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Iron Man 4: Iron Man Fights Income Inequality
February 17, 2014
The career of famous Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw has taken a strange detour in the past five or so years. The former George W. Bush administration economist and economic adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns has, like many of those on the right, ...

Hip New Trend for the Young People: Caring about the Deficit!
February 14, 2014
How do we reach the millennials?, the powerful people constantly wonder. They obsess over it. Because they know that if they can only figure it out, the world will be theirs! (Even more so than it already is!) blog has long been fascinated by terrible political appeals to ...

Lancelot Gomes
February 14, 2014
It was Filomena Rodrigues who broke the news at the Panjim fish market. She ran into her neighbor Maravilha da Gama, who was haggling over the price of a glassy-eyed mullet with a large fisherwoman bedecked in gold necklaces which rested in serpentine spirals on her hillocky ...

Baby Steps with Eric Holder
February 13, 2014
Eric Holder’s Justice Department has been a disappointment more often than not. The reefer madness, an absurd and abusive political foray into sensitive academic archives, that ghoulish speech about the power of the federal government to kill U.S. citizens overseas in ...

Mr. Secondhand
February 13, 2014
When Cajetan Xavier sold his ten-year-old Vespa to buy a ten-year-old Maruti 800 it came as no surprise to the other residents of St. Jerome’s Colony in Dona Paula. The wiry frame of Cajetan putt-putting on his aging scooter up the steep slope before the National Institute of ...

Congress Stuns World with Minor Hint of Functionality
February 12, 2014
Yesterday, the world witnessed a major breakthrough in contemporary United States governance: the speaker of the House of Representatives decided, for the first time in years, that it would be counterproductive and perhaps even strange to threaten the arbitrary destruction of ...

Do As He Says, Not As He Does. That Would Be Unprofitable.
February 12, 2014
Chamath Palihapitiya is a partner at a wealthy venture capital firm, Social+Capital Partnership, which aims “to create value and change on a global scale.” Being interested not just in profit but in social change, Mr. Palihapitiya appeared Sunday before a marginalized group ...

Minimum Wage Debate Focusing Less on Poverty, More on Lobbying
February 11, 2014
A sharp piece of reporting in the New York Times this week pulls the very thin mask off the expertise-for-hire industry that clusters around the District of Columbia. Reporter Eric Lipton paid a visit to the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit “economic research ...

Obamacare May Also Mean No More Employee Parking Spots
February 10, 2014
Could it be that corporate executives are among the biggest “winners” in the implementation of Obamacare? We don’t just mean health insurance company executives, either. We mean executives everywhere, from Delta to AOL to UPS, who now get to eliminate the ...

Glenn Greenwald Will Not Be Doing Trust Falls with the U.S.
February 07, 2014
Suppose you were, say, an ex-pat living in Brazil who wanted to be free to come and go to your home country, America, without much hassle, but the potential for hassle was greater than 0 percent. See, you had been publishing documents exposing the United States ...

When Separating Art from the Artist Doesn’t Work
February 06, 2014
By now, the lines have been drawn. A disturbing number of responses to Dylan Farrow’s February 1 New York Times blog concerning the alleged sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her father, Woody Allen, have run the gamut of rape culture apologias. Her memories ...