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Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 08:56
Yet another promise shredded as Starmer maintains 100% weasel record Keir Starmer has broken yet another promise – maintaining his perfect betrayal record – by abandoning his pledge to scrap the hateful and cruel Universal Credit system through which the Tories have inflicted years of misery and poverty on the UK’s lowest earning and most […]
Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 08:43

Nothing shines a brighter light on the harmful effects of bad intellectual property law than an ongoing pandemic. CEPR’s researchers continue to advocate for reform of this broken system which causes so much damage here in the US and abroad. This year saw some success from the long campaign to waive COVID vaccine patents for […]

The post CEPR Spotlight: Intellectual Property appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 07:30
LA's a big place and not entirely homogeneous, but after spending a few weeks there my basic observation is that it tends to have all the costs of population density (cars, it's all cars) without the benefits. Even the more walkable bit aren't pleasant to walk.

There's some tipping point that places just can't get over. If you build for cars, you get cars.
Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 07:30
Media Matters reports today on many of the American extremists who expressed support for the Brazilian insurrectionists yesterday which is not surprising. It’s clear that the US right has become quite the inspiration. Here’s an example: Of course. But then he was probably involved in the planning. This piece by Anne Applebaum recalls how the American revolution inspired the French Revolution and Haitian slave revolts in the years after independence. And she writes: The American Revolution also inspired scores of democratic and anti-colonial revolutionaries. Simón Bolívar, remembered as the Liberator in half a dozen South American countries, visited Washington, New York, Boston, and Charleston in 1807 and later recalled that “during my short visit to the United States, for the first time in my life, I saw rational liberty at first hand.” Visits to the U.S. inspired independence leaders from across Africa and Asia, and they still do. Would-be democrats from Myanmar and Venezuela to Zimbabwe and Cambodia reside in the United States, and study the institutions of the United States, even today.
Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 07:22

In the previous post, we looked at the difference-in-difference models of Escobari and Hoover. We noted that they all show the same thing, suffering from the same problem. To identify fraud, they require that however much more the results at the late-transmitting polling stations favored Morales when contrasted with the early ones, they ought to […]

The post The Grand Switcheroo: Escobari and Hoover Reinterpret Their Results to Misidentify Fraud appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 06:03
Video and transcript.

Subject: global corporate totalitarianism.

Naked Capitalism
50 Years After Allende at the UN: a Corporate Triumph Named Multistakeholderism
Lynn Fries interviews Harris Gleckman, Senior Fellow at the Center for Governance and Sustainability, UMass-Boston; Director of Benchmark Environmental Consulting, and Board Member of the Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability
Originally published at GPE Newsdocs
Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 06:00
Judd Legum’s newsletter today reports on an English teacher in Florida who is leading a charge to ban books. She’s doing all the usual banning of LGBTQ material but also wants to make sure her white high school students aren’t made “uncomfortable” by having to read books about race: Vicki Baggett, an English teacher at Northview High School in Florida, is pushing for the Escambia County School District to remove nearly 150 books from school libraries.
Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 05:45
Well, happy 2023 to all my readers. We are back for another year – the 19th in this blog’s existence. All the observers have been waiting for a sign that the US interest rate hikes are slowing the US economy down, which is the mainstream logic that has been used to justify the regressive policy shift. The data, so far, suggests that the inflationary pressures are subsiding as a consequence of the factors other than the interest rate changes which seem to have done little other than redistribute income to the rich away from the poor. The latest labour market data release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics supports that view. Last Friday (January 6, 2022), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – December 2022 – which revealed on-going employment growth, rising participation and falling unemployment. These are good signs for American workers. Further, as inflation is subsiding the modest nominal wages growth is now providing real wages growth – another virtuous sign. The latest data is certainly not consistent with the Federal Reserve type narratives.
Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 05:36

The advent of military Keynesianism is a warning against complacency about the moral superiority of the West in defending Ukrainian democracy.

The war in Ukraine features in our consciousness as resistance to invasion, with the West playing a leading part in supplying military hardware and imposing sanctions on Russia, consequently breaking down international free trade, regulating international payments, and boosting food and energy price inflation. But the war is also changing us with the emergence of a new role for the state in the countries supporting Ukraine’s resistance.

Created
Tue, 10/01/2023 - 05:21
from Dean Baker The New York Times had a major article reporting on how many people in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan are being forced to work well into their seventies because they lack sufficient income to retire. The piece presents this as a problem of aging societies, which will soon hit the United States and […]