The UK is facing a binary choice between a deep trading relationship with the EU or the US, according to a report from MPs on the International Trade Committee (ITC).
Efforts to drop regulations in a bid to land a quick Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US could result in the erection of fresh trade barriers between the UK and the EU, the report claimed.…Detailed report. Longish.
These papers also fail to make any empirical predictions or really engage with data at all. I get the impression that people aren't actually interested in making predictions or an actual scientific approach to macro- or micro-economics, but rather in simply using science as a rhetorical device....Information Transfer Economics
With Senator Bernie Sanders in the forefront, some Democratic members of Congress are planning a bill to guarantee jobs that pay $15 per hour, not including mandatory benefits packages, for all Americans. Legislative details have not yet been announced (!), but several sets of plan have been published recently, including on the website of the Sanders Institute, which was founded by Jane O'Meara Sanders, wife of the senator. Here, let's run through a couple of the more prominent plans, and then list on criticisms that have been bubbling up--with a focus on critiques from writers typically identified as being on the political left....Conversable Economist
The news is not the news. What you are seeing on the tube on the nets is not necessarily the truth. That's a shocker, huh? Today's propaganda blitz came courtesy of Israel's Bibi Netanyahu. In a carefully staged managed presentation, Bibi one upped Colin Powell's lamentable lie fest before the UN Security Council in January 2003. While Powell's mission back then was to get the world in line for an unprovoked, illegal attack on Iraq using the false guise of weapon's of mass destruction, Bibi's task was less audacious and far more manageable--Give Donald Trump ammunition for ending the multilateral agreement with Iran. In other words, put the Iran agreement in the toilet.…
Yet, Bibi failed to provide one shred of evidence that Iran had violated the agreement currently in place. In fact, all Bibi did was dredge up old, dated intelligence and present it as something new. I suspect we will soon learn that Jared Kushner and Mike Pompeo were in touch with Netanyahu and his crowd in coordinating this presentation. This was staged managed so that Trump can announce in 10 days that the United States is pulling out of the accord because Iran "lied." Of course, there will be no evidence whatsoever that Iran lied, but who needs proof when there is a political axe to grind.
I expect we will see more efforts by Israel in the coming 10 days to launch military strikes in Syria against Iranian troops and targets in hopes of triggering retaliation by Iran. But such retaliation will be portrayed in the media as an unprovoked act of aggression by Iran.
The die is cast. Trump is pulling the plug on the Iran agreement. But that is a foolish move. It may feel good today but it will work to Iran's advantage in the long run.Sic Semper Tyrannis
Among Netanyahu’s motives for trying to destroy something that is in Israel’s own security interests is to distract attention from the destructive effects of his own government’s policies and to levy all blame for any regional bloodshed and instability on Iran by keeping it a pariah. The destructive effects in question keep accumulating, and the past few days are no exception. There is the Israeli military’s lethal use of forceagainst Palestinians demonstrating against their confinement in the miserable conditions of the Gaza Strip. There are the lethal Israeli air and missile strikes in Syria, which over the past year or two have numbered in the dozens as compared to a single drone in the other direction that did not fire a shot.
The Israeli government’s vigorous opposition to any agreement with Iran also helps to preclude an American straying from the passionate attachment to Israel, which in practice on many issues has meant attachment to the Israeli government and its policies. If Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s just-concluded visit to the region is any indication, Netanyahu need have no worry about that with the current U.S. administration. Pompeo’s remarks—on Iran, on Syria, on Gaza—could not have been more pleasing to the prime minister’s ears if Netanyahu’s own staff had written the talking points. Such remarks represent prioritizing the passionate attachment over an independent pursuit of U.S. interests and over the interests of regional stabilization and nuclear nonproliferation.
One closing observation concerns the irony of exactly who is energetically accusing another regime of lying about activities related to nuclear weapons. The accusations are coming from the prime minister of a state that has long asserted that it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East—an assertion that almost no one in the region believes.…LobeLog
My opinion remains that Kiev will attack not when it decides that the time is ripe for an offensive, but when the West gives the command.Putting pressure on Putin?
The Ukrainian president also said that “a military operation to protect territorial integrity will be completed only when the last piece of Ukrainian land, including the Crimea, is liberated.”
Today, America’s long awaited lethal weapons have been confirmed to be delivered to Ukraine.…Urgent: Poroshenko announced operation for return of Crimea
By changing the format of the military operation in the east of Ukraine, Kiev has legalized the use of armed forces in resolving the conflict in the region in peacetime. At the same time, the leadership of the security forces involved in the Donbass are now moving from the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) to the Ukrainian military.
Javelins – American anti-tank missile systems have been delivered to Ukraine, according to the State Department.
In 1978, the Australian social scientist, Alex Carey, pointed out that the twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: “the growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
In order to defend their business interests against the forces of democracy, the corporations that now dominate much of the domestic and global economies recognize the need to manipulate the public through media propaganda by manufacturing their consent, largely achieved through coordinated mass campaigns that combine sophisticated public relations techniques.
This is the context of the political and media establishment’s vilification of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and their plot to oust him....If Donald Trump is any indication, "they" will attempt to block his rise to power and will try to oust him should he gain office.
At the very beginning of the of the Skripal incident, the security services blocked by D(SMA) notice any media mention of Pablo Miller and told the media not to look at Orbis and the Steele dossier on Trump, acting immediately to get out their message via trusties in the BBC and Guardian.…
We still have no idea of who attacked Sergei Skripal and why. But the fact that, right from the start, the government blocked the media from mentioning Pablo Miller, and put out denials that this has anything to do with Christopher Steele and Orbis, including lying that Miller had never been connected to Orbis, convinces me that this is the most promising direction in which to look.
It never seemed likely to me that the Russians had decided to assassinate an inactive spy who they let out of prison many years ago, over something that happened in Moscow over a decade ago. It seemed even less likely when Boris Johnson claimed intelligence showed this was the result of a decade long novichok programme involving training in secret assassination techniques. Why would they blow all that effort on old Skripal?
That the motive is the connection to the hottest issue in US politics today, and not something in Moscow a decade ago, always seemed to me much more probable. Having now reviewed matters and seen that the government actively tried to shut down this line of inquiry, makes it still more probable this is right.…
Steele, MI6 and the elements of the CIA which are out to get Trump, all would have a powerful motive to have the Skripal loose end tied.
Rule number one of real investigative journalism: look where they tell you not to look.
I don’t think it’s in the long term interests of the United States to enter a sort of arms race in this area. Because I think that’s going to produce a frightening kind of dystopian world. We have a lot of choices about the future that we can create. And unfortunately, I think intellectual property, the privatization of science, an arms raced mentality when it comes to the use of science, is going to produce the sort of sci-fi future that none of us really want, a kind of dark, dystopian one. We could have a very different one of course....TRNN
As a new crypto lender, Nexo, launches Monday, the fintechs that lend money to people based on the digital currency they own say they’re doing well even when cryptocurrency values plummet.Longish but interesting article that looks at three crypto lenders.
Almost all governments run deficits, so it’s a big deal when a government achieves a surplus. This graph includes data for all levels of U.S. government (local, state, and federal) on the net result of their lending and borrowing: A net deficit appears below the zero line, and a net surplus appears above the zero line. Notice the sudden jump in the fourth quarter of 2017 that reaches just above zero? This is a seasonally adjusted data series, by the way, so this jump has nothing to do with the regular influx of tax payments as the filing deadline approaches. (And that particular seasonal jump is in the second quarter, anyway.) So what’s going on here?...Notice "achieve." No one ever says, "achieve a deficit," only "achieve a balance" and "achieve a surplus."
Why are democracies around the world failing to curb rising inequality? What explains the ascent of populist parties and politicians? In a recent paper, French economist Thomas Piketty argues not only that inequality and populism are linked – but that both can be explained by dramatic shifts in the traditional two-party system that favour different elites....
- The rise of the “Brahmin Left”
- The persistence of the “Merchant Right
- Where does this leave poor and less educated voters? ...
There has been a bit of commotion recently about the Job Guarantee idea (AKA employer of last resort). I don't consider myself an opponent of the strategy but I do have several reservations about its political feasibility, the marketing rhetoric of its advocates, and its economic and administrative transparency. Some of these concerns I share with an analysis presented by Robert LaJeunesse in his 2009 book, Work Time Regulation as Sustainable Full Employment Strategy. For that reason, it would be timely to post an excerpt from Bob's discussion of"Job guarantees versus work time regulation."...Lot of the things to think about and debate here.
The following excerpt is from pages 125-134 of Work Time Regulation as Sustainable Full Employment Strategy.Longish but worth the read.
Australia is currently being shocked on a daily basis with the revelations in our Royal Commission on Banking, which show that our financial services sector (banks, insurance companies, financial planning, etc) is deeply corrupt, with criminal behaviour clearly rife. Hopefully, many of the top executives and board members of these firms will be prosecuted and do time. Another ‘bank’ that has totally lost any sense of moral compass, not to mention effectiveness, is the World Bank. Its behaviour over the years has been scandalous. Earlier this year we learned that its so-called ‘Doing Business’ strategy deliberately manipulated its reporting to undermine a democratically elected government (Chile). And, last week (April 26, 2018), the World Bank released the Working Draft of its upcoming – World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work – where it attempted to pressure governments into widespread labour market deregulation, which if carried through would further disadvantage workers and further redistribute national income towards profits. The World Bank has outlived its purpose. It is now a seriously dangerous international institution and progressive governments should set about defunding it.
The World Bank has long been criticised for its role in undermining democracy in the less developed world.…
Institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank that grew out of the Post World War 2 consensus between nation states to manage the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system and the need to reconstruct Europe and build prosperity in poorer nations have long outlived their role.
They have morphed into using their financial power over weaker nations to push a neoliberal agenda which prioritises the needs of international capital at the expense of the well-being of citizens in those nations.
Both institutions should be defunded and a new international institutional framework created.
Well North Korea keeps saying "denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" instead of "North Korea," and that has a specific meaning in North Korean parlance. That is dislodging the US nuclear [extended] deterrence from the region.
So, we are not talking about the denuclearization of North Korea per se, but disarmament or dislodging the US presence from the region. These are two very different conceptual definitions....
Bolton, a hawk who Trump named on Thursday to replace H.R. McMaster in the key security role, told Radio Free Asia on Monday that discussions at the proposed summit with Kim Jong Un should be similar to those that led to components of Libya’s nuclear program being shipped to the United States in 2004.
“Let’s have this conversation by May, or even before that, and let’s see how serious North Korea really is,” Bolton said, according to a transcript of his remarks posted on the RFA website on Friday.
“If they’re not prepared to have that kind of serious discussion, it could actually be a very short meeting.”...
On the 19th of April, The Guardian (International Edition) published an article making the assertion that two Twitter accounts were Russian propaganda operations or as they like to put it ‘trolls and bots’ to unleash disinformation on to social media in the wake of the Salisbury poisoning.
The article is written by a rather unsuspecting and maybe, let’s be charitable here, nieve Heather Stewart, who went along with the government operative who fed this nonsense to her in the first place. Either that or she and The Guardian is deliberately distributing stories that are fake....
But there’s a problem with this.
The owners of both these Twitter accounts quickly stepped forward and on video too, remonstrating in no uncertain terms that they were, indeed are, in fact, real humans – and weren’t even Russian. They have defended themselves to prove they are definitely not software programs.
The Guardian should have taken this story down – its fake news, but they haven’t.
Ian of @Ian56789 even went on national TV, Sky News to be precise and he was quite definitely miffed about being called an automated Russian bot.…
Scott Ritter is arguably the most experienced American weapons inspector and in this interview with Dennis J. Bernstein he levels a frank assessment of U.S. government assertions about chemical weapons use.Consortium News
Just as members of the old Soviet nomenklatura depended on Marxism-Leninism both as a working methodology and as a justification for their prerogatives and privileges, denizens of the entrenched duopoly of Democrat liberal interventionists and Republican neoconservatives rely upon an ideological imperative of “democracy promotion” for global empire and endless wars.…
Unfortunately, the ersatz America has taken firm hold of the key levers of power. Worse, Trump handed those levers to them.Russia Really Is America’s No. 1 Enemy – Depending on Who ‘America’ Is
Well, to be clear, Trump is a big problem. But he’s not the cause of our problems.
To understand why, we have to go back to the 70s, when conservatives and oligarchs launched a de facto coup that ultimately ushered in a New Dark Ages. Conservatives like Lewis Powell and Milton Friedman were mounting a counterattack on the progressive policies of the New Deal, in an attempt to make America more “business friendly.”
As I detail in my book WTF, America? How the US Went Off the Rails and How to Get It Back on Track, conservatives and corporations funded a network of endowed academic chairs, foundations, think tanks, and media outlets that allowed the rich to influence, and ultimately shape, the nation’s policy agenda, giving the cover of intellectual respectability to an ideology based on greed and self-interest, while creating a cadre of leaders and upcoming leaders who could and would, win elections.
It wasn’t their intent to repeal the Enlightenment and push the U.S. into the Dark Ages, but along the way, their coup ran into an uncomfortable fact: Their ideology was simply not true. Greed wasn’t good. Their perversion of Adam Smith’s invisible hand—the notion that self-interest served the public good better than do-gooder government policies—simply didn’t work.
The evidence for this became too overwhelming to deny. Trickle down, supply side, tax cuts for the rich, government as the problem, markets as the solution—all the carefully structured arguments for cutting back government, deregulating the economy, and unloosing the corporate juggernaut—failed to deliver prosperity. Manifestly, and miserably. Except for the top 1 percent. For them, it delivered unparalleled wealth. For many of the oligarchs that was fine, and for some it was the whole point of the coup.
Their schema didn’t fail once—it failed over and over again. It failed at the national level all three times it was tried; it is failing now in virtually every state where a radical right-wing governor has attempted to implement it.
Meanwhile, states like California, which raised taxes and regulated the economy, prospered. And then there was the uncomfortable fact that the New Deal, with its heavy regulatory hand and high taxes, ushered in the longest, most equitably shared period of prosperity in our nation’s history.
What’s a poor government hater to do?
Step 1: Take control of the media. Gut the FCC; buy up all the stations; consolidate the newspapers.
Step 2: Distract, deceive, dissemble and divide. Use sexism, racism, jingoism, hate, fear, greed, and any other “ism” you can think of to take the spotlight off your failure; to short-circuit reason; and to put the limbic lizard brain in charge. Meanwhile, use advanced rhetorical techniques to sell your snake oil through a multi-billion dollar network of think tanks, endowed university chairs, foundations, media outlets, and both bought-and-paid-for political parties.
Step 3: Sabotage the democratic process. Use gerrymandering, voter exclusion, and suppression to keep the young, minorities, and the poor from voting. Make elections a contest for corporate money and buy both parties. Mess with the census. Alienate enough voters that a mere 27 percent of the passionately ignorant can decide the elections.
Step 4:Tell people that the market will deliver everything their hearts desire if we just get government off its back, and that the government is the problem, not the solution...then gut government with tax cuts and political appointments representing the oligarchy at the expense of the people so it can’t and won’t provide solutions any longer.
Step 5:Use the billions spent on the oligarchs’ coup to attack reason, facts, and critical thinking itself. Repeal the Enlightenment and usher in a Next Dark Age, where myth, revealed truths, decrees from on high, and counterfactual nonsense have equal standing with reality.
Once you’ve done all this, you can continue to walk away with most of the money, the power, and the spoils, and do it under cover of ignorance. For example, in 2012, North Carolina lawmakers passed legislation against sea level rise. A day later, the Virginia legislature required that references to global warming, climate change, and sea level rise be excised from a proposed study on sea level rise.
The year before these acts of abominable ignorance the Texas Department of Environmental Quality, which had commissioned a study on Galveston Bay, cut all references to sea level rise—the main point of the study. Meanwhile, Texan Republicans had opposed a proposal to make a course in critical thinking skills a requirement in the state’s curriculum. Don’t want people thinking clearly.
The problem with all this is that the Enlightenment is what brought us untold wealth and health, and it was the basis of our constitution and the freedoms it confers upon us. It took us from one-horse carts to automobiles to airplanes. From leaches and phrenology to penicillin and monoclonal antibodies. From autocracies, kleptocracies, and plutocracies to democracy—or at least a reasonable facsimile of one. And until the oligarchs’ coup, the trend in our nation was to expand the freedoms originally granted to white males only, to an ever-increasing number of people.
Trump is simply the inevitable result of this divorce from reality. He is the bitter harvest of poisoned fruit we get from sowing seeds of ignorance.
And yes, this descent into the New Dark Ages is a bipartisan affair—one the Democrats seem intent on continuing, by backing centrist, corporate-friendly candidates in the mold of the Clintons.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 LicenseCommon Dreams
The amount of money held by Russians in the UK is dwarfed by the amount held in the British Overseas Territories, which include some of the world’s most significant tax havens.
The Global Witness report, Missing the Bigger Picture, is released as politicians have called for a crackdown on criminal and corrupt cash from Russia following the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and ahead of a crucial vote in parliament to increase transparency in the UK’s tax havens on Tuesday 1 May.
The analysis of figures from the IMF and Russian Central Banks shows nearly five times as much Russian money is invested in the British Overseas Territories (OTs) as is held in the UK....Enabling bad behavior.
Yves here. Another way to think about the warning of this post is: Beware of Silicon Valley libertarian billionaires bearing gifts.Naked Capitalism
It is also imperative to seriously rethink the nature, composition, and distribution of economic growth in order to make growth, and its GDP measure, humane. Economic thinkers belonging to the “classical school” of economic thought believed that the question of distribution of surplus couldn’t be separated from production, as the contribution of different economic classes to social production was dictated by the prior distribution of endowments among them. To turn the focus back to ‘distribution’ we can draw inspiration and insights from the classical school.The classical school culminated in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Arguably it was continued by Thorstein Veblen and the institutional economics he inspired by continuing the exploration of the effect of class and class endowments. But for all practical purposes, the classical approach was sidelined by the rise of marginalism and the neoclassical approach based on it.
FBI interviewed Russian MMA fighter linked to Trump and Putin: report https://t.co/wP5Fc5uGJU pic.twitter.com/nJDxXQCuXh
— The Hill (@thehill) April 29, 2018
Hey, Sunday Times? How about fuck you, actually?
Fuck your brazen attempt to keep the British people from reclaiming what is being stolen from them by an increasingly corporatist neoliberal government. Fuck your shameless “information war” which places the agendas of plutocrats and intelligence agencies above truth and honest discourse. Fuck your relentless propaganda campaign which smears anyone who remembers the lies they were told about Vietnam, Iraq and Libya as a “useful idiot” and arbitrarily labels any discussion of the very real phenomenon of false flag attacks as a “Kremlin talking point”.
This is as fascinating as it is infuriating. By attacking literally anything which poses an obstacle to the loose alliance of western plutocrats and secretive government agencies, the social engineers who are fueling this Russia hysteria are actually closer than ever before to openly admitting that the west is truly ruled by those plutocrats and agencies.
They are now this close to saying “Russia is our enemy because it stands in opposition to the corporatist Orwellian oligarchy which is your real government.”...
So to recap, the leadership of the Democratic party is no longer attempting to hide the fact that it deliberately stacks its own primaries against progressive candidates, and yet still has the gall to act like they’re the smart adults in the room who know how to win general elections. These are the same people who think telling the public “screw primaries, you’ll vote how we say” is sheer strategic brilliance. The same people who lost over a thousand seats under Obama.
The leaders of the Democratic Party may be experts at defeating progressive primary challengers, but they don’t know how to win general elections. Winning general elections is not their concern. Last year we saw resort tycoon Stephen Cloobeck openly boast on national television that he had instructed Pelosi and other Dem leaders to espouse a pro-billionaire platform or else risk losing plutocratic funding, and this is exactly what we are seeing them do. The Democratic Party doesn’t care about winning elections, it cares about making sure the oligarchs who own it are able to continue ruling over the deliberately impoverished and politically impotent masses. That is its job. That is its function....Pelosi: “I Don’t See Anything Inappropriate” In Rigging Primaries
“The test of science is its ability to predict”— Richard FeynmanIs economics "cargo cult science" (Richard Feynman)?
Of course, as I point out in my forthcoming book Quantum Economics, economics should not be compared directly with weather forecasting. For one thing, the fact that economists’ predictions and models affect the economy (the financial crisis of 2008 for example was in part caused by faulty economic risk models) means that their responsibility is more like that of engineers or doctors. Instead of predicting exactly when the system will crash (no one has ever asked for a precise ‘date’), they should warn of risks, incorporate design features to help avoid failure, know how to address problems when they occur, and be alert for conflicts of interest and ethical violations. The profession’s failings in these areas, rather than any particular forecast, are the real reason so many are calling for a genuinely new paradigm in economics, as opposed to a rehashed version of the old one....Evonomics
At the start of April President Vladimir Putin believed he could postpone Russia’s strategic and battlefield responses to the state of war which the US is escalating. He was to be disappointed.
On April 6, the US Treasury announced it is putting the state aluminium monopoly United Company Rusal out of business, not only in the US but worldwide. Not since July 26, 1941, when President Franklin Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the US and prohibited all US trade with Japan, especially metals and oil, as well as all US dollar transactions, has the American state attempted such a thing against a rival Great Power. Roosevelt calculated it was one deterrent step short of US war with Japan. Everybody understands now that miscalculation led to Japan’s decision to make its preemptive strike against the US Navy at Pearl Harbor, five months later....Economic warfare. Playing with fire?
Back then I did not realise what I now know, that the person being protected was Pablo Miller, colleague in both MI6 then Orbis Intelligence of Christopher Steele, author of the fabrications of the Trump/Russia golden shower dossier. That the government’s very first act on the poisoning was to ban all media mention of Pablo Miller makes it extremely probable that this whole incident is related to the Trump dossier and that Skripal had worked on it, as I immediately suspected. The most probable cause is that Skripal – who ou should remember had traded the names of Russian agents to Britain for cash – had worked on the dossier with Miller but was threatening to expose its lies for cash....
The response from the US, UK and France to a briefing on Thursday at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague was perverse, to say the least. Russia had brought 17 witnesses from Douma who stated that there had been no chemical weapons attack there earlier this month – the pretext for an illegal air strike on Syria by the three western states.
The witnesses, a mix of victims and the doctors who treated them, told accounts that confirmed a report provided last week from Douma by British reporter Robert Fisk – a report, it should be noted, that has been almost entirely blanked by the western media. According to the testimony provided at the OPCW, the victims shown in a video from the site of the alleged attack were actually suffering from the effects of inhaling dust after a bombing raid, not gas.
The first strange thing to note is that the US, UK and France boycotted the meeting, denouncing Russia for producing the witnesses and calling the event an “obscene masquerade” and “theatre”. It suggests that this trio, behaving like the proverbial three monkeys, think the testimony will disappear if they simply ignore it. They have no interest in hearing from witnesses unless they confirm the western narrative used to justify the air strikes on Syria....See also
The internet is full of photos and videos with the leaders of these nazi organisations posing with swastikas and other nazi symbols and openly declaring their nazi/rasist views and agenda and making the nazi salute! But the west does not want to see the evidence! Hundreds of torch-marches, book-burnings, attacks on churches and synagoges have been carried out by these nazis with the silent support of the illegal regime in Kiev, as well as attacks on, and murders of, journalists, politicians, priests, teachers and anyone suspected of being anti-nazi/anti-racist. But the west does not want to see this either.
Newspapers, TV and radio stations, even internet-sites and bloggers have been burnt, occupied or closed because they showed the truth about the nazis and the illegal regime - the Kiev nazi junta - but the west - that in other cases "fights for the right of free speech" (at least when it comes to Pussy Riot in Russia), does not want to see what happens in former Ukraine.
The term ‘media bias’ does not do justice to the western corporate media’s relationship with Israel and Palestine. The relationship is, indeed, far more profound than mere partiality. It is not ignorance, either. It is a calculated and long-term campaign, aimed at guarding Israel and demonizing Palestinians.
The current disgraceful coverage of Gaza’s popular protests indicates that the media’s position aims at suppressing the truth on Palestine, at any cost, and by any means....Politics for the People
The White Helmets, otherwise known as the Syria Civil Defense, are often presented as an independent humanitarian NGO, but in reality it was founded by a former British intelligence officer, receives millions of dollars in funding from the US, UK, Qatar, Denmark and the Syrian opposition party and material support and training by many EU member nations.
The White Helmets were set up by ex ‘security’ specialist and former British military intelligence officer, James le Mesurier who played a key role in some of NATO’s most dubious interventions including Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine....Tidbit.
Professor Fadhel Kaboub, Associate Professor of economics and international studies at Denison University says there is a lot of evidence the White Helmets have staged and choreographed events that have been revealed and debunked by many experts including the UN.Fadhel Kaboub is an MMT economist.
US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is America’s most popular politician according to a study by Quinnipiac University, CNN reported yesterday.Neocon Bill Kristol, who "discovered" Sarah Palin, is pushing Haley for POTUS in 2020.
$SPX Q1’18 opertating EPS estimate up 10.0% YTD, as EPS setting record; 2018 est +8.1% YTD, 2019 +8.0%; Oper margin record high at 11.66% (20YrAvg8.08%); Sales strong +9.4%Y/Y, second (-2.8%) only to record Q4 2017 (holiday); file under ‘Additional info” https://t.co/hWKNiES12t— Howard Silverblatt (@hsilverb) April 27, 2018
$SPX Q1’18 buybacks (29% reported) up 72% over Q4’17 & up 76% ovr Q1’17 as a few significant increases had an impact, but even ex those, buybacks up between 25% and 42% depending on the exclusions; $AMGN $10.7B for
— Howard Silverblatt (@hsilverb) April 28, 2018
Q1’18 ($0.8B Q4,’17), $ORCL $4.0B ($2.1$B), $MSFT $3.8B ($2.0B)
RT movement_cap: atlanta fed gdp now 5.0% -> 2.0% in two months pic.twitter.com/6OmZgDxiEn
— Robert Hyndes (@trhyndes) April 26, 2018
It's complicated....More pertinent questions.
None of this means we should reject a job guarantee out of hand.Daily Beast — Opinion
Most mainstream economists seem to think the idea behind Modern Monetary Theory is something new that some wild heterodox economic cranks have come up with.
New? Cranks? How about reading one of the great founders of neoclassical economics — Knut Wicksell. This is what Wicksell wrote in 1898 on ‘pure credit systems’ in Interest and Prices (Geldzins und Güterpreise):Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Abstract
Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US, this paper documents a striking long-run evolution in the structure of political cleavages. In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for left-wing (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher education voters, giving rise to a “multiple-elite” party system in the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the “left”, while high- income/high-wealth elites still vote for the “right” (though less and less so). I argue that this can contribute to explain rising inequality and the lack of democratic response to it, as well as the rise of “populism”. I also discuss the origins of this evolution (rise of globalization/migration cleavage, and/or educational expansion per se) as well as future prospects: “multiple-elite” stabilization; complete realignment of the party system along a “globalists” (high-education, high-income) vs “nativists” (low- education, low-income) cleavage; return to class-based redistributive conflict (either from an internationalist or nativist perspective). Two main lessons emerge. First, with multi-dimensional inequality, multiple political equilibria and bifurcations can occur. Next, without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it is difficult to unite low- education, low-income voters from all origins within the same party.Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict(Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017)
We have been discussing the investigation by the Inspector General of the Justice Department into the leaking of FBI memos by former Director James Comey. I have previously explained why there are serious questions concerning Comey’s conduct. Now there is an interesting development after Fox News confirmed that the law professor used by Comey for his leak was in fact a “special government employee” (SGE) for Comey’s FBI. That status of Columbia Professor Daniel Richmanraised new concerns.
Richman, confirmed “I did indeed have SGE status with the Bureau (for no pay).”Jonathan Turley Blog
However, that means that Comey not only removed FBI memos (including some classified memos) but he used a Justice Department employee to leak the material to the media. I have previously discussed my view that Comey had acted unprofessionally and possibly unlawfully. However, that misconduct is magnified if if used another DOJ employee to carry out the violation....
It’s the modern gold rush. Around the world, the most sought-after mineral isn’t a precious metal, nor is it oil and gas…it’s lithium.
Lithium, or “white petroleum” as some call it, has become a crucial element in today’s high-tech economy.
Demand for lithium is soaring, and producers are frantically searching for new sources of supply. Prices have doubled in the last two years, rising as high as $16,500 per ton....
The fact that China is trying to corner the market has made the search for new deposits even more intense, as U.S. and European firms try to get around Chinese domination.
For the last five years, the commodities world has focused on the epic showdown between OPEC and U.S. shale drillers for oil market share. But it’s the war over “white petroleum” that will dominate the next decade....
The banking and finance royal commission has cast light on a new type of poverty to emerge in our society: middle class poverty.
To understand it, we have to go back to an earlier government inquiry: the 1972 Commission of Inquiry into Poverty, conducted by Professor Ronald Henderson. That commission had no real policy impact, but its cultural impact was profound. It gave prominence to the Henderson Poverty Index: a measure of consumption described by Henderson as so austere that it was unchallengeable. Updated versions of this index remain a standard benchmark of poverty.
But more than 45 years on, the royal commission into finance is revealing that poverty is no longer just about low income. The commission has heard that Australian banks have adopted actual lending practices (as distinct from their official lending policies) that claim so much household income for contract payments that borrowers are left without enough money to fund basic consumption levels: they are living in poverty....
My point is that, under capitalism, if you can’t pay your costs from your income you go bust – which releases your market space for somebody who is either more productive, or more realistic in their pricing.
Cheap labour and a systemic lack of jobs encourages undercutting – the parasite businesses Nick Hanaeur speaks of.From some reason my comment in response was rejected as looking like spam, so I am posting it here instead. I have also added to the original comment:“It is appealing to believe that the parasite economy will eventually correct itself. Or that a few high-road employers will set an example that will eliminate it. But trust me when I tell you: This is wishful thinking. I know because I am one of those employers. People, like me, when faced with brutal competitive dynamics, will not pay workers a living wage unless all of our competitors do the same. And the only way that will happen is if citizens like you require employers like us to do it. Until then, corporate America will continue to build its record profits on the backs of cheap labor.
Now, I think modern monetary theory has this right.The Week
The comprehensive survey by the Pew Research Center released Thursday found deep partisan divides over whether the country is achieving some of the values critical to maintaining democratic principles.Suggests that populism is on the rise across the population asa whole regardless of the partisan divide and large cohort that self-identifies as independent. This in turn suggests different forms of populism.
For starters, there is an increasingly marked disconnect between the issues that concern most Americans on a day-to-day basis and the way in which the foreign policy establishment discusses America’s role in the world. Washington Post national security correspondent Greg Jaffe remarked in mid-2017 that “sustaining the US-led, rules-based international order [is] an exhortation that, at best, [is] meaningless to most Americans. At worst, it smack[s] of soulless globalism.”…
Americans have yet to turn isolationist; last April the Chicago Council on Global Affairs noted that, even in the Trump era, “a majority Americans of all political stripes said that the United States should maintain an active part in world affairs.” But Mr. Trump’s election demonstrates that policymakers cannot take that proportion for granted: if they do not accord greater priority to domestic renewal and assuage wide-ranging public anxieties over the impact of globalization, the postwar order’s erstwhile anchor may feel domestic pressure to abdicate its role.World Economic Forum
Every five weeks, 9,500 brand new electric buses take to the roads in China.Winning.
That’s the equivalent of the entire London bus fleet, says a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The world has around 3 million buses. Most run on diesel and compressed natural gas. The global fleet of electric buses now totals around 385,000 vehicles - and 99% of those are in China.
The BRI, for Beijing, is all about geopolitical but most of all geo-economic projection – including the promotion of new global standards and norms that may not be exactly those practiced by the EU. And that brings us to the heart of the matter, not enounced by the leaked internal report; the intersection between BRI and Made in China: 2025.
Beijing is aiming to become a global high-tech leader in less than seven years. Made in China: 2025 identified 10 sectors – including AI, robotics, aerospace, green cars and shipping and shipbuilding – as priorities.Leapfrogging.
As Bauer CEO Thomas Bauer told Reuters: “(Rivalry with China) will not be a contest against copiers. It will be one against innovative engineers.”The obvious problem that Western countries face against China is the difference in population. There are going to be a lot more highly qualified Chinese engineers.
False Flag is a concept that goes back centuries. It was considered to be a legitimate ploy by the Greeks and Romans, where a military force would pretend to be friendly to get close to an enemy before dropping the pretense and raising its banners to reveal its own affiliation just before launching an attack. In the sea battles of the eighteenth century among Spain, France and Britain hoisting an enemy flag instead of one’s own to confuse the opponent was considered to be a legitimate ruse de guerre, but it was only “honorable” if one reverted to one’s own flag before engaging in combat.
Strategic Culture FoundationToday’s false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. There is nothing honorable about them as their intention is to blame an innocent party for something that it did not do. There has been a lot of such activity lately and it was interesting to learn by way of a leak that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has developed a capability to mimic the internet fingerprints of other foreign intelligence services. That means that when the media is trumpeting news reports that the Russians or Chinese hacked into U.S. government websites or the sites of major corporations, it could actually have been the CIA carrying out the intrusion and making it look like it originated in Moscow or Beijing. Given that capability, there has been considerable speculation in the alternative media that it was actually the CIA that interfered in the 2016 national elections in the United States....
What sense can we make out of all these strategic events in Syria? We encounter a baffling array of players: Syrian troops, Syrian insurgents, jihadis of varying ideologies, Iranians, Russians, Americans, Israelis, Turks, Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis, Shi’ite militias, Iraqis, Kurds, Hizballah—all locked in a deadly dance. But as complex as it may be, this seven-year bloody conflict still continues to pose the very same long-term fundamental questions to US policy in Syria and the region. These questions demand an answer....Graham E. Fuller
