Portside

What is needed is not structural reform within Greece and Spain so much as structural reform of the Eurozone and a fundamental rethinking of the policy frameworks that have resulted in the monetary union’s spectacularly bad performance. Failure to restructure Greece's debt would be a failure of democracy and morality.

With our banking system in private hands, the simple truth is that as the debt levels accelerate, so does runaway inequality. Therefore key to controlling runaway inequality is to dramatically curtail the power of high finance.

Countries do need to be able to buy foreign products that they cannot acquire or produce domestically, and for that they need a form of currency or an international credit line that other nations will accept. But countries are increasingly breaking away from the oil- and weapons-backed US dollar as global reserve currency. To resolve the mutually-destructive currency wars will probably take a new Bretton Woods Accord.

The vulture funds that secured a ruling in their favor are not original lenders to Argentina. They purchased bonds in default at obscenely low prices for the sole purposes of engaging in litigation against Argentina and making an enormous profit.

We can no longer allow the billionaires and their think tanks or the corporate media to set the agenda. We need to educate, organize and mobilize the working families of our country to stand up for their rights. We need to make government work for all the people, not just the 1 percent.

Detroit’s bankruptcy is, at its core, a cash flow problem caused by its inability to bring in enough revenue to pay its bills. Detroit’s bankruptcy was primarily caused by a severe decline in revenue and exacerbated by complicated Wall Street deals that put its ability to pay its expenses at greater risk.

The debt ceiling, the dollar and hegemonic currencies

A recent “Spreadsheet Scandal” has rocked the economics world. It has eliminated the last remaining technical argument in support of the President’s “chained CPI” Social Security cut. Earlier this year the IMF admitted they had made errors in their modelling of expenditure multipliers. Now, the darlings of the austerity cultists – Rogoff and Reinhart – has been exposed for errors in spreadsheet coding. Who is ever going to take responsibility for these travesties?

Self-righteous critics have portrayed Social Security as the profligate monster borrowing from the Treasury and sucking the life out of federal government. It's the other way around. The Treasury has been borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund for 30 years, and the debt to beneficiaries now totals nearly $3 trillion. The financial barons and their media collaborators would like to get out of repaying the debt by cutting benefits over and over again. Count on it.