Year: 2017

Deficits, Deficits – the rhetoric of the forthcoming attacks on the poor Republicans Create Bigger Deficits Then Blame The Entitled Poor The Republicans have given huge tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations thereby ballooning the deficit by more than $1.5 trillion. Now, they will start making big noises about --->> read more -->>

Market Automaticity A central feature of free-market, neoliberal ideology is the automaticity of the market, the self-regulating market. As I describe in my keynote essay, “What Is Market Capitalism and Why Do We Need to Understand It?“: The market mechanism mobilizes capital investment assigning it to best uses, provides automatic --->> read more -->>

President Obama came into office on a wave of emotion and hope for change. His two terms have been largely a disappointment. He did a competent job of working part way out of the financial crisis of the Clinton-Bush Bubble – the 2008 Wall St. meltdown. Having completed the bailout --->> read more -->>

Inequality in the World – findings Inequality in wealth and income is not a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, recent decades in the US, and as this new report World Inequality Report 2018 shows, the world has seen a real explosion in inequality. As shown in the charts below the US is --->> read more -->>

Opioids and White Privilege The arrival of opioids as a national concern might focus your attention on the role of drug companies, doctors, and hospitals in creating this new addiction path. In the October 30 New Yorker Patrick Radden Keefe provides a through introduction to this in his piece, “The --->> read more -->>

The Watson Institute at Brown University has just released an updated report: United States Budgetary Costs of Post 9/11 Wars Through FY2018: A Summary of the $5.6 Trillion in Costs for the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Post 9/11 Veterans Care and Homeland Security by Neta C. Crawford. --->> read more -->>

CHIP has been defunded by the vicious Republican Party. Nearly 9 million children are loosing their health insurance as states run out of funds. The Congress, controlled by the vicious Republican Party that is more focused on getting a sexual predator elected in Alabama than worrying about mere children, has --->> read more -->>

Trump – Republican Positions and Crimes (some just attempted) against the poor, working and middle class Not to be obsessive, but the current Trump Republicans effort to cram their bill to pay back their corporate and rich supporters with giant tax breaks has me frothing a bit. I wrote down --->> read more -->>

The US has been engaged in military actions, no actual declared wars though, continuously since my birth. This is a simplified list taken from Wikipedia entry: Timeline of United States military operations. Information added by me is in italics. Note that this list does not include CIA and other covert --->> read more -->>

Corrective History The NYTimes posted a bit of Turkey Day corrective history: “Most Everything You Learned About Thanksgiving Is Wrong” By MAYA SALAM Adaptive Turkeys The Trump pardoned two turkeys yesterday at the White House. But, no surprise for us here in Columbia County, wild turkeys are doing just fine. Once again --->> read more -->>

“If New York were a separate country, its incarceration rate [for women] would be the 8th highest in the world. A woman in New York is 12 times more likely to be incarcerated than she would be in France.” The Prison Policy Initiative has released a new study “Women’s Mass --->> read more -->>

The NY Times published an interesting article by Max Fisher and Josh Keller, “What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer” on 11/7/2017. The analysis shows that there is a strong correlation between the high level of gun ownership and mass killings. No other factors are well correlated. --->> read more -->>

The shape of jobs in the US and around the world it’s changing rapidly. On 11/5/2017 NBC News reported: Self-driving trucks One year ago this week a truck rolled into history as it traveled from a Colorado brewing plant to a warehouse 120 miles away carrying 45,000 cans of Budweiser beer. --->> read more -->>

The Republicans have rolled out their tax “reform”. As predicted earlier in “Trickle-Down Returns to Enrich the Rich – updated” there are ample claims that their plan will boost economic performance for the vast majority of Americans. Additionally we are hearing more about how American corporate tax rates are the --->> read more -->>

The National Geographic has a running list of the Trump regime’s efforts to save the environment for capitalism. A Running List of How Trump Is Changing the Environment  “The Trump administration has promised vast changes to U.S. science and environmental policy—and we’re tracking them here as they happen.” Here are --->> read more -->>

With all of the current outrage over Russia’s attempts to influence our last presidential election one can only be struck by the notion that Americans don’t know their own history, even that which occurred within our own lifetimes. Thus they are unable to see the ironies involved in our complaints --->> read more -->>

Bumpy Ride – Why America’s roads are in tatters This article by Dale Maharidge explores some history of our road system and the current mess of our infrastructure. It is a charming read and interesting in what it has to say about our approach to maintaining infrastructure.

Trump and Republicans (and some Democrats) puff up the return of well-paid manufacturing jobs and toss about ideas that thirty years of globalization can be reversed by renegotiating NAFTA and other trade agreements. All the while one of the most important factors in the disappearance of jobs, automation and robots --->> read more -->>

“Dynamism in Retreat: Consequences for Regions, Markets, and Worker”, a February 2017 report from the Economic Innovation Group provides interesting evidence that the US economy has been loosing its innovative edge and that the slowdown in enterprise creation is exacerbating regional differences in the US economy. “From 2010 to 2014, five --->> read more -->>

The US Wins Again – Incarceration in Global Context Americans love to think of the country as No 1 in every dimension. Richest, most powerful, most freedom, most dynamic economy, best healthcare, best sports teams, best education and on and on…… there are some things that we are No. 1 --->> read more -->>

The impact of globalization on the US economy has been mostly cast by the media and politicians in light of the disappearance of many manufacturing jobs and the swarms of cheap products imported to fill our stores. We should not think that just because we invented the internet and most --->> read more -->>

It is widely known that the bottom 80% of the US population has been stuck in neutral or gone backwards in terms of income and wealth over the last 45 years. But even this woeful state of affairs is not distributed evenly across the country. A new analysis of the --->> read more -->>