Professor Steve Keen, Distinguished Research Fellow, Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security, University College London. One of the great ironies of economics is that, while the public regards economists as experts on money, the issue of how money is created is still not settled within economics. In 2014, the Bank of England published a landmark … Continue reading "The schizophrenic understanding of money in economics"
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The Taliban is falling behind This story from the L.A. Times about a 9-year-old and her goat got mine: Every day for three months, Jessica Long’s young daughter walked and fed her goat, bonding with the brown and white floppy-eared animal named Cedar. But when it was time for Cedar to be sold and slaughtered at the Shasta District Fair last year, the 9-year-old just couldn’t go through with it. “My daughter sobbed in her pen with her goat,” Long wrote to the Shasta County fair’s manager on June 27, 2022. “The barn was mostly empty and at the last minute I decided to break the rules and take the goat that night and deal with the consequences later.” Long purchased the goat for her daughter to enter into the 4-H program with the Shasta District Fair. Children are taught how to care for farm animals. The animals are then entered in an auction to be sold and then slaughtered for meat in hopes of teaching children about the work and care needed to raise livestock and provide food, as farmers and ranchers do. In her letter, Long pleaded for the fair to make an exception and let her and her daughter take Cedar back.
Nothing systemic here, nope There’s something about these maps. The legacy of slavery is right there in color. The persistence of poverty across the South is too. It is of course more complicated, as Gordon Hansen of Harvard’s Kennedy School explains. Well-heeled fans of The Market often treat workers as pawns, abstractions called human resources expected to move about the board of states in pursuit of work when jobs dry up where in places they call home. Relocating requires financial means the poor often lack. Not to mention people’s attachment to place is often more powerful than economics. (Blasphemy, I know.) Donald Trump considers such people losers. They consider him their champion for reasons that have little to do with The Market. The Market is not some force of nature independent of human control. It is not somehow upset by human attempts to regulate it. That’s the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the financial sector. Jeremy Ney, author of American Inequality substack, is a former researcher at MIT, Harvard, and Federal Reserve, and creator of the Life Expectancy graphic. “U.S.
Asa Hutchinson has tried mightily to turn himself into moderate and in today’s GOP, I suppose he is one. In reality he’s a hardcore old-school conservative. Nonetheless, I suppose somebody had to take this tack in the GOP primary and it looks like he’s the guy: Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson made his 2024 White House bid official on Sunday in an exclusive sit-down interview with ABC “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl. Ahead of his presidential announcement, Hutchinson, a Republican, spent several days in the first-in-the nation caucus state of Iowa, stirring speculation that he intended to enter into what he acknowledged is a tense national political landscape. “I have made a decision, and my decision is I’m going to run for president of the United States,” Hutchinson told Karl. “While the formal announcement will be later in April, in Bentonville [Arkansas], I want to make it clear to you, Jonathan, I am going to be running. And the reason is, I’ve traveled the country for six months, I hear people talk about the leadership of our country.
JV Last takes a look at the GOP primaries’ various possibilities in light of the indictment: Yeah, no. Makes no sense. Another part of the dynamic that gets frozen is DeSantis. As it stands right now, just about everyone assumes he’s running. It would destabilize the race if DeSantis didn’t run. And Trump’s indictment almost certainly keeps DeSantis in, even if his polling continues to decline. We know this because yesterday evening—by total coincidence—Florida Republicans introduced their bill to change the law so that DeSantis could run for president as the sitting governor. This makes sense because it underscores the extent to which DeSantis is less a competitor to Trump than his understudy. He’ll keep making demonstrations and preparing his run because someone has to be ready in case Trump blows up. In short: I can see how the indictment might introduce uncertainty into the Republican primary. But right now I’m convinced that it will function as an artificial stabilizing element which actually makes it harder for the campaign to develop and change according to its own logic. Agreed.
No it’s not crazy to hold a president accountable: In the eyes of the world’s media, the indictment of Donald Trump was not the big freaking deal many Americans might expect. Save for a handful of English-language websites and newspapers, the story ranked beneath most regional and local concerns and in more than a handful it was found alongside or just above the coverage of other celebrity news items like the denial of parole to Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius and the Gwyneth Paltrow ski accident trial. There’s a reason for this and it may be hard for many Americans to hear. For all our chest-thumping about our world-leading democracy, we lag the world in living up to the idea that no one is above the law, particularly when it comes to heads of state and government. While, as much coverage at home and abroad noted, the indictment of a president is unique in American history, to the rest of the world, holding leaders to account is much more commonplace. In fact, it is hard to find a major country as reluctant to require its leaders to face the legal music as we have been.
It’s all bad, but this one takes the cake: Cult? Nah…
By supporting Trump they are signing away any chances they have to win. Ron Brownstein lays it out: The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee. In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in the race for the Republican nomination. Yet recent surveys have also signaled that this criminal charge—and other potential indictments from ongoing investigations—could deepen the doubts about Trump among the suburban swing voters who decisively rejected him in the 2020 presidential race, and powered surprisingly strong performances by Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.
Unless it is No, really. These GOP state senators in North Carolina introduced this bill on Thursday. I’m still not convinced it wasn’t an early April Fools’ Day gag. I am certain it’s Tim Moffitt trolling the left. VERY on brand. He’s also introduced legislation to allow one of his counties to “prohibit or restrict skateboarding” on public streets. Multiple outlets have reached out to Timmeh for comment on the trophy bill. So far, Moffitt’s not talking. Probably too busy snickering.
It’s not prosecution that’s selective “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” – Field Marshal Óscar R. Benavides, former president of Peru. Donald Trump niece Mary Trump summed up her uncle’s view of the world in just over 20 words Thursday night: “He knows the difference between right and wrong. He just never in a million years thought it would apply to him.” [timestamp 3:50] Selective constitution is now an organizing principle for the party that all but bears Trump’s name. It seems an awful lot of its members respect neither the Constitution or the rule of law, yet aspire to run a country ostensibly run based on them. I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will will not support and defend the Constitution of the United States. The only thing American about them are their birth certificates.