The Automatic Earth

Protest against education and health care spending cuts in Madrid on April 29, 2012 The populist reaction to bankster-led austerity in Europe is reaching a boiling point now, as elections near in several countries (Greece, France) and there is no way for politicians to spin the record levels of unemployment and ubiquitous conditions of credit/economic contraction that now exist. A full quarter of the adult populations in Greece and Spain are unemployed, the other peripheral nations are fast approaching that same

If you have the bad luck to find yourself taking a trip to a hospital in Minnesota, Michigan or Utah in the near future, be on the lookout for debt collectors from Accretive Health posing as hospital employees, accessing your private medical records and trying to get at your wallet while simulatenously discouraging you from taking on any additional medical treatment, regardless of whether you may actually need it to oh, say, save your life. Private collection companies like Accretive and their practices represent the quintessence of debts, legitimate

December 1919. “Christmas tree at the District Jail, Washington, D.C., and some of the prisoners.” National Photo Co. Collection glass negative. One foundational piece of advice here at TAE as been to get out of debt and stay of debt – not only because the monetary costs of such debt will grow, but also because debt can be used as a means of physical repression and enslavement. It gives public (government) and private institutions the sufficient amount of leverage they need to

European markets are ending the day deep in the red (DAX down 3.6%, CAC down 2.8%) on a plethora of different concerns, but mostly due to the political machinations occurring in France and the Netherlands. None of this should be surprising to TAE readers, since it has been repeatedly stressed that democracy, in whatever form it takes, is one of the biggest threats to maintaining stability in the European Monetary Union. For example, this is what I wrote in Political Theater Will Kill the