The Angry Bear

Labor as a Common Pool Resource The everyday experience of working people, economic policies of governments, bargaining priorities of trade unions, and theoretical models of economists refute the idealistic maxim that labor is not a commodity. An early rationale for the proposition was given in 1834 by William Longson of Stockport in his evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Hand-Loom Weavers: – …every other commodity when...

UNITED WE SPEND For 20 Top-Selling Drugs Worldwide, Big Pharma Revenue from U.S. Sales Combined Exceeded Revenue from the Rest of the World, Public Citizen, Rick Claypool and Zain Rizvi, I have written on the high prices of pharmaceuticals in the past on Angry Bear, pointing to a WHO report which showed the costs laid out to bring the drugs to market had been recovered, and hinting on a new approach to increasing profitability by claiming...

US natural gas hits highest price since 2008, closes at 7 1/2 year weekly high; European and Asian prices 5 times higher, Commenter RJS, Focus on Fracking Oil prices rose for a sixth consecutive week as rising global demand amid tight supplies more than offset higher US inventories . . . after rising 3.0% to $73.98 a barrel last week as U.S. crude inventories fell to a 35month low and as global oil supplies tightened, the contract price for US...

In her 2020 book ‘Waste’, Catherine Flowers speaks to the practice in Alabama – throughout the South – of keeping the poor and ignorant poor and ignorant so that there would always be a cheap source of labor on hand. In a September 2021 House Budget Committee hearing, a member from neighboring Georgia patiently explained the economic necessity of cheap labor; how increased wages were a threat to small businesses; and how any increase in wages would...

Improving Medicare Coverage Act – H.R. 5165 Medicare – Improving  Medicare Coverage Act; H,R, 5165, September 3, 2021 130+ House Democrats are co-sponsoring a bill by Pramila Jayapal, the Improving Medicare Coverage Act. The impact of which would drop the Medicare eligibility age to 60 years of age. All well and good, it is about time something is changing. Healthcare Insurance and medical costs are exceeding high in the US. Pricing of...

August Personal Income up 0.2%; 2 Months PCE Would Subtract 0.07 Percentage Points from Q3 GDP, Blogger and Commenter RJS reports at MarketWatch 666 The August report Personal Income and Outlays from the Bureau of Economic Analysis gives us nearly half the data that will go into 3rd quarter GDP, since it gives us 2 months of data on our personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which accounts for nearly 70% of GDP, and the PCE price index, the...

In October 2020, three public health academics published the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that policymakers should focus on protecting those most vulnerable to covid, while encouraging those at low risk of death or serious disease to resume normal activities.  This would result in a rapid spread of natural immunity through the population, hastening an end of the epidemic. I will discuss the Great Barrington Declaration – both its...

Briefly, with more info being found at The American Prospect by David Dayen (link below). The USPS has initiated check cashing service for a minimal fee. And Louis Destroy the USPS DeJoy has bought into this service. The pilot was launched on September 13 (?) in four locations: Washington, D.C.; Falls Church, Virginia; Baltimore; and the Bronx, New York. The initial banking test allows customers to cash business or payroll checks at the post...

Manufactuing remains white hot, while construction spending is mixed As usual, we started out the month with the forward-looking ISM manufacturing report for September, as well as construction spending for August. Let’s take the ISM report first since it is an important short-leading indicator for the production sector. And here, the news was good, as the overall index improved to 61.1, among its highest numbers in several decades (but not...

Dennis Smith writes in the Ohio Capital Journal: While the U.S. Capitol was placed under assault some months ago, public education has been targeted for forty years, when Ronald Reagan signaled his followers that the public sector was undesirable and that private enterprise was always preferable in the nation. His attitude was immortalized in his remark that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and...