In their groundbreaking new book, The Bankers’ New Clothes, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, two of the world’s most prominent and respected academics in finance and economics, expose the lies propagated by those who fight so dramatically to preserve the broken status quo. Argument by argument, scare tactic by scare tactic, they take on the bankers’ arguments and shred them, one by one, exposing them as nothing more than self-serving justifications for preserving a system that serves only the banks, not the general public. And most importantly, they do so in plain English with real world examples that are familiar to anyone who has ever had a bank account, a credit card, or a mortgage. They make the complex simple, and in so doing, reveal that as taxpayers we have been on the wrong side of a decades-long con that has enriched a handful of bankers while the rest of us suffer for their excesses.

Google, the company that makes its money by assembling digital dossiers about its users and selling them to advertisers for the highest bid, reported earnings Thursday. Revenue increased 31 percent to $13.97 billion and net income in the first quarter rose 16 percent to $3.35 billion, or $9.94 a share.

Richard Wolff’s latest book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, makes provocative observations about our economic woes and proposes thoughtful solutions. His writing is concise and clear so even if you do not agree with his perspective on the world you come away with a clear understanding not only of what he thinks, but why you’re thinking doesn’t align with his.

You will read about such ideas only rarely in the news pages of mainstream magazines and newspapers – and then typically in a tone that is, at best, jaundiced. Wolff gets even less attention from radio, television and cable programs, with the lone exception of Bill Moyers who has been shunted off to a time slot guaranteed to minimize his audience.

Why the fear of an aging professor? Almost certainly it is because Wolff is widely regarding as America’s leading Marxist economist.

It’s very impolite to talk about money in polite circles, like Washington, D.C. Too bad, suckers.

The people Marrero views as extremists to the right in the immigration debate of recent years have both crushed the ability of many immigrants to progress and hamstrung the country’s ability to harness the energy and labor of this generally younger immigrant class that is essential to the country’s long-term economic health.

These ideas would seem particularly relevant these days, as an incoming Congress is expected to take up the issue of immigration reform.

Nature Climate Change‘s most recent issue included a paper by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows entitled, “A new paradigm for climate change” [subs. req'd]. Kevin works at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, School of Mechanical Civil and Aerospace Engineering and Alice works at the Sustainable Consumption Institute, School of Mechanical Civil and Aerospace Engineering, University of Manchester. The discussion and arguments in the paper aren’t exactly novel if you’ve paid attention to the policy side of the climate change topic but bears examination as much as other works on the climate-policy interface, in which I am very interested.

I attended a local government meeting earlier this month in order to keep up with the latest on fracking in our town. Something else interesting happened as well. The meeting began with a budget review. Budget reviews are long and drawn out affairs even when they’re not, if you know what I mean. Fifteen minutes of going through line items, projected numbers, shortfalls, and so on can seem very long indeed if you aren’t turned on by bookkeeping.

That’s a shame, because those kinds of dry, eye glazing exercises are where the real action is at from a policy perspective.

David Brooks is again prominently displaying his misunderstanding of economics in the New York Times, first by claiming that borrowing today is impoverishing our future. Elementary economics shows the opposite is true.

It is an honor and a pleasure to have Paul Krugman at the Lake this afternoon for a conversation on End This Depression Now! Dedicated “To the unemployed, who deserve better,” the book is a condemnation of the policies and mind-set that have produced the worst economic depression since the 1930s. And unlike the Great Depression, which contemporaries did not understand, we know what to do; the current depression is entirely self-inflicted. The broken homes and ruined lives are not attributable to acts of God or the inscrutable logic of the market, but are the direct consequence of public decisions that have amplified the inherent risk of private credit by deregulating financial operations and the attempt to balance the budget when aggregate private demand is collapsing. The central message is that none of this suffering is necessary, and none of it is justified.

The Republican Party is fond of telling voters that their goal is to expand the economic pie, and as the size of the pie grows, there will be more for everyone, no redistribution required. But when you get down to their actual policies, there are two standards for how this pie is shared: one for the rich, and a very different standard for everyone else.