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Via CNN: “Tariffs can’t be inflationary because if the price of one thing goes up, unless you give people more money, then they have less money to spend on the other thing, so there is no inflation.” As James Fallows explained: This is from the guy who is supposedly “the smart one” in the new Trump lineup. To spell this out: By the “logic” of future Treasury Secretary, by definition NOTHING can ever be inflationary. Gas goes to $15, you just spend less on … eggs. So it’s no biggie? It appears that Besset believes in the creed of Milton Friedman that “inflation” can only happen because of increases in the money supply. Ok. But that assumes that when prices go up from these tariffs, people will understand that it isn’t inflation so they will happily stop spending money on the things they want and simply substitute for things they don’t want. Good luck with that. If there’s one thing we have learned over the past couple of years it’s that people are freaked out by price hikes, period. I don’t think anyone’s going to care whether that fits the academic definition of inflation.

From Ukraine’s nuclear brinkmanship to Israel’s West Bank annexation plans, can Trump deliver the peace he promised?

The post Trump’s Peace Promise: Three Flashpoints That Could Ignite Global Chaos appeared first on MintPress News.

Patchen Barss on his 3 greatest revelations while writing The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius.

The post When Work Is Play appeared first on Nautilus.

This is what happens when people think politics is just another Reality TV Show and they were just voting someone off the island. I don’t know who people think will be compelled to do these jobs that nobody wants to do. But these are the same people who think slavery was no biggie so perhaps prison labor? What else can they do? Otherwise, wages are going to have to go up if there’s a labor shortage. That’s how this works. Housing costs are already too high for most people. Good plan, Republicans. Excellent.

After spending most of the year haggling, the Greens political party and the Government have come to terms on a housing bill that will help the country build more houses. The last minute deal is alleged to involve the Greens... Read More ›

“The prosecutors will be prosecuted” The Special Prosecutor’s office in the Trump federal cases moved to dismiss both cases today. They say that the DOJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president so that’s that. TV pundits are sayhing that he will write a report which Merrick Garland can make public but that even if he does it probably won’t say much we don’t know because the intelligence community will not have had time to vet the sensitive information. How lucky. Trump and his henchwoman above have made it clear that they plan to seek vengeance against the prosecutors. I see no reason to believe they won’t do it. Trump had his DOJ fire Andrew McCabe on the day before he hit his 20 years in the bureau to deprive him of his pension. (The courts agreed that was unlawful and reinstated the pension.) The IRS audited James Comey and McCabe. He demanded prosecutions against his enemies including Hillary Clinton and was only thwarted because of the so-called “guardrails” that are no longer there. Pam Bondi sure as hell isn’t going to be one.

Why my new book Global Solidarities Against Water Grabbing: Without Water, We Have Nothing addresses how conflicts over water are human-caused events that have socio-political and economic roots.

The post Global Solidarities against Water Grabbing appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

We survived it.

The OSHA heat regulation was one of the few to have broad public support, but Democrats can’t ever seem to get their act together.

The post Biden Made “Record Time” on Worker Protections for Heat. Trump Could Quickly Stamp Them Out. appeared first on The Intercept.

“The previously unknown ‘muse’ of famed novelist Cormac McCarthy has revealed herself in a Vanity Fair profile… Complete with excerpts from love letters and the first-hand testimony of a woman named Augusta Britt, the article alleges the two met when she was just 16 and the late author was 42. McCarthy died in 2023.” — USA Today

Hail, mortal man! Yes, you there—leaning over your vintage typewriter, tapping out a screenplay. It’s your lucky day. Out of all the artists on earth, we have chosen you to channel our primordial spirit of creative inspiration that transcends space and time.

Also, have we mentioned that we’re sixteen years old?

We’re not sure why. Our age just seems to be important to you.

A couple of days after the election this year I wrote that I thought a lot of the anti-incumbent movement these past couple of years had to do with unprocessed trauma from the global pandemic. Here in America we lost over 1.2 million people in a very short time from a deadly disease that humans had never seen before. Within just a few weeks in the spring of 2020, New York City alone had lost more than 15,000 people. All of our medical systems were strained, supplies were unavailable and the whole country, the whole world, was in a state of barely suppressed panic. I don’t think we’ve ever really dealt with exactly what happened and we are now in danger of doing it all over again. President Trump failed miserably at the most important thing he was tasked with doing — reassuring the public. Instead he lied, complained, pushed snake oil cures and worried more about the effects of the pandemic on his re-election prospects than the health of the American people. Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” lays out a terrifying narrative, from taped interviews with Trump himself, of just how inept and dishonest he was.

Good news, bad news this morning First, good news courtesy of E.J. Dionne. Conservatives (with the most clout) have abandoned their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Why? They won’t admit it, but they caught that car and lost that fight: After gyrating from one position to another, Donald Trump simply gave up on being a pro-life candidate. The states, he said, would settle the issue, and he didn’t give a damn how they did it. The Republican Party followed along, drastically weakening the antiabortion provisions in its platform because it recognized that opposing reproductive rights after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was an electoral loser. And it is. Abortion rights prevailed in 7 out of 10 states where voters had a choice this year — in three carried by Vice President Kamala Harris (New York, Maryland and Colorado) but also in four won by Trump (Missouri, Arizona, Montana and Nevada). Reproductive rights won 57 percent of the vote in pro-Trump Florida, but the state had a 60 percent threshold for the referendum to pass.

Experts say a complex but systematic series of electoral violations rather than a 'single smoking gun' have undermined Georgia's parliamentary elections