Reading

[CHERYL and ADAM sit on a designer couch in their West Village apartment that they can afford even though they don’t really seem to work. SARA enters.]

SARA: Steve broke up with me!

ADAM: Aw, sweetie, there are plenty of fish in the sea.

CHERYL (gesticulating with a Bop It): Which makes it statistically unlikely you’ll ever find your perfect match.

SARA and ADAM (hands on hips, smiling): Cheryl!

[CHERYL and SUSAN shop for lavish dresses even though it’s not really clear whether they have jobs that pay them enough to afford this lifestyle. DAVE enters.]

DAVE: Well, it’s over. Jill said she never wants to see me again!

SUSAN: It’s not you; it’s her.

Ukraine's population has not grown much since 1960 but Russia's invasion had led to a catastrophic drop in the birth rate

.

Streaming services are pulling content to avoid paying workers — and could claim a tax break for doing so.

The MVC team discusses Paul Verhoeven’s hyper-violent satire of the corporate police state.

When it comes to our complicated, undecipherable feelings, art prompts a self-understanding far beyond the wellness industry

- by Aparna Chivukula

Read at Aeon

The hunt for a ‘migraine personality’ dates back over a hundred years and still it goes on. Why is the idea so alluring?

- by Shayla Love

Read at Psyche

On the face of it, you might expect North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll to be despondent about his political future. Elected in May 2019 with 34 percent of first preference votes, the left-wing regional leader was blocked from Labour’s shortlist for the broader position of North East Mayor by Keir Starmer and his allies. […]

Spending only happens if there was something to buy. If that spending is then deficit spending it has a lower inflationary impact than spending that is tax-matched.

If one considers a college education as an asset that provides an income stream, the return on a college degree appears to be quite high.

Right now we have central banks attempting to control inflation by crushing wages. But wage-push demand isn’t the primary driver of inflation, it is corporate profit taking (increasing prices much faster than their costs) and some genuine supply bottlenecks.

This cannot be fixed by central banks except by smashing ordinary people flat, and in certain senses not even then, since it will lead to long term maldistribution of resources which will lead to real economic problems in the future: problems not based on distribution or finance, but on lack of physical ability to create what we need.

If we want to fix this we have to make it so that those who control economic decision making can only do well if the population as a whole does well. That means politicians who want to help the population (not 90% of European or American pols) and corporate leaders who need the population to do well.

May Rostom On average, parental contributions help children buy homes four years earlier than those without them. Out of every 100 new homeowners below the age of 30, 16 will have had help from ‘the Bank of Mum and Dad’, or Bomad for short. That rises to one in four new homeowners under the age … Continue reading Bomadland: How the Bank of Mum and Dad helps kids buy homes →

Child scabs wanted!

Don't you see the REAL dangers?

As is usual with trends of all kinds, some recent electoral successes for far-right parties in Europe have been extrapolated into a narrative in which the rise of the far-right is just about unstoppable. That narrative took a blow with the recent Spanish elections in which the far-right Vox party performed poorly and its coalition […]

The Reserve Bank of Australia has published the dates for the 2024 meetings of the Reserve Bank Board, and the related announcements and publications.

'This is Just Practice' reads the sub-title of Marisa Holmes' book Organizing Occupy Wall Street, which is the latest addition to the Alternatives and Futures: Cultures, Practices, Activism and Utopias series. The book reverberates with revolutionary intent: a threat and a promise.

The post A Human Geography of the Space of The Square appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

This is from Axios the font of all beltway CW. It’s about time: Republicans are hammering “Joe Biden’s America” as a land of rising violent crime, surging immigration and out of control inflation, but there’s just one problem: the numbers are starting to move in the opposite direction. The big picture: With 2024 around the corner, the U.S. is making measurable progress in the areas where Biden has been most vulnerable to GOP attacks. Violent crime surged in U.S. cities during the pandemic and ranked as a top concern for voters in the 2022 midterms. Republicans slammed Biden and Democratic leaders for rising crime rates, and many Democrats started embracing a more centrist approach to policing. Homicides were down 9% in the first half of this year over the same period last year, according to a study of 37 major cities from the Council on Criminal Justice. State of play: Violent crime rates are generally down across the board, thought they’re still higher than 2019 levels.

It’s even worse than we knew Rolling Stone catches up with more Jason Aldean racism: JUST WHEN YOU thought there couldn’t possibly be anymore dog whistles embedded in the Jason Aldean “Try That in a Small Town” saga, an intrepid, sharp-eyed TikTok user has potentially picked out one more. Amazingly, this incident doesn’t involve the song itself, or even its controversial video — part of which was reportedly filmed outside a courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, the site of a 1933 lynching (and features a surprising amount of footage from Canada). Rather, it involves a promotional video shared on TikTok. It’s a largely innocuous lyric video with a newspaper theme, but as TikTok user Danny Collins discovered, there’s an actual old newspaper clipping featured in the video — and it’s tied to a Jim Crow-era story about a writer who was harassed for fighting segregation and white supremacy.  @dannyfcollins Thank you to my followers who tag me. All I’m saying is lets get real. To everyone supporting Jason Aldean what else do you need to see or hear? Accept accountability and do better.

Fresh from a recent trip to Ukraine, veteran anti-war activist Medea Benjamin speaks on the Biden administration’s controversial move to send cluster munitions to the country and more in this revealing interview with Alan Macleod.

The post Biden’s Desperation and the Human Cost of Cluster Munitions in Ukraine, with Medea Benjamin appeared first on MintPress News.