The Angry Bear

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for July 19 – 23 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. No visible impact on the economy yet due to the Delta wave. In March 2020, the first indicator to tip over was restaurant reservations. I would expect that to be the first item to suffer now as well. As usual, clicking over and reading will not only bring you up to the virtual moment, but bring me a penny or two...

Farmer – Economist Michael Smith is discussing how people get into farming and the issues. There are three ways to get into faming, each with their own issues, pitfalls, and nuances. There are three distinct ways to get into farming and those paths are all not worn at all. After a few rainy and hot weeks of watching the Top Gear guy farm his land he previously was subbing out, he now wants to argue with his wife about Cartel Avocados, and...

In 1955, just past daybreak, a Chevrolet truck pulled up to an unmarked building. A 14-year-old child was in the back. The article is part of “Inheritance,” a project about American history and Black life.. It is a good offering by The Atlantic, “His Name Was Emmett Till,” Wright Thompson Depicted is the Barn where Emmet Till was strung up, beaten, and murdered on August, 28, 1955, What We Still Don’t Know About Emmett Till’s Murder – The...

New jobless claims rise sharply; is the Delta wave beginning to take its economic toll? New jobless claims are the most important weekly economic datapoint with regard to the effects of vaccination progress. At this point, it is also a test of how much the “delta wave” of new cases is setting economic progress back. Three weeks I wrote that, because progress in vaccinations had largely stalled, “that implies at least a stall in the decline in...

Why Did Trump Initially Support The Saudi-UAE Effort To Overthrow Qatar’s Government?  One of the more curious things in 2017 in the first year of the Trump presidency was how when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) placed a boycott on Qatar and more directly attempted to overthrow the government of Qatar, President Trump openly supported this effort initially.  He would later be pulled back from this position as his first Secretary...

As if we did not have enough issues with the commercial healthcare insurance industry attempting to supplant single payer Medicare (minus setting hospital budgets, doctor fees, and pharmaceutical costs to the consumer) and the VA with commercial healthcare insurance and/or Medicare Advantage and ACOs? Commercial Healthcare Insurance and Medicare Advantage are “not” the equivalent of Medicare or the VA healthcare models. Some advocates are...

Coronavirus dashboard for July 21: brace yourself for the surge in deaths I have been warning since late June that the situation would likely look very different by the end of July. By 2 weeks ago, I wrote: “In the near future, there appears to be bad news and *relatively* “good” news for the US. The bad news is that the “delta wave” is spreading, and we should expect a real outbreak on the order of last summer’s by early August. The...

Tags: open thread

The Ambivalence of Verfügbare Zeit Back in December I posted an excerpt from the Grundrisse, Reichtum ist verfügbare Zeit und nichts weiter, without noticing that in it was a prototype for Marx’s concept of socially necessary labour time (Gesellschaftlich notwendige Arbeitzeit):  Die Schöpfung von viel disposable time außer der notwendigen Arbeitszeit für die Gesellschaft überhaupt und jedes Glied derselben (d.h. Raum für die Entwicklung der...

So … . What was the House Un-American Activities Committee (1945-1975, with a few interesting precursors) really all about? Looking back through the lens of history, it was much about distracting the Nation’s attention from the racist atrocities being committed in southern states. Still today, all a red state Republican politician needs do is yell, “Communist!”, “Socialist!”, “Nancy Pelosi!” or “Hillary Clinton!” and their constituents forget to even...