More on the Time Domain

Time domain always missing from economic "models"; more discussion of the Time Domain here:

The Failure of the War On Terror

The US has spent $6 trillion on the War On Terror but the problem of terrorism just gets worse.

Has the War On Terror made the World a safer place?

Reality Check: War on Terror - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsTX5S-HMis

How Does Corporate Media Manufactures False Narratives?

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and MENA regions, neocolonialism and Petroimperialism.

Nauman Sadiq describes how Islam isn't the war making religion the West makes it out to be. He say's that it is poverty and Western imperialism that drives some Islamic young people to become Jihadists.  You have to remember that these people are coming fro all over the World, not just the Middle east, and many come from the West itself. In other words, only a small percentage of Muslims are becoming Jihadists.

http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/253686/

What bothers me is not that we are unable to find the solution to our problems, what bothers me more is the fact that neoliberals are so utterly unaware of the real structural issues that their attempts to sort out the tangential issues will further exacerbate the main issues. Religious extremism, militancy and terrorism are not the cause but the effect of poverty, backwardness and disenfranchisement.

Empirically speaking, if we take all the other aggravating factors out: like poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, social injustice, disenfranchisement, conflict, instability, deliberate training and arming of certain militant groups by the regional and global players, and more importantly grievances against the duplicitous Western foreign policy, I don’t think that Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the likes would get the abundant supply of foot soldiers that they are getting now in the troubled regions of Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.


                                                                      ****

...That’s how the mainstream media constructs artificial narratives and dupes its audience into believing the absurd: during the Cold War it created the “Red Scare” and told us that communism is an existential threat to the free world and the Western way of life. We bought this narrative.

Then the West and its Saudi and Pakistani collaborators financed, trained and armed the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” and used them as their proxies against the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union they declared the former “freedom fighters” to be terrorists and another existential threat to the “free world” and the Western way of life. We again bought this narrative.

And finally, during the Libyan and Syrian proxy wars the former terrorists once again became freedom fighters – albeit in a more nuanced manner, this time around the corporate media sells them as “moderate rebels.” And the lobotomized neoliberal audience of the mainstream media is once again willing to buy this narrative, how ironic?

Horrifying loan interest in the IMF and World Bank

This is a recent essay by a student that has been put online by UKEssays. They don't know who the student is because they lost the details, but it is a very good essay so they put it out anyway. The grammar needs tidying up as English is probably not the student's first language, but I liked the essay. It covers what I was trying to say about debt in another post but this goes into more detail. This is just an excerpt, there is a lot more on the site.

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/economics/horrifying-loan-interest-in-the-imf-and-world-bank-economics-essay.php

Published: 23, March 2015

First of all, the article is studied about the IMF and World Bank offer the loan which consists of horrifying loan interest that cause the particular country unable to pay back the principle of the loan. Besides that, some country even cannot afford to cover the high interest rate charge by the IMF and World Bank. The loan that offered by the IMF and World Bank to poor country is considered as the debt trap because most of the countries made the IMF and World Bank loan is unable to pay back their debt. Besides that, the debt trap will limit the future earnings capacity because next generation needs to bear the loan if the past decade is unable to finish pay the debt.

Next is IMF and World Bank dominate the world's poor majority in developing and third world countries by using the economic growing reason to attract the lenders. After that, the loan sharks have hijacked the economies of more than 60 countries because of the loan agreement set by the IMF and World Bank. However, the capacity of the debt trap can claim all surplus production of a society. The compound interest caused most of the countries are unable to finish pay back the loan. The debt trap robs major surplus of the production in the whole society so that the particular country economic will not growth before they settle all the debt.

Due to the bad economic, an estimated 100 million children live and work on the streets in the developing world because they need to work hard to supplement their families' income in order to continue future life. Moreover, there are 25 million children live in the streets with other without family children. Basically, most of the young victims in debt trap countries force to be criminals in order to continue their life and some of them cannot survive due to the hunger pain and diseases because they no money to buy the medicine and find medical treatment.

Besides that, the indebted countries force to pay their debt interest by reducing the budget on the public facilities. In fact, most of the poor Africa countries spend most of the government budget on debt repayment instead of spending on healthcare and education and then the rich clients will more and richer after absorb debt repayment from the indebted countries. The consequences are some countries such as Keyans, Bostwana, South Africa and Zimbabwe citizens is died because of the HIV and AIDS infection spread very fast among each other due to the not enough money on medical treatment. The results are wealth people will be richer and poor countries will not able to repay their loan interest. However, five hundred billionaires in the world have too much wealth while around three billion people are considered as poverty. The fact is most of the income from the third world will go into the debt service payments and absorbed as banks profit so that the five hundred billionaires actually gained their profit from the poverty. An example in Nigeria debt was the government borrowed up around $5 million dollar but the amount was compounded to $16 billion only in one year period because of the high compound interest charge by the IMF and World Bank.

Stela Rubínová, Emmanuel Dhyne — The supplier network of exporters: Connecting the dots

Even in export-oriented industries, only a handful of firms ship their goods abroad. These firms are systematically different from their purely domestic counterparts. This column sheds light on the domestic supply chain of exporters to uncover firms whose production is exported indirectly. Accounting for indirect exporters brings the empirics of international trade closer to the modern structure of production, characterised by many stages in possibly many locations. These findings suggest that the distributional effects of globalisation go beyond the exporters versus non-exporters dichotomy.….

Conclusion

A better understanding of the production structure that underpins observed international trade flows is important for assessing trade-related policies. In complex economies that are characterised by a large degree of production fragmentation, customs data alone provide limited information for answering questions such as which firms are impacted by trade policies, or how foreign demand shocks can propagate throughout the domestic economy. The established fact that exporters are a small club of the best performing firms gained them the label of ‘export superstars’. These firms, however, are just a tip of the production iceberg as they are embedded in domestic networks of firms that are exceptional performers themselves. Thus even though direct exporters shine the brightest, they are in fact part of bright constellations. These findings emphasise that the group of stakeholders in trade liberalisation negotiations is much wider than the ‘happy few’ who export directly and that distributional effects of globalisation go beyond the exporters versus non-exporters dichotomy.

vox.eu
The supplier network of exporters: Connecting the dots
Stela Rubínová, Emmanuel Dhyne

What is the economic effect of a cut in immigration?

I finally see how neoliberal economists think, and New Labour for that matter. In this article from the blog, 'Economics -Help (helping to simplify economics), they look how the coming loss of immigration will affect the UK economy. The whole article just looks at the business affects of immigration and does not consider the social effects at all. As they say, economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

My old company never trained any apprentices for years, so I guess that helped towards making high short term profits and the directors got good bonuses. Then as the workforce started to age and retire they used skilled Eastern European immigrants to make up for shortages. There's loads of British youngsters doing horrible jobs who would have loved to have well paid skilled jobs but they were neglected and many don't even have jobs at all  That's the neoliberal business model, and the British have had enough of it.

The UK saw net migration of 330,000 in the last year. If net migration were to fall significantly – how would this affect the UK economy?

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/21189/economics/what-is-the-economic-effect-of-a-cut-in-immigration/

Net migration is generally difficult to predict, but there are good reasons to assume this is likely to fall in future years. Net migration will likely fall because:

• Climate post-Brexit has seen a rise in racist incidents and hostility towards migrants. This will deter many from coming, and may even encourage some migrant workers to move elsewhere.
• Lower UK economic growth and higher unemployment will reduce economic incentive of people to come and work in the UK.
• UK main political parties seem committed (at the moment) to ending free movement of labour, whatever the cost in terms of losing full access to Single Market.

If the UK were to see a fall in immigration, how would that affect the economy?
1. Lower economic growth.  Net migration, ceteris paribus, leads to higher real GDP. This is because net migration, with more people of working age coming to the UK, increases the labour supply and increases aggregate demand (migrants spend in UK). If migration falls, then this boost to real GDP will be lost, and we will have a relatively lower real GDP.

 

                                                                   *****

The UK has a skills shortage in many industries and sectors. These include highly skilled professions, such as doctors, nurses and plumbers. A fall in net migration could cause more vacancies in these areas. This could lead to waiting lists rising in the NHS and a shortage of plumbers, builders.
However, supporters of cutting net migration argue that we can have the best of both worlds, allowing skilled workers to still come, only stopping ‘unskilled workers’. In this case, we can pick and choose which migrants come.
However, this kind of selective immigration policy will be difficult to implement in practise and may require much more stringent border controls and checks. Also, If UK leaves the EU, it may make the UK less attractive for skilled workers that we want to attract.
Another argument is that the UK should be self-sufficient in skilled labour. If we need to employ migrant labour to fill labour shortages, a better solution is to increase training for these jobs. However, this is easier said than done. It will take a long time, and also may require changing cultural attitudes – e.g. in UK graduate degree is generally seen as more desirable than practical vocational qualifications, such as plumbing and electrician.

Bill O'Reilly Owned by Rapper Lupe Fiasco

I thought this was terrific, the raper Lupe Fiasco takes on Bill O'Reilly and does really well. Lupe Fiasco made a rap song calling Obama a terrorist, and so in this interview Bill O'Reilly really goes for him but Lupe Fiasco is so articulate that he meets his match.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqtkdSM1CJk&app=desktop

Fox's Bill O'Reilly and rapper Lupe Fiasco went at it on O'Reilly's show Monday night. O'Reilly defended Obama's wars and Fiasco criticized them. Bill was supposedly miffed that the rapper considers Obama a terrorist.

Nigel Farage accuses EU of 'poking Russian bear with stick' over Ukraine.

It looks like the progressive Right is far more progressive than the liberal left. Here Nigel Farage tells the EU straight that it was the West that caused the coup in the Ukraine and that we are deliberately poking Russia. He also mentions how the liberals and even the Greens supported the overthrow of Qaddafi. He then says about the terrible mess the West has made of the Middle East.

It looks like we have more chance of gaining world peace with the progressive Right - where even Trump makes more sense - than we do with the Left, who are now nearly all neoliberals.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AYjGFuvmsc


Nigel Farage accuses EU of 'poking Russian bear with stick' over Ukraine, Nigel Farage intensified his attack on the EU's "vanity" foreign policy on Thursday as he accused Brussels of poking the "Russian bear with a stick" over Ukraine and of deepening the Syrian civil war by giving false hope to forces hoping to topple the Assad regime.

Richard D. Wolff — Economic Theorists: The High Priests of Capitalism

Richard Wolff traces a pattern of advocacy in social, political, and economic explanation. One might also call it persuasion.

Truthout | OpEd
Economic Theorists: The High Priests of Capitalism
Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | Op-Ed

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a visiting professor of economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne). His work is available at rdwolff.com and at democracyatwork.info.

Also

Poverty Has Always Accompanied Capitalism
Mark Karlin interviews Richard D. Wolff for Truthout
See also

Stumbling and Mumbling
Cognitive biases, ideology & control
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

FB Ali — One Belt, One Road

Where the geopolitical, geostrategic, economic action is.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
One Belt, One Road

FB Ali

SouthFront — ISIS Wants to Control Key Trade Route For Oil to Europe

In a video that was released by the so-called Islamic State they presented their strategic objective on a map. According to it the Islamist mercenaries want to control the main oil trade route to Europe. If successful, the safe transport of oil by sea to Europe would be at risk.

SouthFront
ISIS Wants to Control Key Trade Route For Oil to Europe

Originally appeared at DWN, translated by Karin exclusively for SouthFront

Riley Waggaman — The European Union Was Always an American-Led Project, and Now Washington Is in Panic Mode

Like Pepe Escobar, Riley Waggaman is not only an analyst but also a humorist. The problem is that one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Russia Insider
The European Union Was Always an American-Led Project, and Now Washington Is in Panic Mode

Riley Waggaman

F. William Engdahl — Russia’s Achilles Heel – Reflections from St. Petersburg

The first thing that is important to understand is that in Russia's governmental structure there are essentially two governments. The prime minister, currency Dimitry Medvedev, is responsible for domestic policy including economic policy, and the president, now Vladimir Putin, is responsible for foreign and military policy. The Central Bank of Russia is politically independent and responsible for monetary policy.

Secondly, it is important to grab that domestic affairs under Prime Minister Medvedev is deeply beholden to the ideology and economics of Western economic liberalism, introduced at the time the USSR collapsed. This cohort adheres to the the Western paradigm.

 Russia's Achilles heel is the economic liberalism inherited from the Yeltsin years and Harvard boyz by the proteges of Yegor Gaidar, the former Acting Prime Minister that introduced shock therapy. Current prime minister Dimitry Medvedev and central bank chief Elvira Nabiullina are economic liberals who follow the Washington Consensus that is based on neoliberalism as economic liberalization, deregulation, and privatization, along with low taxes and perks for "job creators." The prescription for economic policy is "expansionary fiscal austerity" in order to increase business confidence. The business of the central bank is solely to keep inflation low and the exchange rate stable.

What I experienced in my discussions at the conference–this year with record attendance of more than 12,000 business people and others from around the world–was a sense that there coexist two Russian governments, each the polar opposite of the other. Every key economic and finance post is firmly occupied at present by monetarist free-market liberal economists who might be called “Gaidar’s Kindergarten.” Yegor Gaidar was the architect, along with Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, a Soros-backed economist, of the radical “shock therapy” that was responsible for the economic hardships that plagued the country in the 1990s resulting in mass poverty and hyperinflation.
Today’s Gaidar Kindergarten includes former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, another Euromoney favorite in 2010 as international Finance Minister of the Year. It includes Economics Minister, Alexey Ulyukaev. It also includes Medvedev’s Deputy Prime Minister, Arkady Dvorkovic.

Dvorkovic, a graduate of Duke University in North Carolina, is a protégé, directly serving during his earlier years under Yegor Gaidar. In 2010 under then Russian President Medvedev, Dvorkovic proposed a lunatic scheme to make Moscow into a world financial center by bringing in Goldman Sachs and the major Wall Street banks to set it all up. We might call it inviting the fox into the hen house. Dvorkovic’s economic credo is “Less state!” He was the chief lobbyist in Russia’s WTO accession campaign, and tried to ram through rapid privatization of the assets that remain state-owned.

This is the core group around Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev today who are strangling any genuine Russian economic recovery. They follow the western playbook written in Washington by the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury. Whether they do this at this stage out of honest conviction that that is best for their nation or out of a deep psychological hatred for their country, I’m not in a position to say. The effects of their policies, as I learned in my many discussions this month in St Petersburg are devastating. In effect, they are self-imposing economic sanctions on Russia far worse than any from the USA or EU. If Putin’s United Russia party loses the elections on 18 September, it will be due not to his foreign policy initiatives for which he still enjoys 80+% popularity polls. It will be because Russia has not cleaned the Augean Stables of the Gaidar Kindergarten.

From various discussions I learned to my shock that the official policy of Medvedev’s economic team and of the Central Bank today is to follow the standard IMF “Washington Consensus” budget austerity policies.…

I had the honor of appearing on a major panel together with several members and founders of this group. It included a co-founder of the Stolypin Club, Boris Titov, a Russian businessman and open ideological foe of Kudrin, who is chairman of the All-Russian “Business Russia” organization. He insists on the need to increase domestic production of goods, stimulate demand, attracting investment, tax cuts and the cuts to the refinancing rate of the Central Bank. Titov is a central figure today in Russia’s recent China initiatives. He served as chairman of the Russian part of the Russian-Chinese Business Council, and member of the Presidium of the National Council on Corporate Governance.

My panel also included Stolypin Club leading members Sergei Glazyev, Adviser to the President of the Russian Federation, and Andrey Klepach, Deputy Chairman of the VEB Bank for Development. Klepach, a co-founder of the Stolypin Club, was formerly Deputy Economics Minister of Russia, and director of the macroeconomic forecasting department of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. My impression was that these are serious, dedicated people who understand that the heart of true national economic policy is human capital and human well-being not inflation or other econometric data.…

What was clear from my St Petersburg talks this time is that events are approaching a decisive “do or die” turn in which either economic policy is formally put into the hands of competent national economy circles such as those of Boris Titov, Andrey Klepach and Sergey Glazyev, or she will succumb to the insidious poison of Washington Consensus and liberal free market nonsense. After my recent private talks I am optimistic regarding prospects for a positive change.

NEO

Russia’s Achilles Heel – Reflections from St. Petersburg

F. William Engdahl

The Young Turks on the Minimum Wage.

Very sharp, superb commentary from the The Young Turks as usual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORoZgyz_N4c


As momentum builds to raise the minimum wage, Fox News’s Stuart Varney is fighting back. He wants to ensure that the lowly plebs don’t get paid $15 an hour. Cenk Uygur, John Iadarola (ThinkTank), Jimmy Dore, and Michael Shure, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

"The $15 minimum wage is going into effect in several cities starting today, and the panel at Fox Business’ Varney & Co. today were simply horrified by it.

Speaking from Bermuda, panelist John Layfield explained that there is no minimum wage in the country and it’s an economic paradise where children work for tips...

Varney then marveled that people who work 40 hours a week and make $15 an hour will make a yearly salary of $30,000. Darlings, how ghastly!

Panelist Elizabeth MacDonald shared Varney’s disgust that people who work 40 hours a week would not be making starvation wages anymore because these jobs are “supposed to be an entry-level job, it’s not supposed to be a career.””*

Propaganda on Venezuela

More on neoliberal mainstream media propaganda about Venezuela based on misrepresentation and exaggeration.

Yes, there is a crisis, but the new reporting is way overblown. 

Sensationalism to get eyeballs and clicks in order to increase ad revenue, or ideological political spin as part of the information war aimed at regime change, or both?

Defend Democracy
How Severe Is Venezuela’s Crisis?

Gabriel B Hetland, assistant professor of Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies at University at Albany, SUNY

The Real News Network
Media Exaggerations of Apocalyptic Venezuela Plays into Regime Change Narrative

Sharmini Peries interviews Gabriel B Hetland, assistant professor of Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies at University at Albany, SUNY; and Rachael Boothroyd Rojas freelance journalist and doctoral candidate in Latin American studies at the University of Liverpool, UK, who has lived in Venezuela for almost five years and currently works for Venezuelanalysis.

ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Peter Turchin— A Radical Proposal After Brexit: End the European Union and Begin Destructive Creation

The overall trend over the last 10,000 years has been for humans evolving to cooperate in ever larger societies—from living in farming villages of a few hundred people to nation-states of today and even supra-national formations like the EU. But cooperation is fragile. We know from studying history that cooperation tends to go up and down in cycles. Currently, and according to all the indicators, both the United States and the European Union are in a downward, disintegrative, phase of the cooperation cycle.

There are several interlocking reasons why the EU, in particular, has entered the disintegrative phase. Let’s discuss them in turn.…

This development is, in large part, a result of the spread of the corrosive ideology of neoliberalism from the US to Europe. As the European elites adopted the neoliberal views en masse, it changed their attitudes and behaviors in several ways. 

First, neoliberalism freed them to pursue self-serving policies, such as reducing corporate taxes…

Second, the reference group for European elites became other wealth- and power-holders in Berlin, London, and Washington, not their own populations.…

In addition to the spread of neoliberalism, which, as I stated above, is an ideology corrosive of cooperation, different EU members found it difficult to cooperate with each other, because they did not share a well-defined common identity. Additionally, different groups evolve different institutions that promote cooperation. This is why, as the political scientist Robert Putnam found, ethnically diverse groups find it more difficult to cooperate. It’s a coordination problem.…

You cannot build an identity and a common set of institutions in one fell swoop. The rapid expansion of the European Union far beyond the area where Europeanness was born (the Carolingian Empire) was, in my opinion, a big mistake. Positive social change is gradual and slow; it’s breaking apart that can occur quite rapidly.

But breaking apart is also an important aspect of social evolution. When social formations become dysfunctional they must be somehow swept away and be replaced with more cooperative formations. After all, that’s how free market economics works. Unprofitable firms go belly up, and more efficient ones grab their market share. Joseph Schumpeter called this “creative destruction.” For reasons I explain in Ultrasociety I prefer to reverse the order, “destructive creation”.…

Evonomics
A Radical Proposal After Brexit: End the European Union and Begin Destructive Creation
Peter Turchin | Professor of Biology and Anthropology in the University of Connecticut and Vice President of the Evolution Institute

Biagi Bossone and Stefano Sylos Labini — Macroeconomics in Germany: The forgotten lesson of Hjalmar Schacht

Of historical interest. Hjalmar Schacht was Hitler's central bank chief. Schacht was the Marinner Eccles of Germany, serving in the same period and adopting similar stimulative policies.

Despite facing many of the same challenges, Germany’s current macroeconomic policy is substantially different to those of other countries, in part due to the economy legacy of Walter Eucken. This column considers the economic policy of Hjalmar Schacht, whose ‘MEFO-bills’ monetary solution ended the years of economic struggle caused by the Treaty of Versailles’ reparations commitments. By tying the bills to output, Schacht was able to stimulate output, and eliminate unemployment. This historical implication has clear modern-day implications, with parallels to ‘helicopter money’ policy and Italy’s recent ‘fiscal money’ proposal.

vox.eu
Macroeconomics in Germany: The forgotten lesson of Hjalmar Schacht

Biagi Bossone, Chairman, Group of Lecce; Member of the Surveillance Committee, Centre d'Études pour le Financement de Développement Local, and Stefano Sylos Labini, Researcher, ENEA

Matt Taibbi — In Response to Trump [and Brexit], Another Dangerous Movement Appears

Fears of demagoguery are provoking a frightening swing in the other direction

I would not lay this to Trump exclusively or even primarily, but to "populism" as evidenced also by Bernie Sanders in the US, Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn (who was nevertheless for Remain) in the UK, and right wing politicians like Nigel Farage in the UK in the UK and Marine Le Pen in France, as well as left wing parties like Podemos in Spain, Five Star in Italy, and Syriza in Greece. Then there is the leftward tilt that has been taking place in Latin America for some time in spite of fierce opposition from elites.

Elites are worried and they blame democracy, which they have always considered to be mob rule. Now they are afraid it is happening, and they don't seem to have mede the connection that it is a reaction to their own overreach, or just don't care. They want their countries back, and their colonies, too.

Matt Taibbi: The "too much democracy" train rolls on.

Last week's Brexit vote prompted pundits and social media mavens to wonder aloud if allowing dumb people to vote is a good thing.

Now, the cover story in The Atlantic magazine features the most aggressive offering yet in an alarming series of intellectual-class jeremiads against the dangers of democracy.

In "How American Politics Went Insane," Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.

He portrays the public as a gang of nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.

"Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country's last universally acceptable form of bigotry," he writes, before concluding:

"Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around."…

Taibbi puts his finger on the problem.

Voters in America not only aren't over-empowered, they've for decades now been almost totally disenfranchised, subjects of one of the more brilliant change-suppressing systems ever invented.

We have periodic elections, which leave citizens with the feeling of self-rule. But in reality people are only allowed to choose between candidates carefully screened by wealthy donors. Nobody without a billion dollars and the approval of a half-dozen giant media companies has any chance at high office.

People have no other source of influence. Unions have been crushed. Nobody has any job security. Main Street institutions that once allowed people to walk down the road to sort things out with other human beings have been phased out. In their place now rest distant, unfeeling global bureaucracies.

The good news is that in systems where parties have the ability to react peacefully, change can about peacefully. Otherwise torches and pitchforks, and the police or even military repression to meet it.

Rolling Stone
In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears
Matt Taibbi
ht Brad DeLong

New Deal Democrat — How "the Ultimatum Game" explains the Populist backlash to Globalism

In the Ultimatum Game, one player is given $100 with complete discretion as to how much to share with a second player, whose only power is to accept or reject the division. While a strictly rational economic player would accept even a $1 share, in real life most people reject any share under $30. In so doing they harm themselves, but inflict even more harm on the greedy player, enforcing altrusim over the longer term.

Rationality is not a simple as economists make it out to be because interests not merely economic. Moreover, interest involves not only reason but morals, involving sentiment. As contemporary cognitive-affective research shows, cognition is joined at the neurological level with affect, that is, reason with feeling.

"In so doing they harm themselves, but inflict even more harm on the greedy player, enforcing altrusim over the longer term."

This behavior is observed in primates, for example, suggesting that it is an evolutionary trait. Social animals depend on "morals" to function together as units, beginning with the family, since this requires in-group coordination as well as competition. Free riding is discouraged (punished) at much lower levels. The issue is not so much altruism as a choice as much as reciprocity as a requirement.

I do think Brexit and, to a lesser extent, the nomination of Donald Trump by the GOP are watershed moments, where the elites in powerful Western nations have been suddenly and utterly swept aside. I expect this to be a dominant theme in politics over the next 10 years or more, as the neoliberal centrist consensus is destroyed and the left and right offer competing visions of a New Deal 2.0 vs. neofascism to replace it.

Angry Bear
How "the Ultimatum Game" explains the Populist backlash to Globalism

New Deal Democrat

Beverly Mann — Phil Ebersole: Monopoly power and what to do about it

Phil Ebersole: The solution to this problem, [Elizabeth] Warren said, is simply to enforce the anti-trust laws as originally written.

The reason that they aren’t is a neoliberal philosophy of business regulation that took hold in the late 1970s, which held that the most important thing was not competition, but business efficiency. If Amazon can serve customers more efficiently that a local bookstore, then, according to this idea, there was no reason for the local bookstore to exist.

That could be true only if Amazon, Wal-Mart, Comcast and other big corporations were owned and operated by altruists, who passed along the gains in economic efficiency to customers, workers, suppliers and the local community.

But even when consolidation produces economic efficiency that benefits consumers, economic efficiency isn’t everything. Concentration of economic power means concentration of political power, which results in the kind of dysfunctional economic system we have now.…

Monopoly power = monopoly rent

Monopoly rent is one of the chief forms of rent along with profit as surplus value, land rent, and  financial rent.

Rent extraction is based on market power and market power is based on political power.

Somewhat ironically, government is both a source of political influence that enable special interests to garner market power and also a level of power through all, such as anti-trust, regulation, such as the which controls negative externality, and public goods and public utilities that provide goods that are more effectively and efficiently provided publicly than privately.

Beverly Mann: This movement, our movement, which began in the fall of 2011 with Occupy Wall Street, is on track to cause a political and economic earthquake.

Angry Bear
Monopoly power and what to do about it

Beverly Mann

See also

The Irish Review
Markets and states are complements

Kevin O'Rourke

ht Brad DeLong

Monthly Review
Monopoly Capital at the Half-Century Mark
John Bellamy Foster

Branko Milanovic — The greatest reshuffle of individual incomes since the Industrial Revolution

The effects of of globalisation on income distributions in rich countries have been studied extensively. This column takes a different approach by looking at developments in global incomes from 1988 to 2008. Large real income gains have been made by people around the median of the global income distribution and by those in the global top 1%. However, there has been an absence of real income growth for people around the 80-85th percentiles of the global distribution, a group consisting of people in ‘old rich’ OECD countries who are in the lower halves of their countries’ income distributions.

Formerly Lead Economist in the World Bank's research department, Branko Milanovic gets that today doing macroeconomic properly in a connected world of open economies that the only closed economy is the world economy, and it is the proper study of macroeconomics. What passes for macroeconomics conventionally is based on the study of national economies which openness is often an afterthought. This is the study of mesoeconomics rather than actual macroeconomics.

In this scheme, micro-economic is the study of aspects of national economies; meso-economics is the study of national economies, and macro-economics is the study of the global economy as a closed system inclusive of its subsystems. Micro, meso, and macro must of course mesh since they are the whole and its parts. As a complete system these aspects are complimentary and influence each others through the web of relationships that constitutes the global system's intricate network. This system is dynamic and it is also a complex adaptive system characterized by reflexivity and emergence.

It must be further noticed and acknowledged that the global economic system is an aspect the world system, which includes social, political, and economic aspects that are intimately connected so that isolating aspects of them risks oversimplification and distortion.

The challenge is not only to progress but to progress in a way that harmonizes the social, political and economic aspects of the system. Otherwise, not only imbalances but also conflict will be the likely result, owing to winners and losers.

vox.eu
The greatest reshuffle of individual incomes since the Industrial Revolution
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor, Graduate Center, University of New York and Senior Scholar, Luxembourg Income Center

Neil Wilson — Brexit happened and will progress because the people of the UK want to take a different direction…

Sailing toward a brave new world. Let's hope.

Neil Wilson
Brexit happened and will progress because the people of the UK want to take a different direction…

Brian Romanchuk — John Taylor Highlights The Uselessness Of Taylor Rules

A "rule" that is discretionary is not a rule. It's a regulation and not a regularity.

Setting a policy rate is a command system that is technocratic without being well-founded under present circumstances. What could go wrong?

Bond Economics
John Taylor Highlights The Uselessness Of Taylor Rules
Brian Romanchuk

The Costs of Privatization

The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles, by Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs

These are two interesting books. In the first one, above, the professors show how privatization increases the costs by two to three times.  

From the back cover:

Despite George W. Bush’s professed opposition to big government, federal spending has increased under his watch more quickly than it did during the Clinton administration, and demands on government have continued to grow. Why? Lawrence Brown and Lawrence Jacobs show that conservative efforts to expand markets and shrink government often have the ironic effect of expanding government’s reach by creating problems that force legislators to enact new rules and regulations. Dismantling the flawed reasoning behind these attempts to cast markets and public power in opposing roles, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest urges citizens and policy makers to recognize that properly functioning markets presuppose the government’s ability to create, sustain, and repair them over time.

The authors support their pragmatic approach with evidence drawn from in-depth analyses of education, transportation, and health care policies. In each policy area, initiatives such as school choice, deregulation of airlines and other carriers, and the promotion of managed care have introduced or enlarged the role of market forces with the aim of eliminating bureaucratic inefficiency. But in each case, the authors show, reality proved to be much more complex than market models predicted. This complexity has resulted in a political cycle—strikingly consistent across policy spheres—that culminates in public interventions to sustain markets while protecting citizens from their undesirable effects. Situating these case studies in the context of more than two hundred years of debate about the role of markets in society, Brown and Jacobs call for a renewed focus on public-private partnerships that recognize and respect each sector’s vital—and fundamentally complementary—role.

Contents:

1 A Return to Realism
2 Markets and Policy: From Pragmatic Realism to Dogmatic Utopianism
3 Cycles of Reform: Formulation and Ratification of Market Utopianism
4 Cycles of Reform: Institutional Reality and the Dystopia of Markets
5 The Democratic Disconnect and the Growth of Government
6 Pragmatic Policy in the Marketplace of Ideas

                                                                         

                                                                       ***

In the UK the accountants Professor Warwick Funnell, Robert Jupe, and Jane Andrew have written a similar book:

In Government We Trust: Market Failure and the Delusions of Privatization. 

From the back cover:

Neoliberalism has had a huge impact on our lives over the past three decades, convincing governments in liberal democratic states to transform themselves and society according to the values and practices of the market. In Government We Trust examines these promises within the context of market failures in services relinquished to the private sector by governments. Using prominent examples such as the collapse of Railtrack in the UK, the energy crisis in the US and the Sydney water treatment scandal in Australia, it exposes the level of risk which remains with government after privatisation, requiring them to resume responsibility when the private sector fails. The authors show how these failures reveal the benefits of government intervention and the dangers of unfettered markets. They argue that these problems confirm that there are some things only governments can and should do.

Note: This is my new writing style, more copy and paste with only a light commentary. Essays used to take far too long to write anyway, and we can all argue it out with civility in the comments section below. 

Kevin

This Week's Trump Economic Speech from Monessen, PA

FTR:

Michael Hudson — The Silence of the Left: Brexit, Euro-Austerity and the T-TIP

The media in the United States have treated the British vote against remaining in the European Union (EU) as if it is populist “Trumpism,” an inarticulate right-wing vote out of ignorance at being left behind by the neoliberal economic growth policy. The fact that Donald Trump happened to be in Scotland to promote his golf course helped frame the U.S. story that depicts the Brexit vote as a “Trump vs. Hillary” psychodrama – populist anger and resentment vs. intelligent policy.

What is left out of this picture is that there is a sound logic to oppose membership in the EU. It is Nigel Farage’s slogan, “Take Back Control.”

The question is, from whom? Not only from “bureaucrats,” but from the pro-bank, anti-labor rules written into the eurozone’s Lisbon and Maastricht treaties.…

The Left, whose leaders have conflated neoliberal globalization with internationalism and solidarity, is ceding its territory to the Right as a result of losing the working class.

What used to be a socialist left has been silent about the fact that there are very good reasons for people to say that this is not the kind of Europe they want to be a part of. It is becoming a dead zone. And it cannot be “democratized” without replacing the Lisbon and Maastricht treaties on which it is founded, and removing German opposition to public spending on recovery for Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece and other countries.

What is remarkable is that in the face of rising resentment by the “losers” from neoliberalism – the 99 Percent – only the nationalist right-wing parties have criticized the EU’s neoliberalism and the T-TIP. The formerly left-wing Socialist parties of France and Spain, German Social Democrats, Greek Socialists and so forth have endorsed the neoliberal, pro-financial program of austerity and rollbacks on labor union power, wages and pensions. So the riddle is, how did originally pro-labor parties become anti-labor?…

Counterpunch
The Silence of the Left: Brexit, Euro-Austerity and the T-TIP

Michael Hudson

Alex Christoforou — New Leaked EU Document Calls For Expansion To Middle East And Sub-Saharan Africa

Reform and democracy in the EU after the UK referendum? Not a chance. Angela Merkel’s mantra has, and will always be ‘we need more EU not less’. For EU technocrats in Brussels, this is music to their ears, because it means that their lucrative jobs will remain safe and sound.

While many are predicting more countries will wake up, and walk out of the self imposed prison that is the European Union, the Brussels aristocracy has expansion on its mind, well beyond the continent of Europe.

If you thought including Turkey into the union was pushing the boundaries of Europe’s borders, then the latest EU foreign policy document, titled Global Strategy, will make Istanbul feel like Paris.

The leaked EU document calls for an extended reach into new spheres, as distant as the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.

Expansion and military build up go hand-in-hand, as the Global Strategy document outlines a “gradual synchronisation and mutual adaptation” between different member states’ individual defence strategies.

Ukip’s defence spokesman Mike Hookem said:

“The EU wants its own Empire as former Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso made clear when he was in charge.

“This global strategy by the EU is yet another reason why last Thursday’s result was a lucky escape for the UK.”…

The Duran
New Leaked EU Document Calls For Expansion To Middle East And Sub-Saharan Africa
Alex Christoforou

Pepe Escobar — Dead Brexit Walking

Survey of the machinations at foot.

Sputnik
Dead Brexit Walking

Pepe Escobar

Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani — Hacked Emails Reveal NATO General Plotting Against Obama on Russia Policy

Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, until recently the supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, plotted in private to overcome President Barack Obama’s reluctance to escalate military tensions with Russia over the war in Ukraine in 2014, according to apparently hacked emails from Breedlove’s Gmail account that were posted on a new website called DC Leaks.…

Yep, looks like Breedlove did go rogue. It's called insubordination.

The Intercept
Hacked Emails Reveal NATO General Plotting Against Obama on Russia Policy

Lee Fang and Zaid Milani

See also

Consortium News
Is Trump Really the Anti-Neocon?

Chuck Spinney

Emmanuel Saez — U.S. top one percent of income earners hit new high in 2015 amid strong economic growth

WCEG
U.S. top one percent of income earners hit new high in 2015 amid strong economic growth
Emmanuel Saez | Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley