness from the thought that last year, during our Athens Spring, Greece had weapons against the troika’s organised incompetence that I was, alas, not allowed to use. The result is a Europe more deeply immersed in disrepute and a Greek people watching from the sidelines an ugly brawl darkening their already bleak future.

the clock is now ticking for more than a million on food stamps...,

npr |  One month down, two to go.

For unemployed adults in 22 states, that's how long they can count on help with the grocery bills: Starting this January, they have three months to find a job or lose their food assistance.

SNAP benefits — formerly known as food stamps — have been tied to employment for two decades. Unless they are caring for children or unable to work, adults need to have a job to receive more than three months of benefits.

But after the recession began, that three-month cap was waived in many areas, as state and federal governments acknowledged that jobs were hard to come by.

Now, as the economy is improving, the time limits are being reimposed — by federal policy in some areas, by state legislators in others.

For 22 states, the time limit returned in some or all of the state at the beginning of this year. It's the largest reinstatement of the three-month cap since the recession, The Associated Press reports

A million SNAP Recipients Affected

The three-month time limit applies to people ages 18 to 50 who aren't caring for a child or other dependent, aren't pregnant and aren't disabled or otherwise prevented from working. After their three months are up, such recipients must be working or in a training program at least half-time (80 hours a month) to receive SNAP benefits.

meanwhile, on the non-BLM, no-mandingo side of the occupy 2.0 protest movement...,

LATimes |  Nearly three years ago, a group of about 200 workers at McDonald's, Taco Bell and other New York City fast-food restaurants walked off the job and rallied for higher wages.

It was widely described as the largest series of demonstrations ever in the fast-food industry.

Fast-forward to Tuesday, and the so-called Fight for $15 movement seeking better pay for fast-food and other low-wage workers has spread to what organizers say are 270 cities across the U.S. All three Democratic presidential candidates weighed in with support on Twitter after rallies began. The governor of New York and the mayor of Pittsburgh issued orders Tuesday that will lead to a $15 minimum wage for all government workers.

How the once-fledgling campaign has captivated national political discourse is a testament to the uneasiness still felt by many Americans left out of the recovery from the Great Recession. Although jobs have continued to grow since the depths of the downturn, earnings for lower- and middle-income workers have not.

By galvanizing efforts around fast-food workers — people who many interact with on a daily basis — the movement's organizers, backed in part by the nation's second-largest labor union, have worked to change the public perception of low-wage work.

"For many of us, these are workers who we see every day, yet they're invisible," said Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley labor expert. "What the Fight for 15 has done is give faces, names and personal stories that many, perhaps most, working Americans can identify with."

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has been the same since 2009, and efforts have stalled in Congress to increase wages. But at the state and local level, there has been an unprecedented wave of action to boost wages since the movement began in 2012.

germany has NO standing to lecture other nations about debt

thewire |  Since his successful book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the Frenchman Thomas Piketty has been considered one of the most influential economists in the world. His argument for the redistribution of income and wealth launched a worldwide discussion. In a interview with Georg Blume of Die Zeit, he gives his clear opinions on the European debt debate.

DIE ZEIT: Should we Germans be happy that even the French government is aligned with the German dogma of austerity?

Thomas Piketty: Absolutely not. This is neither a reason for France, nor Germany, and especially not for Europe, to be happy. I am much more afraid that the conservatives, especially in Germany, are about to destroy Europe and the European idea, all because of their shocking ignorance of history.

ZEIT: But we Germans have already reckoned with our own history.

Piketty: But not when it comes to repaying debts! Germany’s past, in this respect, should be of great significance to today’s Germans. Look at the history of national debt: Great Britain, Germany, and France were all once in the situation of today’s Greece, and in fact had been far more indebted. The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem. There have been many ways to repay debts, and not just one, which is what Berlin and Paris would have the Greeks believe.

ZEIT: But shouldn’t they repay their debts?

Piketty: My book recounts the history of income and wealth, including that of nations. What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.

ZEIT: But surely we can’t draw the conclusion that we can do no better today?

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

the future of all pensioners in the western world...,

zerohedge |  In chaotic scenes, thousands of angry elderly Greeks on Wednesday besieged the nation’s crisis-hit banks, which have reopened to allow them to withdraw vital cash from their state pensions.

“Let them go to hell!” said one pensioner waiting to get his money, after failed talks between Athens and international creditors sparked a week-long banking shutdown.

The Greek government, which closed the banks and imposed strict capital controls after cash machines ran dry, has temporarily reopened almost 1,000 branches to allow pensioners without cards to withdraw 120 euros ($133) to last the rest of the week.

The move has again sparked lengthy queues at banks across Greece — and outrage from many retirees who are regarded as among the most vulnerable in society, exposed to a vicious and lengthy economic downturn.

Under banking restrictions imposed all week, ordinary Greeks can withdraw up to 60 euros a day for each credit or debit card — but many of the elderly population do not have cards.

Another customer, a retired mariner who asked not to be named, told AFP he had no cash to buy crucial medicine for his sick wife.

“I worked for 50 years on the sea and now I am the beggar for 120 euros,” he said.

“I took out 120 euros — but I have no money for medication for my wife, who had an operation and is ill, he added.

bad sex and ego at the root of austerity?

telesurtv | Speaking at the largest anti-austerity rally since the Conservatives won the election Brand questioned their ability to rule the country.

Comedian Russell Brand told anti-government protesters in London Saturday that Britain’s problems were caused by megalomaniacal leaders and members of parliaments with poor sex lives.

Speaking at the largest anti-austerity rally since the Conservatives won the election with a majority 44 days ago, attended by between 70,000 and 150,000 people, Brand talked about the “crushing disappointment” many people felt at the result.

He criticized the policies made by establishment figures and questioned their ability to rule the country.

“What I feel like we’ve done is created a culture around the worst aspects of our nature. I have selfishness in me, I have greed in me, I have the megalomaniacal tendencies of Boris Johnsonn, or Rupert Murdoch, or David Cameron, but I don’t turn them into policies. I go to 12-step meetings and psychiatrists to try and deal with that shit,” he told the cheering crowd outside the houses of parliament in Westminster.

“I’m assuming that the vast majority or those (in the houses of parliament), Jeremy (Corbyn) and Caroline (Lucas) aside, are not having very successful sex lives … Something is wrong,” he added

The demonstration comes in response to the recent announcement by Britain's Conservative government that it plans to adopt new measures to reduce the national deficit, including further welfare cuts, cuts to social services, departmental spending cuts and boosting revenue through a crackdown on tax avoidance. The Conservative financial minister, George Osborne, is expected to announce a further £12bn cuts to spending on benefits, according to Sky News.

“We’re here to say austerity isn’t working,” said Caroline Lucas, the Green Party representative in parliament. “We’re here to say that it wasn’t people on jobseekers’ allowance that brought down the banks.

“It wasn’t nurses and teachers and firefighters who were recklessly gambling on international markets. And so we should stop the policies that are making them pay for a crisis that wasn’t of their making.”

tosca isn't for everyone...,

nationofchange |  On Saturday at the Left Forum in New York City, Chris Hedges joined professors Richard Wolff and Gail Dines to discuss why Karl Marx is essential at a time when global capitalism is collapsing. These are the remarks Hedges made to open the discussion.

Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production” and “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships … the relationships which make one class the ruling one.” He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai wrote, was “an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.” Marx was keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and important critic.

In a preface to “The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” Marx wrote:

No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation.

Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its potential for further development. That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when. We are called to study Marx to be ready.

The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism.

But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes.

Capitalist oligarchs, meanwhile, hoard huge sums of wealth—$18 trillion stashed in overseas tax havens—exacted as tribute from those they dominate, indebt and impoverish. Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it caused widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression. It would attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature.

social welfare for citizens is healthier than sovereign subsidization of banksters...,

for whom the muzzein calls....,

WaPo |  The poor pay more for everything, from rolls of toilet paper to furniture. It's not because they're spendthrifts, either. If you're denied a checking account, there's no way for you  to  avoid  paying a fee to cash a paycheck. If you need to buy a car to get to work, you'll have to accept whatever higher interest rate you're offered. If you don't have a car, the bus fare might eat up the change you'd save shopping at a larger grocery store as opposed to the local corner store.

It's easy to feel that "when you are poor, the 'system' is set up to keep you that way," in the words of one Reddit user, "rugtoad." That comment is at the top of an extraordinary thread full of devastating stories about what it's like to get by with nothing in the United States of 2015.

"Growing up really poor means realizing in your twenties that Mommy was lying when she said she already ate," wrote "deviant_devices," another commenter.

You can buy only a single pack of paper towels at a time, rather than saving on a bundle of 10, as "Meepshesaid" noted:

When you are broke, you can't plan ahead or shop sales or buy in bulk. Poor people wait to buy something until they absolutely need it, so they have to pay whatever the going price is at that moment. If ten-packs of paper towels are on sale for half price, that's great, but you can only afford one roll anyway. In this way, poor people actually pay more than others for common staple goods.

You can't pay for health insurance, and instead buy medicine from pet stores, as "colorcoma" writes:

I buy "fish" antibiotics online because I can't afford health care. … Amoxicillin and such. Mostly for husband who has Lyme's disease. We can't afford our monthly health care rates. We are 30somethings in the US. Really feel like a "bottom feeder".

You can't also buy shoes that will last for more than a few months, according to "DrStephenFalken":

I'm making $150- $200 a week and I need new shoes. So I can buy $60 shoes that will last or $15 walmart shoes. So I buy the walmart shoes and some groceries instead of just the $60 shoes and no groceries. Three months later I'll need new shoes again. But I'll also have to pay rent and my light bill is due. So I'll pay the light bill and buy some "shoe glue" for $4 to fix my shoes for another few weeks until I can buy the $15 ones again.

Economists have documented the "ghetto tax," as the additional costs of living paid by the poor are often known. A Brookings study from 2006 found that someone who is not able to open a checking account will typically pay between $5 and $50 to cash a $500 check, and that people in poor neighborhoods paid several hundred dollars more for homeowner's insurance, or to buy a car of a given make and model, than someone living in a wealthier neighborhood.

the right to exclude others (property rights) is the foundational american religious principle

thenation |  The austerity agenda as it plays out on the ground in American cities is often so relentless in demanding cuts in public services that it is easy to imagine that it cannot be upended. And that goes double for Detroit, where Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has given his appointed “emergency manager”—rather than local elected officials—control over critical decisions regarding city operations.

But that does not mean that austerity always wins.

Last week, protests by Detroiters and allies from across the country focused local, national and international attention on the Detroit Water and Sewage Department’s program of shutting off water service for thousands of low-income families that have fallen behind in paying bills. On Friday, religious leaders and community activists were arrested after blocking trucks operated by the private contractor that was responsible for the shutoffs. At the same time, a mass march filled the streets of downtown Detroit with protesters arguing that the most vulnerable citizens of a city hard hit by deindustrialization ought not be further harmed by the loss of a basic necessity that the United Nations deems a human right.