The historic testimony by former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan before the House Committee of Government Oversight and Reform on October 23, 2008, represented such a startling turnaround for an individual previously given such nicknames as “Maestro” and “Oracle,” that it might well have been entitled “The Education of Alan Greenspan.” Taken to task […]
Archive | Volume 60, Issue 07 (December)
Volume 60, Issue 07 (December 2008)
Financial Implosion and Stagnation
“The first rule of central banking,” economist James K. Galbraith wrote recently, is that “when the ship starts to sink, central bankers must bail like hell.” In response to a financial crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve and other central banks, backed by their treasury departments, have been […]
America Right or Wrong: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945
British subordination to the United States, the so-called special relationship as it is optimistically known in London, is so taken for granted that it is seldom subjected to critical scrutiny. Why is it that the British ruling class and its agents have since 1945 come to embrace a junior partnership in the U.S. empire so […]
Braddock, Pennsylvania Out of the Furnace and into the Fire
As far as scenic ruins go, the Pittsburgh metropolitan area sets a high standard. The natural beauty of the Monongahela Valley and the built legacy of deindustrialization make gorgeous scenery out of blue-collar defeat. Beauty is no compensation for lost jobs though. The old steel towns of this region have been imploding for decades. No […]
Happening upon the Exploding Sand Sculpture Competition on TV
Denise Bergman is the author of Seeing Annie Sullivan, poems based on the early life of Helen Keller’s teacher (2005), which was translated into Braille and made into a Talking Book. Her poems have been widely published. She conceived and edited City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry, and she was the author […]
The Human Costs of Economic Growth
Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 395 + xxiv pages, hardcover, $76, paper, $34.95. The great debate of social science for the last two centuries at least has been how to account for the extraordinary economic growth of the modern world. We all […]
Why Orthodox Economics Fails
Reviewed: Michael Perelman, Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 238 pages, paperback, $20.00. Paul Krugman in Development, Geography, and Economic Theory contends that the reason some economic theories are not widely engaged by economists is because they cannot be modeled mathematically. He goes on to highlight […]