John Lanchester, writing for London Review of Books, offers a dire warning about the status of Britain’s big banks that likewise speaks loudly to all of us living over here across the pond, since we’re in a similar situation: As the new governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, takes up his job, itâs…
Category: Economy
Conspiracy theories are a mythologization of capitalism
From an essay published on May 21 at The New Inquiry and bearing the teaser line “Just because we can hear the black helicopters doesn’t mean they don’t exist”: The modern conspiracy theory is a mythologization of capitalism. That humanity writhes in the grip of a power alien to itself is so palpable that the…
Disruption, catastrophe, and resilience in a hyperfast, hyperconnected world
From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a thought-provoking examination of the ins and outs, both philosophical and practical, of the contemporary reality of disasters, catastrophes, and “resilience” — a word and concept that, as the article points out, is currently all the rage among scholars and policy wonks: In all, [Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear…
‘Monarchs of Money’: How central bankers became the new ruling class
A new short documentary from the CBC titled The Monarchs of Money explains in hair-raising and gut-punching detail how “The world’s central banks have printed unimaginable amounts of money in recent years. Neil Macdonald explores what this means for the global economy and for your financial well-being.” There’s also an accompanying written report, billed as…
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U.S. Out of Vermont! Christopher Ketcham, The American Prospect, March 19, 2013 [EDITOR’S NOTE: This captivating article/essay about the relatively thriving secession movement in Vermont features a cameo appearance from Teeming Brain favorite Morris Berman, who delivered the keynote address at a secession-oriented conference held in September 2012 in the chambers of the house of…
Recommended Reading 36
This week: How entire U.S. towns now rely on food stamps. The regrets of the Iraqi “sledgehammer man,” whose image became famous in Western media when Saddam’s statue fell. The Obama administration’s epic (and hypocritical) focus on secrecy. The demise of Google Reader and what it portends for Net-i-fied life and culture. The sinister rise…
Recommended Reading 35
This week, a more America-centric set of recommendations than usual, covering: the gargantuan crisis of America’s “health-care-industrial” complex, which is literally killing the nation with galactically inflated prices and substandard healthcare; the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of America’s “sequestration” debacle; how the “personalized” Internet experience created by user profiling and content filtering actually delivers up two different…
Financial dystopia: “The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own”
In a review of Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story, the new (October 2012) book by Greg Smith — who also wrote last year’s bombshell piece “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs” for The New York Times — Michael Lewis makes the following cogent, riveting, and frightening observation about the current world…
Energy, food, and the upside (or not) of dystopia
This piece from The Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner is supposed to be about the upside of the fact that we’ve transitioned definitively to a new era of elevated food and energy prices, but the upshot that Warner arrives at sounds less like a silver lining than a recipe for a Promethean desperate-dystopian transformation of human…
Our global Ayn Rand moment
In the past half-decade, the name and legacy of Ayn Rand have become the subject of much prominent comment, debate, analysis, and punditry in the English-speaking press, where a swelling sea of multiform journalism examines her enduring and pervasive (some would say insidious and awful, while others would say heroic and wonderful) influence on American…