Michael Collins

Federal district court Judge Jed S.  Rakoff called off a J.P. Morgan deal in an order that revealed the inside track on how the financial giant does business. The ruling of January 28 prevents Morgan from selling or participating the $225 million loan it made to Cablevisión, owned in the majority by Grupo Televisa, one of Mexico's largest telecommunications companies.  

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. – Macbeth, by William Shakespeare

The financialization of the American economy certainly represents a bubbling cauldron, and the cauldron has bubbled over quite recently, and we sadly can look forward to further overflows.

This post is meant to build upon my previous post on healthcare cost drivers, as well as building upon a recent Instapopulist post by Robert Oak on the pension funds shortfall.

Previously, I had stated the premise of the rise in healthcare costs due to private equity firms' leveraged buyouts of health sector companies together with any and all speculation by healthcare hedge funds.

I was inspired by Michael Collins' wonderful article, Where are the Populists?  to make this contribution. I have been spending much time this winter peering through the kaleidoscope of American history at what happened in the early 1900s, when progressives were able to ride a rapidly rising wave of populism to political power, and institute some major reforms that still redound to our advantage today. These progressive populists were able to achieve a number of specific goals, such as direct primaries (to break the rule of state and city political bosses), direct popular election of U.S. Senators (to break the stranglehold large business and financial interests had acquired over the selection process in state legislatures), and some reforms within the U.S. Congress that curtailed the power of entrenched interests by curbing some of the administrative power of House Speaker Joseph Cannon.