Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 19, 2025
By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Can nonviolent struggle defeat a dictator? This database emphatically says yes
[Waging Non-Violence, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 01-14-2024]
Reading
Great Googamooga How the hell did we survive four years of this deeply insecure man-child once? How did Americans get crazy enough to give this unstable knot of personality defects four more years in the White House instead of in jail? Anne Applebaum’s account of her visit to Denmark has me waggling my head like a Lonney Tunes character. She writes that “a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.” And yet Donald Trump apparently called Copenhagen on Wednesday and demanded Mette Frederiksen do a real estate deal with him. It’s Kafkaesque. Trump the Transactional seems to have generated a political crisis in Scandinavia even before his inauguration. “In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion,” Applebaum writes. It’s not as if anything Trump might want the U.S. to do in Greenland is not already doable. A former Danish diplomat related a story from 1957.
A president who has both warned of corruption and courted oligarchs sounds a final alarm on his way out of the swamp.
Reserve requirements are the latest economic fad, but do they actually solve anything? Let’s break down the myths and explains why the UK banking system is (slowly) returning to what worked for centuries.
‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomist Simon Wren-Lewis has a post on his blog discussing how evidence is treated in modern macroeconomics (emphasis added): It is hard to get academic macroeconomists trained since the 1980s to address this question, because they have been taught that these models and techniques are fatally flawed because of the Lucas critique and […]
I was separated from my mom at age 10. Donald Trump's reelection has reignited my family's fears.
The post Why My Memories of Being Taken From My Mom at the Border Came Flooding Back appeared first on The Intercept.
In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I’ve combed my review archives and curated 10 films that reflect on race relations in America; some that look back at where we’ve been, some that give us a reality check on where we’re at now and maybe even one or two that offer hope for the future. We still may not have quite reached that “promised land” of colorblind equality, but each of us doing whatever we can in our own small way to help keep Dr. King’s legacy alive will surely help light the way-especially in these dark times. BlackKkKlansman (2018)– So what do you get if you cross Cyrano de Bergerac with Blazing Saddles? You might get Spike Lee’s BlackKkKlansman. That is not to say that Lee’s film is a knee-slapping comedy; far from it. Lee takes the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), an African-American undercover cop who managed to infiltrate the KKK in Colorado in the early 70s and runs with it, in his inimitable fashion. I think this is Lee’s most affecting and hard-hitting film since Do the Right Thing (1989).
Cluck, cluck: I’m sure this is all Biden’s fault as everything bad will be for the next four years. Still, from what I’ve been told, the price of eggs is the most important issue faced by all mankind. Of course, now that Dear Leader has returned I’m sure most people will be happy to roll with the punches.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal confronted Blinken, asking why he continued to “keep the bombs flowing when we had a deal in May” and whether he was “compromised by Israel.” Moments later, Sam Husseini was dragged from the presser by cops after attempting to ask a question. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held his final press conference on Thursday and was confronted about his support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza by two veteran reporters, including independent journalist Sam Husseini, who was dragged […]
The post ‘Why Aren’t You in The Hague?’: Sam Husseini and Max Blumenthal confront Tony Blinken first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post ‘Why Aren’t You in The Hague?’: Sam Husseini and Max Blumenthal confront Tony Blinken appeared first on The Grayzone.
Are they all like this??? From Gizmodo: Marc Andreessen, the billionaire tech investor who co-founded Netscape, has recently been making the rounds on various podcasts to talk about how the Democrats were so very mean to him and forced him to become a supporter of Donald Trump. Andreessen’s obnoxious whining wouldn’t otherwise be notable, given how many guys in the tech industry have blamed backlash against “wokeness” on their support for the MAGA movement. But a new interview released by the New York Times on Friday is interesting, if only because the Times cleaned up its own transcript to make Andreessen sound like less of an idiot. Andreessen said that Hillary Clinton was really running the government between 2017 and 2021. The Times claimed he misspoke but as you read further it’s clear that he’s talking about some conspiratorial deep state BS about which either the Times is unaware or they decided to ignore. But even if Andreessen did misspeak he still sounds like a sophomoric fool, much like the rest of these tech bros who all seem to be in the grip of serious cases of arrested development.
I offer you a gift link to the whole interview (and transcript if you prefer.) It’s super interesting. A little excerpt: Klein: I think attention is now to politics what people think money is to politics. Certainly at the high levels. There are places where money is very powerful, but it’s usually where people are not looking. Money is very powerful when there’s not much attention. But Donald Trump doesn’t control Republican primaries with money — he controls them with attention. I keep having to write about Musk, and I keep saying he’s the richest man in the world. But it’s actually not what matters about him right now. It’s just how he managed to get the attention and become the character and the wielder of all this attention. And that’s a changeover I think Trumpist Republicans have made, and Democrats haven’t. Democrats are still thinking about money as a fundamental substance of politics, and the Trump Republican Party thinks about attention as a fundamental substance of politics. Hayes: I really like this theory.
Two sides of the same bitcoin… David Corn’s very skillful lede to his new piece: On Monday, the three wealthiest men in the world—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—are scheduled to be at the Capitol as honored guests for Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, seated where four years ago Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militia members, and other extremists, incited by his brazen lies about the 2020 election, violently attacked Congress to overturn American democracy and keep Trump in power. This transition—from brownshirts to billionaires—encapsulates what has gone wrong. It is a clear signal that the United States is broken. With the news that Trump launched that new shitcoin and has made at least $25 billion overnight, I feel very hopeless today. This is what it’s come to. Corn’s piece is very good. But gird yourself.
Gaza has become a killing field—that is the view of a well-informed Israeli veteran who was an enthusiastic supporter of the initial Israeli response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. He believes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the mastermind of the all-out retaliatory bombing and ground attack there, is now a contemporary Continue reading »
Despite causing widespread criticism overseas, in the 1950s under the Menzies government, Australia’s whites-only immigration policy seemed as popular as ever. Indeed the rise of Communism in the region added extra justification to the need to prevent Asians entering the country. But that was to change. Deborah Kennedy (DK): John Menadue leaves his home in Continue reading »
As negotiators from Israel and Hamas continue discussions in Qatar about a possible Gaza ceasefire, we speak with Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed, who spoke at a press conference of Gaza media workers last week urging the international press to speak up for their Palestinian colleagues. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate says nearly 200 journalists have been Continue reading »
Humanity stands at a crossroads, its future bound not to conquest but to synthesis. The world before us is not one of irreconcilable opposites locked in perpetual conflict but an intricate ecosystem of human Adaptive Systems, each defined by its strengths and vulnerabilities. In a rapidly interdependent world, Western elites must abandon the confines of Continue reading »
It’s time to rid ourselves of the concepts of disadvantage and equity and immerse ourselves in the practices of learning and knowledge like never before. I did not come from a disadvantaged family. It was however low-income, with my father working at the local milk factory and my mother working nightshift, part-time at the local Continue reading »
Worshippers of Death, They will remain such, In the annals of human history. Never forgiven, Never forgotten, For the genocide, They perpetrated! … GAZA, GAZA, GAZA I look at the photos I look at the videos I look at the explosions I look at the obliteration Dust rubble Everywhere Every image Witness to the horror Continue reading »
“Israel is a liability,” said one Palestinian-American rights advocate. As a ceasefire and hostage release deal was reportedly reached between Hamas and Israel on Wednesday, new polling made it clearer than ever that Vice President Kamala Harris‘ refusal to break with the Biden administration’s position on Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza had an impact on her support from voters, Continue reading »
Trump’s describing his ultimately abandoned pursuit of the Reform Party’s presidential nomination in 2000: Trump had inked a deal with Tony Robbins, the frighteningly upbeat motivational speaker, by which Robbins would pay Trump $1 million to give ten speeches at his seminars around the country. Crucially, Trump had timed his political stops to coincide with Robbins’ seminars, so that he was “making a lot of money” on those campaign stops. “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” Trump said. … That was then, this is now: I’m speechless. Tom has more below…