Daily Archives: June 2, 2014

The Troika Attack Italy for Refusing to Bleed the Economy

By William K. Black

The title to the latest Wall Street Journal article on Italy is “EU Tells Italy to Adopt More Austerity Measures.”  It’s an old, stupid remedy.  If you hit your carburetor with a hammer and it doesn’t fix it – hit it harder and more often.  Italy is the troika’s carburetor and austerity is its hammer.

The Troika’s Response to Renzi’s Electoral Success: Crush Him

The general context of the troika’s latest act of depravity is particularly interesting.  The troika consists of the European Commission, the IMF, and the ECB.  The troika’s insistence that the periphery inflict austerity caused not simply a gratuitous second recession through much of the EU but a Second Great Depression in Italy, Spain, and Greece.  One-third of the eurozone’s population – 100 million people – was kicked into a Great Depression due to the troika’s long-falsified economic dogmas.

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The Tories’ Colonial Mindset and Independence for Scotland

By William K. Black

Family tradition says my relatives came from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and Denmark – so I’m probably a typical American mutt.  As an Irish-American I learned early about London’s disgraceful treatment of its first colony, Ireland.  Indeed, but for London’s malign neglect my Irish relatives would likely never have emigrated and I would not exist.  I cannot, therefore, claim objectivity when it comes to the subject of independence for Scotland.  While I have no right to tell Scots how they should vote I would personally vote for independence.

My focus is on how the Tories are seeking to intimidate Scots to vote against independence.  The point is made in the title of a recent New York Times article:  “Scots Are Divided Over Independence, and Its Economic Costs.”

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The 80th Anniversary of the Strike that Freed Minnesota from Tyranny

By William K. Black

Teaching makes one feel very old, very quickly.  You make a movie or literary allusion and your students stare at you blankly because A Man for All Seasons won all those Oscars decades before they were born.  University students know only a world in which women are the majority and make up half the students in law schools and many other professional schools.  The idea that women were treated as less than second class citizens is inconceivable to our students.

Tom Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, (who has a doctorate in history) writes about how most Democratic Party leaders turned their back decades ago on organized labor.  Frank routinely asks progressives what they think about labor unions – and he tells me that the answers are overwhelmingly negative in terms of immediate responses.  Eventually, the progressives mention the vital role that unions once played, but that is an intellectual response about a bygone era.

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