This is the sixth set of notes for a reading group on Marx’s Capital, and includes a Volume I refresher for further reading of Volume II. There are links to earlier posts and texts that may be useful. Marx is probably too taken with a kind of scientism by proposing...
Economics
The straight news or punditry often starts with the premise of scaring the American people away with a price tag. From the Biden Build Back Better plan reporting, one would think that its’ only attribute—or detriment, depending on your point of view, is the 3.5 trillion dollar price tag. Even...
A few years ago, I wrote the piece titled “Boomers Must Take Some Blame And Help Fix Generation Y Unhappy Problem” without any malintent. I was raked over the coals by my boomer friends who accused me of agism and much more. Some said I was pitting generations against each...
Have you ever asked yourself, why are so many GOP political theories race and gender-based? The latest is that voter ballots in Arizona were smuggled in from China. The GOP has decided the best way to expose this absurd idea is to exploit a silly stereotype and check the ballots...
Whether it’s soccer teams or sandwich shops, financialization was there before the pandemic, only making some of its supply-chain hijacking yet another example of an impending capitalist disaster. Re-regulation must remain important as crises loom in the post-pandemic recovery. A 2017 interview with UMass’s Gerald Epstein points to the need to...
This proposed “debate” between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should generate plenty of charitable pay-per-view revenues. Enough to build a space laser. The outcome should also resemble Bambi meets Godzilla. There’s yet to be a response from AOC, and MTG is busy trying to expel Maxine Waters. Last week, Georgia GOP...
We’re now at that strange nexus where Brian Kilmeade’s attempt to pin Prince Phil’s death on the granddaughter-in-law fits other anti-semitic and racist tropes fronted by Fox News. This because of counting artifacts in threes. “The New York Time’s (NYT) Upshot examined the statistical prevalence of celebrity deaths in threesomes. How did they do...
“As in the Times Op-Ed from which the book originated, the title refers to the results of studies conducted in Germany from the mid-nineteen-eighties onward, which reported, among other intriguing findings, that eighty per cent of East German women always experienced orgasm during sex, compared to sixty-three per cent of...
It is exceedingly disturbing that media outlets are playing the game of ‘Where’s QAnon,’ searching to unravel the GOP’s puzzle of voter restrictions. The use of voter suppression and the excusing of insurrectionists by Republican lawmakers have made the GOP a group of Q-watchers. Despite the circumlocutive excuses made by...
Here’s some big news today out of Pennsylvania: .@JohnFetterman announces he raised $3.9 million in the first quarter for his Pennsylvania U.S. Senate run, through 140,000 contributions. A big haul of 💰 at an early stage. — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 1, 2021 Lt. Gov. John Fetterman said he raised...
Who knew, Big Tech is corporate communism, which may explain why there should be a Magnitsky law for the US. A Ghislaine Maxwell pardon could occur if she gave up those tapes of the previous guy. Comic gold @mcsweeneys ‘The Boat Cops open a shipping container. It is full to...
Remember Infrastructure Week? It’s coming back—this time without an infrastructure weakling deflating the promise of a newly rebuilt America. Joe Biden is set to unveil his sweeping $3 trillion infrastructure plan, and according to Axios, top economists are simply “giddy” about its prospects. Of course, Republicans understand Keynesian economics as...
Like Martin Luther objecting to Pope Leo X selling indulgences to raise money for a variety of excesses, the environmental costs of carbon markets far exceed the benefits. Austerity would have denied us Renaissance art which is less at risk in an age of non-fungible tokens. Today the consequences for the planet...
So much dodging bullets these past months, but so many tradeoffs. What remains is that we now have a POTUS who can actually talk about “modern Jim Crow” rather than the previous guy making a mockery of the office. “A new study by an UCLA economist estimates that 400,000 people...
I still remember when Donald Trump got up in front of a throng of masochistic fools and said, of his plutocrat-friendly 2017 tax cut bill, “This is going to cost me a fortune, this thing, believe me. This is not good for me. … I think my accountants are going crazy...
Before 1937, inaugural day wasn’t until March 4. Back in the day we would’ve been facing 6 more weeks of Trump. QAnon-Pushed March 4 As Trump’s ‘True Inauguration Day’—But Officials Don’t Expect Violence https://t.co/vBkkXuPVww pic.twitter.com/2gOGsJ5myh — Forbes (@Forbes) March 2, 2021 Apparently, many QAnon supporters believe that Donald Trump has...
Ron Johnson and a core number of GOP senators does the bidding of Russia for what seems to be the reasons that Kevin McCarthy attributed to Dana Rohrabacher and Donald Trump: Putin pays them. Russia seemed to be on Riley Williams’s mind when she indicated that she wanted to sell...
The sparse number of actual carbon capture and sequestration projects plus weak carbon markets amplify the problems of the climate crisis yet to be revisited, post-Trump. Two heartland examples in North Dakota and Texas show how there are several interlocking problems addressing the climate crisis that must be included in future environmental policy. More specifically...
Darn those class commitments, aligning us to our political choices in a democracy, made worse by all those folks who knew they were in that Gilded Age. “If the future of the Democratic Party is in the rich suburbs, the future of American politics is another long Gilded Age.” Matt...
No, not by the US but by that jolly benevolent Empire of the British. Of course, it was started by a corporation. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade. They arranged a sweetheart deal....
I’ve always admired Naomi Klein since reading her terrific and insightful book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” She has a NYT editorial column up yesterday, expounding on her prior theme in relation to Texas’s recent disaster, titled “Why The Republicans Fear The Green New Deal,” in which she...
Recovering memory and historical revisionism in sex work might be the sad product of many repressive regimes. What becomes worse is the complicity of academic institutions in white-washing crimes against humanity. Harvard is no stranger to items like Alan (buddy of Jeff Epstein) Dershowitz’s attempt to move the statutory rape...
Let real wages (of $15+/hour) grow faster than labor productivity for some years, undoing the wage repression of the last decades. We have been misled by neoliberal economics for now many decades, it’s time to turn many things around in what is becoming a second-rated US economy, recently crippled by the...
As Climate Crisis returns to the new US administration agenda, negative emissions technologies (NETs) may find their implementation hindered by neoliberal financialization. An earlier ACM story showed how Steve Keen’s critique of Nordhaus’s use of discounting climate change demonstrates that orthodox economics is incapable of accelerating innovation especially in...
This morning in his latest batch of rescinded Executive Orders issued by his predecessor, President Joe Biden reinstated the rights of transgender men and women to serve in the armed services. Biden was quoted as saying, “Allowing all qualified Americans to serve their country in uniform is better for the...
The modern slave trade. Forced Labour : 25,000,000 Sexually exploited: 4,800,000 [99% women] State sponsored: 4,100,000 Forced marriages: 15,400,000 [71% women] Total: 49,300,000 Women represent [excluding the sex trade] 55% of the total. Another 40,000,000 are living in slave like conditions [eg N. Korea] While there is only limited information...
M-i-c-k-e-y, Why because we like it. M-M-MMT. “We collectively decide just what counts as a resource, economic base, or productive work.” OTOH, it could all be trippin’ on bong hits. The superlative science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, The Ministry For The Future, is essentially about using MMT to...
Happy New Year Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers...
The neoliberals’ “free market” is not going to sequester enough carbon to save the environment. Even Warren Buffett isn’t willing to take a bet on surviving an impending climate crisis catastrophe, because “the rents are too high”. Existential threats have a critical reality, about which ruthless criticism is entailed. Even...
Dr. Dean Baker sheds important light on the COVID-19 vaccine economics. Fox News backtrack voter machines, & autocrat Trump exposed. Dr. Dean Baker articulates an unfortunate truth. x x YouTube Video Politics Done Right Live weekdays @ 3:00 PM Central Video Zoom: LINK — Live Calls: (346)248-7799 ID:254 0 9091 Topics:...
Crimes against humanity by needless deaths, because sending Americans a check with his name on it obligated a vote. Trump needed anti-masking reactionaries and antivaxxers to merge in order to foment some naïve idea of herd immunity such that wanting to get more people infected was more important to the...
Thankfully the new administration will steer the economy to a place quite unlike the disaster that Trump had pointed the nation. x Long-term unemployment is up 2.32 million since Sept – the largest 3 month increase since data was first kept in 1948. Long-term UE causes the most lasting human...
Larry Kudlow continues the underlying theme of Trumpian nihilism and its trickle-down contagion of pixie dust and pseudoscience. Trump continues to see his numbers decline as his campaign put him on a superspreader rally schedule, attempting to repeat his 2016 victory of 155,000 votes in swing states while trailing 3 million...
I try to keep out of American politics as I have been an expat for over half my life [passed that milestone last month] and just don't understand it anymore. I haven’t written anything anywhere for more than three years on any subject to do with the US. However, that...
Trump’s now doing shtick at his virus-fests, focusing on grievance and culture-war nonsense, nearly promising Michiganders that he’ll not visit Minnesota if he loses the election. “Remember that time Trump got Herman Cain killed?” x Trump says “lock them all up” as his fans direct “lock her up!” chants toward...