The Angry Bear

 – by New Deal democrat Tomorrow and Thursday a plethora of data will be released, on consumer inflation and spending, production, housing, and jobless claims. In the meantime today we got a chance to look at upstream pressures on inflation. And those upstream pressures do seem to be building slightly, reflecting a strong economy with full employment. Commodity prices increased 0.9%. These are very volatile, so this was not particularly out...

I need to crash

Schools in One Virginia County to Reinstate Confederate Names, The New York Times, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar substack SUMMARY: After a meeting that lasted for hours, the Shenandoah County school board voted early Friday morning to restore the names of three Confederate officers to schools in the district. With the vote, the district appears to be the first in the country to return Confederate names to schools that had removed them after the summer...

I was going to finish this up two days ago. Except I got sick and was sweating for two nights in a row. And slept most of the first day and some of today. I had been fighting this for a about 5 days and then it came om stronger. Today, I feel I am back, but at half speed. I posted “Senator Warrens Clawback on money looted by Cereberus” here. She called it:“The third and best source of funds would be a clawback of money looted by Cerberus, de la...

It appears rent, transportation, and medical care services are the culprits holding up a decrease in inflation. Medicare does not surprise me at all. Harvard School of Health blames the rise of prices on administrative expenses, corporate greed and price gouging, and higher utilization of costly medical technology. What to Look for in the April CPI by Dean Baker CEPR The overall and core Consumer Price Index (CPI) both increased by 0.4...

Pharma companies providing pharmaceuticals exclusive to them have vast amounts of control in availability and or pricing. Either can result in increased costs to the patient. Economist Timothy Taylor reviews one particular instance with Teva Pharmaceuticals. Collaboration with other companies to control pricing appears to be Teva’s Director of Strategic Customer Marketing Nisha Patel’s strong suits. by Timothy Taylor Conversable Economist...

by Professor Heather Cox-Richarson Letters from an American If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia...

In the summer of 1984, I lived on the ranch of Gerald “Digger” Moravek, just outside Sheridan, Wyoming.  Like many of the ranchers who banded together to establish the Powder River Basin Resource Council, where I was working, Digger was drawn to environmentalism partly for self-interested reasons:  in the early 1970s a coal company was blasting near his land and damaging his house.  But fighting coal companies and limiting the damage from strip...

Reuters says the students are protesting the war in Palestine.  The students say that they are protesting the war — the killing of innocents.  Still and yet, the U.S. media doesn’t get it — says that the protesters are pro-Palestian, or anti-Semitic.  Seems it is about the narrative. To be clear. Netanyahu and ultra-orthodox Jews wanted this war.  They wanted Gaza, the occupied territories.  An observer over the years might envision caged...

The old man knew what it was. At first, he hoped to wait until tomorrow. That wasn’t meant to be. He had to go now, and his regular Doctor was too far away; especially at the time of day. The nearest Emergency Room (E.R.) it was. By this time, he could barely walk, but felt that he was alright to drive. The walk from the parking garage to the hospital front entry took all he had. There, the security guy told him that he couldn’t go through to the...