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“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

- Martin Luther King Jr.

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— James Baldwin On the Dick Cavett show (1968)

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Atlas Mugged

“If the books of our time tell us anything anymore, capitalism has jumped the shark. Not even its most erudite defenders and critics know what to say about its future—the sense of an ending saturates every sentence they write.” Read more from James Livingston here.

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The Bingewatch: Mother Winona

“By aligning viewers with Byers, it has been said, Stranger Things upends the “hysterical woman” stereotype. The men in charge of recovering Byers’s child might initially write her off as crazy, but we just as quickly come to see her as a prescient woman trapped in a patriarchal world...”

Read Sarah Kessler’s full review of Stranger Things here.

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So capitalism ends with a bang, not a whimper, but the arc of history doesn’t bend toward progress, toward a more perfect union—it runs backward, toward the pioneer individualism and the rural idiocy of the 18th and 19th centuries.

James Livingston on The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047, a novel for the end of capitalism

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The New Working Class

“The major problems we have in our society are stuck because we have the wrong narrative, and those narratives are often shaped by elite individuals who do not quite understand what is happening.”

Read more from Jeffrey J. Williams here.

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The Student Debt Crisis and Its Deniers

“Economists may want to equivocate, but the student loan crisis is real. The actual fiction? Too many Americans believe that “college is affordable.”” Read more from Elizabeth Tandy Shermer here.

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Today’s financial aid doesn’t lessen inequality—but actually exacerbates it.

THE STUDENT DEBT CRISIS AND ITS DENIERS by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

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“In 1992, 80 percent of young Japanese workers had regular jobs. By 2006, half were temps.”

– See “What Americans Should Understand About Japan’s 1990s Economic Bust: The Slacker Trap” by Ethan Devine, The Atlantic, 24 April 2013.

Image: Akio Suga / EPA / Corbis

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To Hell and Back: Spain’s Grotesque Recession and Its Surprising New Economy

MADRID – It’s been more than a rocky few years for Spain. It’s been a rocky half-century.

Run by a military dictator until the 1970s, Spain emerged in the early 2000s as a model of social democracy and the poster child for the European Union. Then the global economy collapsed in 2008, and suddenly Spain was suffering from Depression-era levels of unemployment and an economy melting down like Dali horrorscape. In a few years it had gone from budget surpluses, a growing middle class, and generous social supports to wrenching austerity policies and collapsing wages, triggered by the massive failure of Spanish banks. 

Unlike Greece, the Spanish government was not a chronic over-spender. Its debt was merely 36% of its GDP in 2007, about half the debt burden of the U.S. and Germany at the time. The Socialist Party wasn’t stocked with bank industry shills, or slavish admirers of greedy capitalism, but their reaction to the crisis devastated their own constituents just as Spain’s decades-long economic model was coming undone. There are lessons for Americans in understanding what happened to Spain.

Read more. [Image: Bosch/Prado]

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Unspeak word of the day: Recession The term ‘recession’ originated as a euphemism for ‘depression’, because that sounded too depressing, even though it in turn had first been employed as a euphemism for ‘crisis’. A recession occurs when an economy ‘contracts’ for two consecutive quarters. Notice that economies ‘grow’ but never ‘shrink’; instead they ‘contract’, like a muscle or a legal agreement.  Michigan Central Station | Detroit

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This development of multi-million dollar homes fell through during the Great Recession and has sat empty ever since. Hutchinson Island, GA

Source: G.aget (flickr)

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Credit Crunch Carpets, Arnold. Nottingham, July 2017.

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Full thread here by @mathewstoller

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“I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn’t already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”

literature posters; the book thief by markus zusak