EconoSpeak

 Yes, this 25-year deal is a big deal, just recently signed and not getting much attention in the US media.  Juan Cole has called it the most important deal involving China and the Middle East since the days of the Mongol Empire in the 1200s, when both what was then Persia and China were actually under the same ruler.  This $400 billion deal was signed on the 50th anniversary of the opening of diplomatic relations between Iran (then under the rule of the Shah) and the Peoples' Republic of...

 The who?  Never heard of them?  Or never heard from them? More like the latter. After all they have not been called "Silent" for nothing.Yes, it seems that we alternate generations between large noisy ones and smaller quieter ones.  The Greatest Generation survived the Great Depression and won World War II, and they certainly let everybody hear about all that a whole lot.  Two generations has been mine, with me a front end boomer, and we have certainly boomed plenty, much to the annoyance...

 Yeah, to heck with "socialism" in any of its forms, even old varieties that Marx and Engels denounced, neologizing the label "utopian socialism" for its advocates, even as they made clear their respect for the intentions at least of their intentions, even as they did not provide an analysis of the historical dynamic of capitalism and the broader issues arising from that. And we know that while some communes inspired by the utopian socialists survived such as the Israeli Kibbutzim, most...

 Yesterday (or maybe the day before), Virginia Governor Ralph Northam overturned over 400 years of a death penalty. My state had the highest number of executions of any other, 1390, over those 400+ years. And now it is done. Good.Barkley Rosser 

 “It was zero threat. Right from the start, it was zero threat,” Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “Look, they went in — they shouldn’t have done it — some of them went in, and they’re hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know? They had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in, and they walked out.”Yeah, they were yelling "Hug Mike Pence!" not "Hang Mike Pence!"The deaths of  Capitol police officers? -- they were evidently smothered...

 On the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring uprisings that held so much hope at the time but would lead eventually only to one nation, Tunisia where they started, ending up with a democratic government, while others ended up with either authoritarian governments such as Egypt or in ongoing states of internal war, such as Syria, Yemen, and Libya. But now it appears there might be hope for a peaceful, if not necessarily fully democratic, outcome in Libya.Since the end of the Qaddafi regime...

 The murderer of 8 people recently in the Atlanta area, of whom 6 were Asian American women, mostly (if not completely) Korean American, has claimed that he did not do it out of any anti-Asian prejudice, much less anti-women prejudice, although apparently only one of those killed was a man.  Rather he claims that he did it to "remove temptation" for himself due to a claimed "sex addiction" he has.  I note that for at least one of the three massage parlors he hit numerous individuals are...

I was sure that the English translation of Friedrich Engels's Preface to volume 2 of Capital had used the expression "rescued from oblivion" in referring to the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. But the only translations I could find didn't agree:"In this pamphlet, the importance of which should have been recognized on account of the terms surplus produce or capital, and which Marx saved from being forgotten, we read the following statements...""In this...

Is bitcoin a speculative bubble by the angry bear by barkley rosser there are at least · By The Angry Bear By Barkley Rosser There are at least two definitions of a speculative bubble. The first, and most widely accepted, is that it. Is Bitcoin A Speculative Bubble? Nasdaq · So I would just say that you know its a its a massive bubble and its.extremely difficult for value to any intrinsic point on what Bitcoin should be worth. In my opinion, there is a gigantic...

 I was long aware that Frances Perkins (1880-1965) was the first woman to serve as a cabinet secretary, namely Secretary of Labor for Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which position she was one of the two people to serve in their position all they way through his presidency, the other being Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Somehow I never heard that much about her, but an article in yesterday's WaPo's Retropolis section, "The woman who helped FDR change America in 100 days" proved a real eye-opener...