The Angry Bear

Disposable People Disposable people are indispensable. Who else would fight the wars? Who would preach? Who would short derivatives? Who would go to court and argue both sides? Who would legislate? Who would sell red hots at the old ball game? For too long disposable people have been misrepresented as destitute, homeless, unemployed, or at best precariously employed. True, the destitute, the homeless, the unemployed and the precarious are...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 2 – 6 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Two important data considerations this week: (1) for the first time, some YoY comparisons – e.g., restaurant reservations – are compared with data after the onset of the pandemic. The distortions will intensify next week and last at least through the end of April; and (2) long-term interest rates, in particular for...

Usually, lies are told for purpose. So, in most cases, if we can determine whose purpose is being served, we will know who is behind the lie. Whose interests were being served by the Confederacy during the American Civil War? Sure as heck wasn’t those of the yeomen farmers who did most of the fighting and dying. There’s a good chance that it was the planters who told the lies that got so many killed. Heady stuff; people knowingly and willingly...

Household debt and the pandemic This is something I used to pay a lot more attention to back around the time of the Great Recession. How stretched were American households in paying their monthly bills? The Federal Reserve publishes a quarterly update tracking this issue. Two of the metrics in that quarterly update are debt service payments and financial obligations, respectively, as percents of household disposable income. The last update was in...

Is There No Hope for “Muslim Social Democracy”?  Probably not I am afraid.  Indeed, this label is a recently cooked up one, to replace an earlier one that used “Islamist” instead of “Muslim.” The group claiming this apparently failing and declining label is the Ennadha Party of Tuinisia, founded in 1981 and still led by al-Ghannouchi, currently  Tunis’s Speaker of the House, although he and his party, which has led Tunisia for the last decade, may...

Another big event is on the United States horizon, in Alabama, and its occurrence portends a potential seismic shift in the contours of our political parties. Amazon workers at an in Bessemer, Alabama facility are going to vote on unionization. And of course, Amazon opposes unionization. Amazon has a lot at stake if the Bessemer facility unionizes as it employs more than 400,000 warehouse and delivery workers. It is shaping up to be the biggest...

I am going to comment on two smart guys who believe that they disagree about the optimal political strategy for Democrats. Brian Beutler wrote an interesting essay criticizing what he calls “issue polling essentialism”. It includes the text The topic occurred to me after I recorded last week’s Rubicon with my friend Matt Yglesias, where we took different sides on the question of how determinative issue polling should be in setting...

How Do COVID-19 Vaccines Compare?, Kristina Fiore, MedPage Today MedPage Today has a good article detailing each of the approved Covid drugs as of today. The information includes company name, vaccine name, efficacy, trial participation, type of vaccine, dosage, and patient side effects. There is other information which is not necessarily needed for a typical or curious patient. If still interested, I included a link above. I think it is...

Disposable people are indispensable. Who else would fight the wars? Who would preach? Who would short derivatives? Who would go to court and argue both sides? Who would legislate? Who would sell red hots at the old ball game? For too long disposable people have been misrepresented as destitute, homeless, unemployed, or at best precariously employed. True, the destitute, the homeless, the unemployed and the precarious are indeed treated as...