I agree. Prices in Minnesota have now climbed up to $ 4.00 + per gallon which in some places was a $0.30 jump. The two refineries located in Minnesota, both owned by the Koch Brothers, announced simultaneous shutdowns for repairs. Just in time for the Memorial Day weekend.

BTW, I still have a copy of “The Seven Sisters.” That book was based on a study by a Senate Committee in the 1970′s lead by a former FTC economist, John Blair, a leading authority on industrial organization economics. It laid out the whole structure of the industry and how prices were rigged at the international level. But it really is a multistructured monopolistic industry.

The big question is with these monopoly profits from price fixing and gouging, why people can’t get the idea that a carbon tax would at least channel some of these profits into renewable energy development?

A fair point. But it might be a pedantic quibble because “subjectivist” or “objectivist”, Menger was a political conservative who adapted his theories to fit his political convictions, like Friedman and others of the Austrian school. My point about “screwing up” came from this comment at the “von Mises Institute” about Menger.

https://mises.org/etexts/sennholzmenger.asp

Menger, like Friedman, von Mises and Hayek were monetarists who also to varying degrees had this abiding conviction in the gold standard. Menger’s attempt to reform the Austrian currency in the 1890′s in accordance with the goldd standard was a failure. Of course, Menger, like others in his tradition, blamed the government and blunders of the authorities. For thinkers like Menger and Friedman, it’s always someone else’s fault if the theory doesn’t work.

This, BTW, was central to Veblen’s critique of economics in general. Economics as taught, then and now, was simply taxonomy. Today it has added econometrics but it is not a true science based upon observed behavior or empiricism.

I think you can draw a straight line in terms of intellectual development from Austrian economist Carl Menger to Milton Friedman and the rest of the Chicago School big thinkers. Carl Menger is an interesting character I’ve learned. He helped screw up the Austrian monetary system in the late 19th and early 20th century by his big ideas. Screwing up has never stopped anyone from being “influential” I’ve noticed. In economics and finance, the more you screw up, the more lives you damage, the more people find your ideas “interesting.”

Since you bring up “alternatives to the price system”, may I recommend Thorstein Veblen’s “Engineers and the Price System” in which he proposes just such an alternative. Veblen gave up on alternatives though. His “Absentee Ownership in America” is the master’s indictment of the price system in the U.S. I dare say that if you read certain chapters such as “The Larger Use of Credit” in which he describes the role of the investment banker and the Federal Reserve in the US system of “absentee ownership” (getting something for nothing at the cost of whomever it may concern), you will better understand what happened in 2008. Our elites learned nothing from 1929 and nothing from 2008. The “price system” will somehow blunder on because there is no alternative.

C. Wright Mills still resonates but I think Veblen does too if you have the patience to read him. It’s not “feel good” reading either except for the satisfaction of gaining understanding. How Veblen was regarded in the 1930′s is written by John Dos Passos’s episode on Veblen in “The Big Money” -part of “U.S.A.”

This has to be a hoax. I have no doubt that there are douches like this and that they are often heads of major multinational conglomerates. And that they no doubt think that way. But making a public statement like this and even staging it like a commercial? I have a hard time accepting this video as being an authentic statement of the CEO of Nestle Corporation, even if Peter Brabant” is the CEO of Nestle. What is the point of a major CEO honcho making a statement like this which is certain to piss of customers needlessly? The whole thing looks like a send up of those guys who pretend to be major CEOs and crash board meetings or what not.

Underlying Summers’ callous comment is the belief that money and monetary policy trumps all other considerations in public policy in general. By monetary policies, that means Treasury policy which more or less has been controlled by the “masters of the universe” type people like Summers through the revolving door to the Treasury department. Summers and his ilk believe it’s all so self-evident that somehow single payer system or for that matter anything else that would improve the living standards and livelihoods of millions of people cannot be consistent with monetary policy and selling stocks, bonds, or bullshit fake instruments like CDO’s or credit default swaps. Ask him or someone like him to explain why this is so in language an ordinary English speaker can understand.

Guantanamo is this country’s shame and a shame on all of us. How has the USA sunk so low? Obama, have you ears?

I know it’s real passe to think that grand juries are anything but prosecution tools, but the Grand Jury was included in the Fifth Amendment for reasons not only to protect innocent. It was included there to allow the voice of the community to decide who should be prosecuted.

The government lawyers can talk all day about what can or cannot be prosecuted but their talk is completely empty rhetoric as long they are not busy cross examining Wall Street in front of a Grand Jury.

The backdrop to this post and this film is the Sixth Amendment and the constitutional right to “Assistance of Counsel.”(caps in original). The Supreme Court in Gideon v. Wainright and subsequent cases has construed this right to mean the right to “effective Assistance of Counsel” which means that lawyers have to meet standards. There is such a thing as malpractice in the criminal law. The way Public Defenders are set up by the State deliberately without enough of them and without the funds or staff is publicly subsidized unconstitutional malpractice. There is no way the Public Defender staff of any urban area at least is able to provide “effective Assistance of Counsel” with the case loads mentioned here.