The Angry Bear

One tiny little ray of hope After the Charlottesville, VA white supremacy violence, and his failure to explicitly condemn it, Donald Trump’s Gallup approval rating has fallen to a new low of 34%, and his disapproval to a new high of 61%: This puts him below the lowest ratings during their entire term of Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Only Truman, Ford, Carter, and George W. Bush ever scored lower. So far, alas Rasmussen has not followed...

by Joseph Joyce Current Account Deficits and Safe Assets The International Monetary Fund has issued its External Sector Report for 2017, and among its key findings: “Global current account imbalances were broadly unchanged in 2016…” The U,S. continues to record the largest deficit, $451.7 billion, which is equal in value to 2.4% of U.S. GDP. The continuing deficits contribute to the increase in the U.S. debtor status in its net international investment...

From an old sixties coffee house person, just a little history. In 1950, Woodie Guthrie signed a two year lease to reside in a Fred Trump Brooklyn development. Having wandered around the countryside for a number of years, he knew the North did not have any special claim to racial enlightenment. One event of a shooting at a bus terminal in Freeport, Long Island stuck in his mind. “Ferguson Brothers Killing” by Woody Guthrie. “The town that we ride through...

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Exclusive: Trump to focus counter-extremism program solely on Islam … https://www.reuters.com/…/us-usa-trump-extremists-program-exclusiv-idUSKBN15G… Feb 1, 2017 – The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a U.S. government … Republicans wrestle with effort to cut Obamacare … Although CVE funding has been appropriated by Congress and the grant recipients were … Life After Hate, which rehabilitates former neo-Nazis and other domestic extremists....

The word ‘narrative’ appears 41 times in the infamous Higgins memo, “POTUS and Political Warfare.” Guys, it’s time for some narrative critique. The narrative Higgins is most concerned about is something he calls “cultural Marxism,” which he defines in a paragraph at the top of page four of the memo: As used in this discussion, cultural Marxism relates to programs and activities that arise out of Gramsci Marxism, Fabian Socialism and most directly from...

I found a piece from two years ago on the notoriously far right, alt-right Public Broadcasting Service website entitled Column: Why the STEM gender gap is overblown by Denise Cummins, a research psychologist. She begins by noting that men don’t outnumber women in all areas of STEM, and she provides this graph: (Click to embiggen.) She then goes on: At the Ph.D. level, women have clearly achieved equity in the biosciences and social sciences, are nearly...

“The Changing of the Guard:” the prescient 1980 book that foretold neoliberalism About a month ago I read the synopsis of an interview in which Thomas Frank described the near evisceration of the Democratic Party.  Here’s his simple version: “[T]he Democrats have, what happened is that some years ago they decided they didn’t want to be the party of the people anymore. They didn’t want to be the sort of traditional Democratic Party that I grew up with, the...

Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic  Thoughts Jon Chait Shoots at all the Ducks in a Row — and Manages to Miss (once) I admire both Jon Chait and Glenn Greenwald. They do not admire each other. I enjoy it when they debate. Sometimes they both make fools of themselves. Jon Chait wrote a blog post “The Alt-Right and Glenn Greenwald Versus H.R. McMaster”. The chance to simultaneously critique the right and the left must have delighted him. The post is a critique...