Recommended new movie: Finding the money Extracts from an article by Steven Hail (source) “Between the U.S. economist and fund manager Warren Mosler, Post-Keynesian economists…
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The magnificent failure of mainstream economics Steve Keen For the last fifty years, the development of economics has been driven by the desire to derive…
Amendment of the climate change Act will offer a future for young people David Shearman In 1842 the British Parliament passed a law prohibiting the…
Sometimes animals save us as we save them They need us and we need them: Some say they were first brought in to take out the rats. Others contend they wandered in on their own. What everyone can agree on — including those who have lived or worked at Chile’s largest prison the longest — is that the cats were here first. For decades, they have walked along the prison’s high walls, sunbathed on the metal roof and skittered between cells crowded with 10 men each. To prison officials, they were a peculiarity of sorts, and mostly ignored. The cats kept multiplying into the hundreds. Then prison officials realized something else: The feline residents were not only good for the rat problem. They were also good for the inmates. “They’re our companions,” said Carlos Nuñez, a balding prisoner showing off a 2-year-old tabby he named Feita, or Ugly, from behind prison bars. While caring for multiple cats during his 14-year sentence for home burglary, he said he discovered their special essence, compared with, say, a cellmate or even a dog. “A cat makes you worry about it, feed it, take care of it, give it special attention,” he said.
Finding the tools to end the cost of living crisis Steven Hail Finding an end to the cost-of-living crisis will depend on modern economic theories…
I don’t know that we can afford to be ecstatically optimistic but it is important to hear the positive case for the Democrats. It’s demoralizing to watch the news and constantly be told that Biden is toast. So here’s Simon Rosenberg’s final 2023 Hopium Chronicle. It’s New Year’s Eve. Enjoy it. The hard work starts day after tomorrow: A Positive, Upbeat End to 2023 – Dow in record territory. Inflation running below the Fed target rate. Interest rates coming down next year. GDP growth 4.9% last quarter, looking close to 3% for this one. Best job market since the 1960s. The lowest uninsured rate in history. Crime has fallen across the US this year, rents are coming down too. Consumer sentiment is spiking. Wage growth, prime age worker participation rate and new business formation are all in historically elevated territory. Best recovery in the G7. US setting records for domestic oil and renewable production. $130b in student debt forgiven. The good news just keeps coming. Democrats are also seeing improvement in national polling. A majority of the independent polls taken in recent weeks have Biden tied or ahead.
China looms large in the Australian psyche. On a practical level, what happens in China largely determines the success of global action to deal with climate change, the profitability of our rural economy and the financing of our universities. Our national leaders are concerned about rising tensions in our region and the interplay of US-China Continue reading »
A bright star in the firmament of justice has gone out. One of the greatest journalists of our era has passed away. John Pilger was always on the side of the oppressed. He denounced Empire and all its violent predations–war, genocide, exploitation–as well as its endless lies and propaganda. Till his death, he fought tirelessly for Continue reading »
Dispatch from the Trump cult Watch the whole thing if you have time. Are there people like this at Biden events? I’m not saying there aren’t. But I’ve never seen them. Democrats do have many crazies in their midst. it’s a big coalition. And I know there’s lots of woo and irrationality. Take RFK Jr. for example — there are plenty of left leaners who think he’s great. But I’d be surprised if there were many who believe that Donald Trump, for all his immense flaws, is draining blood from the brains of children and using it to drug the population. Yet Donald Trump has a not insignificant number of such people who believe this of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton following him. Even worse than that (if that’s possible) is the fact that the woman in the video dismisses every indisputable fact by questioning, “where did you hear that?” and insisting that it’s fake news. You can’t deal with people who believe that all reality they don’t like isn’t real. This is cult stuff and it goes way beyond the kind of grotesque propensity for racism and bigotry that characterizes so much of our species.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 31, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Oligarchy
Jeffrey A. Winters [The American Interest, via The Big Picture 12-24-2023]
Winters is professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of Oligarchy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.
We’d better hope not Jack Smith’s office has been working over the holiday and they’ve dropped quite a filing responding to Trump’s claim of immunity. The consequences of the court granting it are dire: Special counsel Jack Smith warned in a new filing Saturday that ex-President Donald Trump’s bid for immunity could “license presidents to commit crimes to remain in office.” The brief lodged in the D.C. Court of Appeals came in response to the ex-president’s claims that he is immune to prosecution for his efforts to undo his 2020 defeat because he survived an impeachment proceeding in the Senate, and because his plotting fell within the powers and duties of his office. If these arguments—which District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected earlier this month—won out, a president could commit crimes freely so long as he threw up sufficient hurdles to keep two-thirds of U.S. senators from voting to remove him, Smith said.
Three days before Christmas, Treasury’s Centre for Population has without much fanfare issued its 2023 Population Statement. As this is only weeks after the ABS issued its population estimates for 2022-23 and its long-term population projections, and a week after the Government issued its new migration strategy (in conjunction with the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Continue reading »
Why Gaza urgently needs a plan B. (A repost from December 2023). War will drag on… It’s now clear that the Gaza War is far from over. Hamas refuses to surrender. Israel has rejected the UN General Assembly’s call for a cease fire and American pressure to lower the intensity of the war because it Continue reading »
An Israel supporter walks up to a guy at a restaurant, grabs his sandwich, starts eating it. Israel supporter: [Walks up to a guy at a restaurant, grabs his sandwich, starts eating it.] Guy: Hey! Israel supporter: What? Guy: That’s my sandwich! Israel supporter [still eating]: Sandwich? What sandwich? Guy: Right there! You’re eating it right now! Israel supporter: No I’m not. Guy: Oh Continue reading »
The African country, one journalist noted, “fought for its own liberation against an apartheid regime supported for decades by the U.S.” “No one knows apartheid like those who fought it before,” said one Palestinian rights advocate on Friday in response to the news that South Africa has taken a “historic” new step to hold Israel accountable for its Continue reading »
The historian Arno Mayer, who had such an influence on my work and eventually became a friend, has died at 97. He wrote books on everything from the French Revolution to the First World War to the Holocaust to the creation of the State of Israel. He was one of a cohort of brilliant scholars at Princeton University who made the study of history, in which I majored as an undergraduate in the 1980s, the most exciting discipline and department in the world. I have a tribute to him at the New Left Review. Some excerpts: Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a […]
Genom att utbilda mig skulle jag få ett bättre jobb än pappa, tjäna mer pengar än vad han giorde och slippa slita ut min kropp medan jag gorde det. Helt enkelt kunna leva ett godare liv än vad han hade gjort. l en rent objektiv och materiell mening har jag också lyckats bättre med det […]
This time last year, Britain was in the midst of the largest wave of strikes in decades. Workers had experienced the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic wars, and with the cost of living crisis biting harder in the colder months, many were taking to the picket line for the first time. From […]
Doctor Who Showrunner Russell T. Davies is already looking to NEXT holiday season, posting a teaser image for the 2024 Christmas Special.
Teach Yellow Dogs new tricks Even if a Democrat wins the White House in November 2024, we could a year from now be sitting on pins and needles wondering if Coup 2.0 is in the works. Watching the January 6, 2021 insurrection unfold may have been the most harrowing day in the lives of ordinary Americans who’ve never served in combat. One wonders if Trump country watched with beer and pretzels as if it was the Super Bowl halftime show. In any event, the Department of Justice, D.C. and Capitol Police, and nearby national guard units, will be anxious as well, and better prepared. There’s a lot to do between now and then. You help keep me/us sane by reading our daily rants. Thank you so very much for that and for your support. I don’t say it enough, thank God for readers: [T]his blog’s proprietor, began writing here New Year’s Day 2003 after attracting a following at Atrios’s blog. She wrote that being invited to write by Atrios was “kind of like having Eddie Van Halen invite you up on stage to join him in a guitar solo.” That’s how I felt when Digby invited me to join her in August 2014.