So @AOC discovers a garbage disposal and teaches the rest of us how terrifying such a device can be. #BOO! pic.twitter.com/qsYEblAY0I
— Jim Fannon 🇨🇦 (@jimfannon) May 7, 2019
The truth is, a war with Iran is unlikely for one simple reason — President Trump detests unnecessary military interventions. His entire foreign policy is based on the belief that economic pressure can bring bad actors to the negotiating table and that diplomacy, through his unparalleled negotiating skills, can solve even the most complex geopolitical challenges and achieve more than a military conflict ever could.
The abject failure to understand mythological thinking is one of the most serious problems of our age, politically, culturally, philosophically, and spiritually. Irrational forces drive individual behavior and collective action, and the failure to understand and live in productive dialog with the energies of the psyche leaves reason vulnerable on several fronts, and cedes a deep matrix of human motivation to noxious and self-serving ideologies.
The essay that follows, I must emphasize at the onset, is not a critique of science or an endorsement of myth; rather, it is a dialectical analysis of the interplay between both.
I sometimes say that generalists are the most specialized people of them all, so specialized they can’t in fact do anything. Except make observations of that nature. Excerpt:Generalists are a subset of polymaths, since one must be a polymath to be a decent generalist. One definition of philosophy is the study of the whole. Plato and Aristotle were such generalists that they were able to establish the foundational structure of the Western intellectual tradition.In an impressively insightful image, Tetlock described the very best forecasters as foxes with dragonfly eyes. Dragonfly eyes are composed of tens of thousands of lenses, each with a different perspective, which are then synthesized in the dragonfly’s brain.I am not sure Epstein figures out what a generalist really is (and how does a generalist differ from a polymath, by the way?), but this book is the best place to start for thinking about the relevant issues.
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. — A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 3Global Inequality
A quick search on the Internet shows that, in the past few years, a spike occurred in the frequency of references to Gramsci’s famous quote about “morbid symptoms”: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
I myself have contributed to this spike by borrowing the phrase “morbid symptoms” for the title of my 2016 book on the counterrevolutionary phase that followed the Arab Spring, and by quoting the whole sentence as epigraph to the book.
The obvious reason for this spike in uses of the quote is that it provides a clue to the emergence on the global scale, in recent years, of various phenomena that are unmistakably “morbid” from a progressive perspective: from the sad fate of the Arab Spring to the so-called Islamic State, to the reinvigoration of the European far right, to Donald Trump, and so on and so forth. However, before dwelling on the relevance of the above sentence to our present condition, it is appropriate to start by making sure that we correctly understand what Gramsci meant when he wrote it. For this, we need to reinsert the quotation in the text from which it was lifted and replace this text in its own historical context in order to grasp Gramsci’s intention, which may be different from what we instinctively attribute to him in retrospect....ISR — International Socialist Review
The deputy manager reviewed developments in domestic money markets. Reserve balances declined by $150 billion over the intermeeting period and reached a low point of just below $1.5 trillion on April 23. The decline in reserves stemmed from a reduction in the SOMA’s agency MBS and Treasury holdings of $46 billion, reducing the SOMA portfolio to $3.92 trillion, and from a shift in the composition of liabilities, predominantly related to the increase in the Treasury General Account (TGA).
The TGA was volatile during the intermeeting period. In early April, the Treasury reduced bill issuance and allowed the TGA balance to fall in anticipation of individual tax receipts. As tax receipts arrived after the tax date, the TGA rose to more than $400 billion, resulting in a sharp decline in reserves over the last two weeks of April. Against this backdrop, the distribution of rates on traded volumes in overnight unsecured markets shifted higher. The effective federal funds rate (EFFR) moved up to 2.45 percent by the end of the intermeeting period, 5 basis points above the interest on excess reserves (IOER) rate.
Legal experts say the new indictment against Assange is the first time the Justice Department has used the Espionage Act to charge a third party — not the government leaker — with publishing classified information.Press Freedom Groups Say The New Charges Against Julian Assange Are A Threat To Journalists
Labor’s share of national income—that is, the amount of GDP paid out in wages, salaries, and benefits—has been declining in developed and, to a lesser extent, emerging economies since the 1980s. This has raised concerns about slowing income growth, inequality, and loss of the consumer purchasing power that is needed to fuel demand in the economy. The decline has been much discussed and the rising power of companies vis-Ã -vis workers—whether from new technology, globalization, the hollowing out of labor unions, or market consolidation—has shaped much of that discussion.
The labor share of income in 35 advanced economies fell from around 54 percent in 1980 to 50.5 percent in 2014.
In A new look at the declining labor share of income in the United States (PDF–849KB) we examine the relative importance of different factors in the United States through a focus on the complement of the labor share decline—that is, the rise in capital share of income. We decompose this into the role of depreciation, capital-to-output ratios, and returns on invested capital. Linking this decomposition with a microanalysis of 12 key sectors allows us to identify the relative importance of the factors that have contributed to the labor share decline. While our findings confirm the relevance of the most commonly cited factors, including globalization and technology adoption, they also suggest that additional trends often absent from the current debate—including boom and bust effects from commodity and real estate cycles and rising depreciation, including from a shift to more intangible capital such as intellectual property—played an even more central role.McKinsey
While Trump has too often accommodated this hive of neocons, his recent statements and repeated calls for cooperation with Russia and China demonstrate a sound push back which should be taken very seriously. In that Fox interview Trump said:Strategic Culture Foundation
“With all of everything that’s going on, and I’m not one that believes—you know, I’m not somebody that wants to go in to war, because war hurts economies, war kills people, most importantly—by far most importantly.”You know, in Syria, with the caliphate, so I wipe out 100 percent of the caliphate. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to have these crazy people who run around blowing up stores and blowing up things—these are seriously ill people. I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, they’re wiped,’ you know, ISIS. But, I wiped out 100 percent of the caliphate. I say, ‘I want to bring our troops back home.’ The place went crazy. You have people here in Washington, they never want to leave.”‘You know what I’ll do, I’ll leave a couple hundred soldiers behind,’ but if it was up to them, they’d bring thousands of soldiers in. Someday people will explain it, but you do have a group, and they call it the military-industrial complex. They never want to leave. They always want to fight.”Trump continued to explain his preference for economic over military solutions which is certainly in alignment with the Russia and Chinese approach in the Middle East....
President Donald Trump said on Thursday he did not think additional U.S. troops are needed in the Middle East to counter Iran, casting doubt on a Pentagon plan to bolster forces in the region.Reuters
The conclusions of the latest confidential report by the Rand Corporation were recently made public in a « Brief ». They explain how to wage a new Cold War against Russia. Certain recommendations have already been implemented, but this systemic exposure enables us to understand their true objective.…
The consequence of the the 737 MAX accidents give China a tool to exert pressure of its own. The credibility of the U.S. regulator FAA is damaged as it was the last one to ground the planes. It is China that will decide when those planes are allowed back into its air. What if it does not do that. What if it buys less planes:Forget Airbus. After having enormous success in military export, Russia is gearing up for the civilian market, which it will soon begin to take a piece of in any case.
No other country has greater demand for aircraft: In the 20 years through 2037, Boeing estimates Chinese purchases at 7,690 new planes worth $1.2 trillion.Airbus will be happy to sell all those planes. Unless of course Trump makes a deal and lets Huawei off the hook.
The European Parliament elections start today and finish at the weekend (May 23-26). The Europe Elects site provides updated information about the opinion polls and seat projections, although given the disastrous showing of the polls in last Saturday’s Australian federal election, one should not take the polling results too seriously. But it is clear that there is an upsurge in the so-called populist parties of the Right at the expense of the traditional core political movements (centre-right and centre-left). It is also easy to dismiss this as a revival of ‘nationalism’ based around concepts of ethnicity and exclusivity and dismiss the legitimacy of these movements along those lines. However, that strategy is failing because the ‘populist’ parties have become more sophisticated and extended their remit to appeal more broadly and make it difficult to relate them to fascist ideologies. The fact that the progressive (particularly Europhile variety) continue to invoke the pejorative ‘nationalist’ whenever anyone begs to differ on Europe and question why they would support a cabal which has embedded neoliberalism and corporatism in its very legal existence (the Treaties) is testament to why the traditional Left parties are showing up so badly in the polls these days. The British Labour Party, for example, should be light years ahead of the Tories, given how appalling the latter have become. But they are not a certainty if a general election was called and the reason is they have not understood the anxieties of the British people and too many of their politicians are happy to dismiss dissent as being motivated by racism. The Brexit outcome so far is a good case study in that folly....
"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws" — attributed to Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild (likely a false attribution)
Huawei’s suppliers in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan (ROC), and Britain are examining if they can continue to make business with Huawei, while some have already declared a suspension in cooperation.
The issue is that these non-American companies nonetheless use some American components of technology, and if they proceed they will be sanctioned by the US themselves.
It is the same reason why Russia’s Sukhoi did not in the end sell its SSJ-100 airliners to Iran….Apparently some have forgotten that Nazi Germany was way ahead of the West in development of rocketry, jet aircraft, and atomic weapons. The US instituted the Manhattan Project to catch up. And remember how MIG-15's ended US control of the skies in Korea? The US had to scramble to bring its own jets into service as quickly as possible. Certainly, China and Russia will try to do the same to become self-sufficient in technology, and they have the resources to do so if they choose. Now they have no choice.
Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon gave an impassioned account of what is driving the US war on Chinese tech firm Huawei… and trade has little to do with it. The US wants to destroy its competitor, for good.Capitalism is about monopoly power. Free market competition as modeled by neoclassical economics reduces profit to costs, eliminating rents.
Russia is adding warships to its navy faster than the US. The reason for that is simple, while the US is pouring $14 billion into the USS Gerald Ford carrier the Russians are building corvettes. A class of warships between 500 and 1,000 tons.
Not only are they small, they are cheap. The newest class, Karakurt, sets back the Russian budget 2 billion rubles or just over $30 million at the exchange rates.
These sound like puny vessels, except here is the thing: they can hit an enemy surface ship from four times the distance a US destroyer (Arleigh-Burke) or cruiser (Ticonderoga) can.
Four different classes of corvettes are being built. Buyan-M-class of which 15 are planned and 10 are already serving. Steregushchiy-class of which 24 are planned and 6 are serving. Karakurt-class of which 18 are planned and one is already serving. And Gremyashchiy-class of which 4 are planned and 1 is already serving.
Except the Steregushchiy-class all these vessels may fire the Kalibr and the P-800 Onyx anti-ship missiles with the respective range of 660 and 600 kilometers. Steregushchiy carries a lighter Kh-35 missile with the range of “only” 300 kilometers.
Arleigh-Burkes and Ticonderogas fire the Harpoon anti-ship missile with the range of just 130 kilometers. Even if the US had heavier anti-ship missiles ready its primary “surface combatants” could not fire them because their multi-functional weapons cells would be too small to accommodate them. An Arleigh-Burke costs $2 billion, the older Ticonderogas cost $1 billion at the time they were built. Both classes displace around 10,000 tons....On the cheap. And the corvettes are chiefly relatively short range (brown/green water) and defensive in perimeter rather than long range (blue water), offensive vessels like destroyers and cruisers, a chief mission of which is to serve in carrier groups to protect carriers.
It is Wednesday today and a blog-lite day. An announcement and a few videos only. But plenty to occupy your time if so inclined. I have an important announcement to make, a video of our Birmingham event (May 11, 2019) and some music from one of the best guitar players. Thomas Fazi and I also have an article coming out in The Tribune magazine soon in response to a rather unsavoury and silly attack on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) by an ex-advisor to the British Labour Party. There will also be a longer version published here in the coming days – which contains more detail. But I have to finish the edits today! So with that said …
Announcing – Foundation for Monetary Studies Inc.
Today, I am formally announcing the – Foundation for Monetary Studies Inc. – aka The MMT Foundation.
Regular readers will know that this has been in the wind for some time. We have now completed all the legal steps to bring the MMT Foundation into operation.Bill Mitchell – billy blog
We hope this will take our MMT-related projects forward and help more people understand our work and use that understanding to improve their nations down to their local communities....
Chinese firm is a queen on tech chessboard, but Beijing will just tell its whiz-kids to reach the next level….Asia Times
