A Gilded Planet

Republicans in the state legislature of Michigan have come together this week to institute new prohibitions on the freedom of contract in their state. These new state-mandated prohibitions would put certain restrictions on people's right to bargain and sign contracts reflecting the outcomes of such bargaining. Republicans often portray themselves in opposition to big government regulations of the economy. However, when it comes to putting new restrictions on the type of contracts that can be arranged between free and consenting adults, they always seem to forget they are against big government. See also "tort reform." Prominent Example of Big Government Interfering with Freedom of Contract For some reason, many prominent reporters and news commentators have decided to refer to the legislation in Michigan as a "right-to-work" law. I guess newspaper editors decided it would be a good idea to try to confuse their readers as much as possible. Instead of calli...

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau announced he was resigning yesterday and I know I speak for a fair number of students, faculty and staff in saying "Good riddance." But you would never know that faculty had debated a vote of no confidence in Birgeneau's during recent months or that student government was presently having a similar discussion if you read the Los Angeles Times : Birgeneau, whose annual salary is $436,800, presided over the highly political campus during an uptick in protests over tuition hikes. In November, the Occupy movement erected a tent city on campus and student demonstrators contended that UC police brutally used batons to evict them. There is no need to frame the UC police brutality as an unproven allegation. There are lots and lots of videos of what happened : police beat up students and professors before a tent city was ever even erected (and they beat students the same way two years before in 2009, it's a pattern). One ...

5. Wu Massacre - Raekwon, Ghostface Killah & Method Man This cracks my top five for the album artwork alone. I got to see the Wu Tang Clan  live this year, and they were actually fairly underwhelming - all shouting over each other and sich. But Method Man is a beast and Ghostface Killah has an inimitable style, both of which made this album quite enjoyable. The three standout tracks are "It's That Wu Shit" along with "Our Dreams" and "Gunshowers" but the whole album has a brisk energetic tone to it which I dig. There's a big gap between this and the rest on my list, except for the album art where it matches or exceeds some of the other awesome album covers of this year. 4. Down There - Avey Tare Avey Tare of Animal Collective deploys some pretty groovyspooky beats and bleats on this record. I especially like "Ghost of Books" which has a fairly mesmerizing end refrain that I was repeating a lot with variations on a recent moun...

I'm working on a longer post about the current status of the U.S. economy, but I want to quickly note that Ryan Lizza's article for the New Yorker, though impeccably written, is really quite lacking as far as good piece of reporting goes. As a puff piece designed to burnish the reputation of Larry Summers, it gets four stars. But I expect a lot more from the New Yorker than that. For more on the problems with Lizza's profile, check out what Dean Baker and Matt Yglesias have to say. Paul Krugman has an interesting take as well. I do want to try to clear up some fuzzy thinking about economic policy that appeared in New Yorker and that Nikhil Dixit over at the Cal Dems blog seemed to commend in his post: Yes, unemployment is rising, but that doesn’t mean the stimulus is a failure. It wasn’t designed to stop job loss altogether. Rather, it was designed as a backstop. Don’t ask what unemployment is now, ask what it would have been without the stimulus (FYI, most economists ...