Weekend newsreading

Beyond brics - BB interviews Noam Chomsky. Several points of interest here. #1, despite the author's blather, Chomsky has always publicly said that there are many places to get real news, including FT and the other newspapers of the plutocracy. Why? Because the rich can't afford to lose money from being misinformed. #2, I'd be interested in Otto's take on Chomsky's opinions on Latin America - especially where he suggests Chavez and Morales have been successful at reducing poverty.

Bonddad - on Italy and Spain. His opinion is vaguely negative on Italy and much moreso on Spain. I'd still retort that the forward outlook must be better than the present numbers; and besides, the plutocrats wanted to destroy the Spanish and Italian economies, right? That's the point of "internal devaluation", no? So this is a good thing, yes?

Reformed Borker (Bork Bork Bork!) - Ari Wald on what could trigger a pullback. Yes, some negative sentiment could pop up and begin to feed back. And it might happen simply because of boring old seasonality; maybe the bull move during earnings season will stop when earnings season ends; or things could stop, maybe, because of a rise in gasoline prices, which Bonddad has noted are a choke collar on the US economy. And it probably won't be a crash, just a rangebound dithering or a slow drift vaguely downish. But at the same time:

Reformed Borker (Bork Bork Bork!) - If this isn't a rotation, you tell me what you'd like to call it. Again, he starts with hard data and ends with a "so there, bitch!".

BI - Raising the US minimum wage is a stimulus package. That's because poor people have to spend every penny that comes in just to survive: so you should pay your poor people more! But more importantly, it'll gain yet more voter support for the Democrats when the Rethuglicunts start screaming about how they hate poor people, want to see them starve, and actually wouldn't it be good to eliminate minimum wage altogether instead of just for the illegals we hire from Mexico?