An economics, investment, trading and policy blog with a focus on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We seek the truth, avoid the mainstream and are virulently anti-neoliberalism.
Short summary: The war was chiefly about sectarianism, and fueled by foreign supporters of the Sunni factions. It was not about installing liberal democracy in place of the "brutal" Assad regime, which in reality had been enforcing liberal secularism. This is the reason it was opposed by traditionalists, including Sunni Islamists.
The Guardian is still bashing Russia and in today's edition Jeremy Corbyn says that there is no place for antisemitism within the Labour Party, but the Guardian has no CiF under these articles so readers can't leave a comment. Is being against the Israel's policies towards the Palestinians antisemitic?
I put out the video below in the Guardian CiF once which is called, An Israeli Soldier's Story, by Eran Efrati, but the Guardian took it down. Was that video antisemitic, and is that what they mean by antisemitism in the British Labour party?
Eran Efrati says how he discovered that Israel was deliberately provoking Palestinians to demonstrate so they could test out their new weapons on them. Israel is a world leading arms manufacture, say's Eran Efrati. It's one of the most powerful videos I have ever watched,
Many people believe the Guardian to be a newspaper of the left, but really, it's supports the ruling class and it's cronies. The Guardian reports fake news and is spreading the flames of war. KV
QUESTION:Did the Deep State indict the Russians to sabotage the Trump Putin summit? The Daily News seems to be cheering World War III. What is going on?
ANSWER: The Justice Department DELIBERATELY indicted Russians they can never put on trial and it was done days before the summit to intentionally disrupt it and set the fake news up to maintaining that Russia is the enemy. In other words, we should not talk with an enemy but we should just declare war. It really is mind-blowing how the press is so intent upon creating war with Russia. They argued against peace in North Korea and they take the same tactic with Russia. The press and Deep State are simply positioning people to support a war and the Democrats are becoming the party of war and anti-Russia.
This is the press and how they acted before to create the Spanish American War. The famous artist, Frederic Remington, worked for William Randolph Hearst, who was the son of a U.S. senator from California who had made a fortune in the mid-1800s mining industry. In 1897, Remington became very bored by the lack of anything newsworthy in Cuba and cabled to Hearst, “Everything quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. Wish to return.” In response to Remington’s message, Hearst replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
I remember in history class back in high school how they blamed the Spanish American war on Pulitzer and Hearst who created a war with fake news just to sell their newspapers. The competition between them was all that mattered. It became known back then as “Yellow Journalism”and the most ironic fact to come from this is that journalists today cherish winning a Pulitzer Prize for journalism that is named after the father of what we call today “Fake News”! Today, journalists keep bashing Trump for pointing out that they are indeed using their power to push personal views. Nothing has changed. In Asia, I am asked what is wrong with CNN? They no longer report the news, it is all about overthrowing Trump because their corrupt candidate, Hillary, lost.
The Daily News has been especially outrageous in that story regarding Putin and they were not finished with distorting the entire summit. They tweeted that Trump “derides reports with which he disagrees as ‘fake news,’ then buys the Russian narrative hook, line, sinker, pole, and boat.”Catherine Garcia.
Garcia has NEVER looked at the evidence behind the Magnitsky Act. Is this intentional or is she so biased that she sees no need to actually investigate anything?
Not a single major news organization bothered to report that Putin said Mueller can go to Russia and interrogate who he wants if Russia can do the same with respect to the Hermitage Capital incident that involved the blackmail of Yeltsin, the charge against Bank of New York for $7 billion money laundering, and Republic National Bank/HSBC. Where is the independent reporting? Where are the real investigative journalists? Not a single major news outlet bothered to report that offer or even question what was it about? A real news organization would be unbiased and at least report what allegations Putin is making.
So what does Garcia want? Does she want a Pulitzer Prize for creating World War III? I have PERSONAL knowledge of what Putin was talking about. The attempt to take over Russia and blackmail Yeltsin is what resulted in Yeltsin turning to Putin for help, to begin with. Putin clearly states that the USA is free to go interrogate the Russians they have indicted and the press declares guilty without any trial PROVIDED that Russia can interrogate Americans and Bill Browder for interfering in the Russia democratic process. They BANNED the film The Forecasterin the United States yet it appeared all around the world and has been on flights on airlines to the USA. They have also BANNEDthe documentary on Bill Browder’s story: Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes. Why are two films that touch on the subject of Russia BANNED in the USA? Who is behind the cover-up? The Forecasterwas even on TV in Canada. It is BANNED by the networks in the USA, the news, and Netflix. Why? Because it shows that there were people in the United States who were interfering in the Russian elections blackmailing Yeltsin not to run and to stuff their own puppet in as President of Russia without an election?
The talk by Eran Efrati was filmed in Denver, Colorado on March 3, 2014 as part of The Soldier and the Refusenik U.S. tour with Maya Wind. Eran talk about his experiences in the IDF and then more broadly discusses Israel, its relationship to the U.S. and the global expansion of militarism.
Eran Efrati, 28, was born and raised in Jerusalem. After graduating high school he enlisted in the IDF, where he served as a combat soldier and company sergeant in Battalion 50 of the Nachal Division. He spent most of his service in Hebron and throughout the West Bank. In 2009, he was discharged and joined Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers working to raise awareness about the daily reality in the Occupied Territories. He worked as the chief investigator of the organization, collecting testimonies from IDF soldiers about their activities. He also guided political tours and to the West Bank and worked to educate Israeli youth about the reality of being a soldier in an occupying army. His collected testimonies appear in the booklet "Operation Cast Lead" and their most recent release "Our Harsh Logic". Since leaving Breaking the Silence, his investigative reports appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Today he is active with the Israeli groups Anarchists Against the Wall and Boycott from Within.
If A is the area colored red in this image...
... then the complement of A is everything else.
In set theory, the complement of a set A refers to elements not in A.
When all sets under consideration are considered to be subsets of a given set U, the absolute complement of A is the set of elements in U but not in A.
The relative complement of A with respect to a set B, also termed the difference of sets A and B, written B ∖ A, is the set of elements in B but not in A.
I don't know much about Martin Armstrong, but Tom put a link out to his site which contained the film, The Magnitsky Act : Behind the Scenes, so I had a poke around the site and Martin Armstrong said in one of his posts that Putin probably murdered Yeltsin's blackmailer, Safara, for exchange for the presidency. So I looked into it further and found another post by Armstrong going more into it.
I don't know if this is just hearsay and gossip, but it does give a glimpse of what can happens at the highest levels. Could Yeltsin have been a crook like all the other Russian oligarchs grabbing state industries during the collapse of the Soviet Union? Was Yeltsin not a reformer at all, but was just in on the game embezzling billions? And was Putin an assassin who solved the problem for Yeltsin? I will leave it for you to decide. But we do know that there is a lot of crime at the top end of society, where bankers rub shoulders with villains. Think of the blood diamonds? It's chilling stuff. KV
Perhaps the number one question I always get about the ordeal I went through and the sheer chaos that surrounded everything, was just who really was behind the plot to blackmail the former head of Russia Boris Yeltsin to stop him from running for reelection in 2000 and hand-pick Boris Abramovich Berezovsky? It is true I even had a meeting with the US Attorney Office on the subject when they realized that Republic National Bank and Edmond Safra had set up even Bank of New York as the center piece in the plot. As the players that surrounded me have mysteriously died, hanged themselves, been imprisoned, released, just saying they were denied a fair trial without explanation as with the nurse that supposedly killed Safra, this wild plot is still the classic who-done-it that may not be solved until someone gets the secret files tucked away on this one. Bereszovsky, who fled to Britain obtaining political asylum, suddenly hangs himself. Then there is the lawyer/accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who represented Safra’s Hermitage Capital Management mysteriously dies in prison awaiting trial and then is given a posthumous trial and found guilty. While he was portrayed in the West as a whistle-blower, don’t forget so was Safra against Bank of New York. This then led Congress to strangely pass the Magnitsky Act to A bill to impose sanctions on persons responsible for the detention, abuse, or death of Sergei Magnitsky, for the conspiracy to defraud the Russian Federation of taxes on corporate profits through fraudulent transactions and lawsuits against Hermitage. This is curiously strange for a foreign act to prompt Congress to pass a law in the USA. We cannot leave out Edmond Safra’s own mysterious murder in Monaco (Death in Monaco) that took the fire company hours to reach being just 10 minutes away while his more than 20 bodyguards were all given the night off and reported bullets in his body with his nurse saying Russians dressed as ninjas showed up.
What I do know is there appears to have been a plot to take over Russia and that came from sources directly in Russia at the time. My case began September 13th, 1999 and Safra was killed December 3rd. Within a week the government moved to put me in contempt and stop my request for a Speedy Trial. It came out in court that bullets were left in my mailbox to warn me to shut up. But I was in the public spot light so they created a contempt and through me in to suspend everything.
Safra was linked with Boris Abramovich Berezovskyand allegedly Vladimir Aleksandrovich Gusinsky, the media tycoon. As the plot was laid out by Russian sources, Yeltsin was convinced to take $7 billion from the IMF funds to refurbish the Kremlin – a staggering amount of money. The funds were wired to a largely unknown company in Switzerland. The wire was steered through Bank of New York and as soon as it was made, Safra had his bank run to the Feds and report that Bank of New York had just conducted a money laundering event. The Feds ran in wide-eyed and of course announced their action to the world before thoroughly investigating the allegations of Safra. I had a personal meeting with Dov Schlien president of Republic National Bank in March 1999 where he asked me to invest $10 billion offering a letter of credit guarantee. I sent an email to Tokyo explaining the offer to our office there.
It was at this time that THE CONSPIRATORS threatened Yeltsin with exposure of his theft of $7 billion on the world stage. The demand was to appoint Berezovsky as the new President of Russia and for Yeltsin to step down and not run in 2000. Yeltsin, realizing he was set up, turned to Putin who nobody had heard of. As the story goes, Putin promised to take care of everything if Yeltsin appointed him instead, Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, after Safra was killed on December 3rd in Monaco. The Presidential elections were held in Russia on the 26th of March 2000 formally electing Putin.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spoken about the primary objectives during the first 100 days of his new administration. Speaking of western financial speculation against the Turkish Lira, Erdogan reiterated that the country is “facing an economic war, but we will win it”. As part of his strategy to win the western war against Turkey’s monetary policies and existing economic growth model, Erdogan announced that for the first time in history Ankara will issue state bonds in Chinese Yuan Renminbi and that the country looks forward to opening up new credit lines with China as a viable and sustainable alternative to borrowing from European or American financial institutions. In hailing the beginning of a “new era” for Turkey, Erdogan further stated that in the future, Turkey’s most important export partnerships with be with China, Russia, Mexico and India. The Turkish President also stated that the country plans to built special trade centres in 35 major cities across the globe....
Basic macroeconomic theory says that a negative shock to GDP, caused for example by falling exports, can be completely offset by a monetary and fiscal stimulus. China is a good example of that idea in action. What about all the naysayers who predicted financial disaster if this was done? Well there was a mini-crisis in China half a dozen years later, but it is hard to connect it back to stimulus spending and it had little impact on Chinese growth. What about the huge burden on future generations that such stimulus spending would create? Thanks to that programme, China now has a high speed rail network and is a global leader in railway construction. Now of course people will say that China is not like an advanced democracy, and it was not part of the global banking network that caused the GFC. But the US and UK stimulus programmes could and should have been larger. Those close to the action tell me that the UK was running out of things to spend more money on in 2008/9, but I cannot help think this amounts to a failure of imagination: it is not as if UK infrastructure is great, there are no flood defence projects left to do etc. Above all else China’s example tells you what a huge mistake 2010 austerity was.
The strongest argument for the adoption of any governmental system is success and the potential for greater success in the future. This is what the history changing Chinese reformer Deng Xiaoping meant when he stated, “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”. Deng’s adoption of Market Socialism With Chinese Characteristics looked to bring the values of his predecessors into the future by creating an industrial revolution in a primarily agrarian economy which during Deng’s initial period in power had a poverty rate of 88%.
Today, Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism With Chinese Characteristics For a New Era looks to reduce an almost all rural poverty rate of 2% to 0% over the next two years while in the next decade China looks to become a moderately prosperous society for all its citizens. Furthermore, the drive to Create in China seeks to transform the country’s economy from one aimed at efficient production to one where production is increasingly mechanised and guided by artificial intelligence while Chinese entrepreneurs are encouraged to pioneer the next great leaps forward in technological, pharmaceutical and transport innovation on Chinese soil.
At a fundamental level, market socialism combines the individuated penchant for innovation in both utilitarian and luxury sectors that is associated with capitalism while regulating the inflow and outflow of capital in order to re-invest the proceeds of wealth back into the people and infrastructure of the nation. The result is a win-win internal developmental model which since 1978 has helped China to bring more people out of poverty in the shortest period of time in modern history.
Young people are turning to socialism, and Democratic Party politicians are adopting the term. But what is socialism?
My own summary answer is that socialism is the socio-economic system that favors people and the environment as a whole over other factors and and political theory that prioritizes human rights.
This is in contrast to capitalism, which favors capital over other factors and accords highest priority to property rights.
Doug Greene presents his view of a Marxist-Leninist approach to socialism and capitalism, which seems to me to be past its expiration date. At the very least, it needs repackaging. But without altering the content, the repackaging would still leave the contents stale.
Marx, Engels, Lenin and others of their day had some ideas that still apply but they need to be adapted and integrated with new knowledge and emergent conditions.
But it is useful to review the fundamental principles.
However, where I think that most explorations of these ideas goes off track is due to focusing on objectives and means rather than the kernel of the design problem, which is necessary to elaborate a satisfactory design solutions.
Basically, the priorities being used now are wrong and lead to social dysfunction, political unrest, and economic inequality that fuels the oligarchic power that is at the bottom of the class struggle between ownership and work.
These priorities are now socially and culturally embedded and institutionally established. Changing these priorities requires a system overhaul. In the West this means the transformation of bourgeois liberalism that resulted from the transition from feudalism to capitalism into a more integrated liberalism that integrates people, the environment and technology.
Under feudalism, an oligarchy owned the means of production in the form of land during the agricultural age. Under capitalism, a similar oligarchy that owns industrial and financial capital in addition to land controls the means of production and reaps the greatest reward based on ownership rather than work. This also enable the negative externality of environmental degradation to be socialized while the gains are capitalized.
Under socialism, there would be no oligarchy controlling the means of production, workers and the environment would be favored by rights established in law, and there would be no incentive to socialize environmental degradation.
Stephanie Kelton and I have been trying hard to keep Democrats from, again, rushing into the trap of denouncing Republicans for running federal deficits. Yes, Republicans are hypocrites about debt and deficits. That does not mean that Democrats should repeat Clinton and Obama’s embrace of the Republican’s economically illiterate, harmful, and fake hysteria about debt and deficits....
In general, good government is good politics. The Democrats should focus on adopting and supporting superior policies that are humane and supported by good science....
Let's see now. US is sanctioning Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and threatening the Philippines, Turkey and India for purchasing non-US weapons, as well as threatening secondary sanctions on everyone, with possible exceptions for allies, for purchasing Iranian oil after sanctions become effective. Oh, and did I mention the trade disputes with Canada and Mexico.
Exactly who is isolated here? Talk about painting yourself into a corner.
And economic warfare is a form of warfare. So WWIII is already on. Are you ready for it?
Don't believe me?
Notably, part of the legislation would require the State Department to make an assessment on whether Russia should be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism.
At the same time, now that the Syrian Armed Forces are recapturing territory they are finding weapons manufactured in the US, Britain, France, and Israel in ISIS and Al Nusra stocks, as well as discovering the White Helmets fake-news-about-chemical-weapons production facility. Sorry, no made-in-Russia weapons.
US backs down on sanctioning India, eats crow. (For those whose first language is not English, "to eat crow" means to get humiliated.)
US Congress has passed its 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, granting India a waiver against punitive sanctions on countries who do business with the Russian defense industry, the Times of India has reported.
The problem arises when former officials use their clearances as bona fides to enhance their marketability for non-clearance jobs in the media or corporate world, particularly when those individuals are criticizing current government policies and behaving in a partisan fashion regarding specific candidates for office. Donald Trump was especially assailed by former officials John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Michael Morell before the 2016 election, all of whom continue to attack him currently, most particularly for the recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During the 2016 campaign, Morell, who openly supported Hillary Clinton and is the designated intelligence on-air contributor for CBS news, deliberately linked the fact that he was ex-CIA Acting Director to his assertion that Trump was somehow an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation” to establish his credibility. That type of activity should be considered abusive and an exploitation of one’s former office.
Agree. It's a conflict of interest, unprofessional and unethical. Intelligence should never be politicized and now intelligence politicization is being normalized in the US.
And the revolving door is a form of corruption. It needs to be locked shut by law.
Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, now Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest and founding member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
See also at SFC
Kissinger was talking with Edward Luce of the Financial Times about the current US President: “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time, to mark the end of an era, and to force it to give up its old pretences”. Later in the conversation, he qualifies this assessment by adding, however: “It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”
Luce, as might be expected, imputes Trump’s meeting with President Putin to signal a possible putative nadir in American diplomacy, and a betrayal of US intelligence claims of Russian disruption of the 2016 elections – even citing the N.Y. Daily News headline that what Trump uttered there, constituted “Open Treason”.
But Kissinger, who briefs both Trump and Putin, evidently refuses to be drawn - to take Luce’s bait. Rather, he says, matter-of-factly, that the Trump summit had to happen: “It was a meeting that had to take place. I have advocated it for several years. It has been submerged by American domestic issues. It is certainly a missed opportunity. But I think one has to come back to something.”
Why was the meeting so crucial? And what is ‘that something’, to which we must “come back”? Luce dwells on Kissinger’s opaqueness of messaging and complains that it is hard to discern the direction of his economical discourse. But in fact, Kissinger lays it all out clearly, and in plain view – and that to which he is leading – is indeed, crucially important.…
Forcing the Surrender of an Era’s Old Pretences – Henry Kissinger
Shock therapy gave Russia one of the worst and longest economic depressions of the 20th century, an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe for a peace time crisis, and a criminally inequitable privatization of public assets. The reasons why things happened this way in Russia generally aren’t well understood in the west. Even among better informed intellectuals, the failure of shock therapy is often thought to be vaguely related to some sinister flaw in the Russian society. It is what Bill Browder characterized as “the dirty dishonesty of Russia,” or “Russia’s evil foundation,” which spawned corruption and criminality of staggering proportions. In this toxic environment, the sweet fruits of western democracy and capitalism simply could not grow in spite of the generous benevolence of Russia’s western friends. Such a credulous version of events was never based on any coherent analysis of what transpired in Russia during the 1990s. Rather, it was based on purposeful perception management in the Western media....
While many among Russia’s western helpers did come with sincere and honorable intentions, the whole project, insofar as it was determined by its command and control structure, was simply a massive, bald-faced criminal enterprise.…
Putin is hated since he stepped in and halted it. Too his credit, at the end Yeltsin recognized what was happening and brought in Vladimir Putin to correct it. He did, to a great degree, without creating undue discord in Russia by working to balance the social, political and economic interests involved. It's a monumental task to switch systems and Putin has done a reasonably good job of it.
The Western neoliberal solution had been to "let the market" sort it out, ignoring the role of power relations. It nearly destroyed Russian society.
Alex Krainer
Reprinted from a 6 part series at The Naked Hedgie. This is part 3.
See also
Former hedge fund manager Bill Browder, the faux crusader for human rights, has made very serious claims of corruption against Vladimir Putin, claims which many media personalities in the West have treated as true and factual without ever challenging them. Browder, the go-to expert on Putin’s corruption, presents these claims in his bestseller, “Red Notice.” At first blush, they show Vladimir Putin in a very negative light that may shock the reader. A more careful scrutiny of Browder’s case shows it to be a disingenous, baseless smear, which further begs the question: if this is the best (worst) Browder can offer as proof against Putin, what exactly do the ceaseless allegations of his corruption amount to? The following excerpt from my book (currently banned, but available here in electronic format) examines the merits of Bill Borwder’s assertions.
Whenever publications or media are banned or censored, either officially by law or regulation, or unofficially by being held off the market, it is a tell.
Tucker Carlson has impeccable conservative credentials.
He started out as a low-level staffer at the Heritage Foundation and now he hosts a popular show on Fox News. In between were stints at The Weekly Standard and the on-line publication he co-founded, The Daily Caller. His often contentious prime-time show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, which now occupies Bill O’Reilly’s former slot at Fox, is third in the cable news ratings war behind Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow.
When Tucker talks, the president listens....
In short, Carlson is an influencer.
Carlson initially supported the Iraq War but then became disenchanted about a year later, along with many others who’d ordered a cakewalk and received a quagmire instead. Now Carlson is warning Trump not to go down the same road as George W. Bush.
Carlson is also aligned with most Americans on this according to polling.
Russia will deploy its military police on the Golan Heights frontier between Syria and Israel, its defense ministry said on Thursday, after weeks of mounting volatility in the area....
Russia acting as the grownup. It can do this since it retains good relations with Israel, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.
What if U.S. retail prices were not denominated in U.S. dollars, but instead were denominated in gold or Bitcoin? Paying for a loaf of bread with gold wouldn’t be very practical, as you’d need a very small speck of the precious metal. But one can imagine a system of gold substitutes, such as notes giving you ownership of a fraction of an ounce of gold, thereby overcoming the small-change problem. With Bitcoin, it’d be much easier, as a virtual currency can be divided any way you want.
Now, let’s look at actual prices. FRED doesn’t have price data on just a loaf of bread, but it does have the consumer price index for cereals and bakery products, so let’s use that. The blue line shows the evolution of the U.S. dollar price of a basket of baked goods. The red line shows the price in gold, and the green line shows the price in Bitcoin. It’s apparent that the dollar price is much more stable and has slowly increased over time. The gold price has considerable fluctuations from month to month. While the gold price seems to have a tendency to decrease, this isn’t always true, which you can see if you enlarge the sample window. As for Bitcoin, the fluctuations are extreme, even when you restrict the sample period to the past year.
What’s behind the differences? The Fed’s mandate is to stabilize prices as expressed in U.S. dollars, and this is quite apparent in this graph. The Fed does this by adapting to changes in the demand for dollars. That isn’t possible with gold, as its supply is determined by worldwide mining success, which is outside of the control of any institution. The same applies to Bitcoin, with the additional constraint that mining success keeps dwindling....
Click this link. Data For Progress decided to ask people about policy proposals which very serious centrists consider way too far left for America. American voters respond differently.
As should already be clear from existing polls (click and search for “fair”), there is strong support for egalitarian populist redistributive public policy. At Data For Progress, they chose to emphasize the positive — four proposals with overwhelming support, but I think it is just as striking that opinion is almost equally split on a top marginal income tax rate of 90% (2% more oppose than support) and universal basic income (2% more oppose than support)....
Sometimes there is clarity. Like when the Koch brothers-funded report on US health care came up with the ‘wrong’ conclusion – that is the right conclusion – $US2 trillion dollars worth of right conclusion. And like when a hard-core German economist breaks ranks and lays out the case for scrapping the Eurozone. Clarity. In the past week there have been some notable contributions to the debate about the viability of the Eurozone. Two German academics, coming from opposite directions, basically reach the same conclusion – the EMU is dysfunctional and prone to crisis and poor outcomes. And then in the same week, a third German, an economist basically breaks ranks with the Europhile reform lobby (neoliberal though it is) and sets out in fairly clear terms how the distrust between Member States is so high that reforms will always be cheated on and the intent derailed. He opposes the creation of a federal fiscal capacity because weak nations would overstate the extent of recession to get more money. Further, more money would be forthcoming to these nations as a perverse ‘reward’ for failing to deregulate their labour markets. His arguments demonstrate without doubt why functional reforms will not be possible in the EMU. It is time (way past that) to dissolve the disastrous experiment in an orderly manner.
For those paying attention to goings-on in the EZ. Bill catches us up on the latest iteration of the debate, which is starting to shift toward the "this is not working and isn't workable" POV. The Germans are still being Germans and insisting on ordoliberalism.
I'd encourage people to read this whole thread, and click on several of the links, and then ask yourself what it says that these are the most compelling defenses of the conventional view of budget deficits. https://t.co/Cf8Q20hcJw
"We are aware of the increase in #Iran naval operations within the Arabian Gulf, Strait of #Hormuz and Gulf of Oman.“ – Navy Capt. Bill Urban, CENTCOM Spokesman @US5thFleethttps://t.co/e0hDa5CANb
The Saudi government said it has suspended oil shipments through the Red Sea after Yemen-based, Iran-aligned Houthi rebels attacked Saudi oil tankers. pic.twitter.com/KeZ7ZMpAdo
In fairness to the Democrats, they likely saw it as payback for the attackers on John Kerry's military recored and the Obama birther conspiracy theory that Trump backed at least obliquely. Then the GOP Never Trumper's jumped on board, too, followed by some US intel chiefs aligned with one of the above.
Those who know American history know that this is an American tradition. There's nothing new under the sun.
All's fair in love, war — and politics.
And it was not just to crush Trump in the campaign, but also Bernie as a Clinton rival.
Now the imperialist colonizers are afraid of being colonized by China rising.
What's that about what you sow, so shall you reap?
James Petras Website Imperialists’ Fear and Loathing. . . of being Colonized
James Petras | Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
The real reason behind the push for censorship of social media.
I’m not a great fan of Marxist philosophy, but one thing it has got right is the need to be sceptical when faced by what academics like to call ‘normative’ claims, and to be aware that such claims often hide a bid for power. When faced by such a claim, one should always ask ‘Cui bono?’ – who benefits?...
Not just Marxist philosophy. Anyone with a working crap detector knows this intuitively. It's just being street-smart.
Irrussianality Cui bono?Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa
David Andolfatto recently published "Reconciling Orthodox and Heterodox Views onMoney and Banking," which discusses the theoretical split between recent mainstream thinking and heterodox views on banking. From my perspective, he is addressing heterodox critiques of mainstream thinking that I am not particularly interested in; in fact, based on his criteria, I would be closer to "mainstream" than "heterodox" -- as would possibly be Hyman Minsky. I would view the problem with mainstream modelling as resulting from a blind spot regarding the business sector. The fact that Andolfatto's proposed model used to structure the debate does not include a business sector might be used as evidence of my claim about that blind spot....
So how does Mankiw answer the question he raises in his first sentence: “What caused the financial crisis of 2008?” He does not answer it. He not even explain why he does not answer his own question.
