EconoSpeak

This looks like bad news.  Iran's foreign minister, JMohammed avad Zarif, hass resigned.  Apparently he has previously tried to resign several times, but President Rouhani refused to accept it.  This time Zarif did it very publicly on Instagram, ah, the uses of social media.  Anyway, apparently there is a chance he might still be talked into staying, but probably not.  It seems that he has lost the favor of Supreme Leader Khamenei, and  that effectively somebody lse is handling foreign...

CEOs of 7 pharmaceutical multinationals addressed the Senate Finance Committee: Pharma execs offer Senate ideas to lower drug costs – except actually cutting prices. Executives from seven pharmaceutical companies — AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer and Sanofi — are testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. The pharma executives have a number of ideas to reduce drug prices for patients, except lowering list prices. High drug prices has...

A few weeks ago I speculated on the structural aspect of neoliberalism at an economy-wide level, the way its characteristic framing of economic decision-making may have emerged from changes in the role of finance in business and the composition of high-end portfolios.  My purpose was to push back against the common tendency to view neoliberalism solely as a philosophy, to be countered by other philosophies.  Today I stumbled across this superb bit of reporting from the Chronicle of Higher...

An edited video of an encounter between Senator Diane Feinstein of California and a group of young campaigners for the Green New Deal is eliciting much outrage and indignation on Twitter. Senator Feinstein's unpardonable offense is that she became impatient with being repeatedly interrupted and made a few sarcastic remarks having to do with her knowledge, experience and authority and their lack of those characteristics.I don't buy Feinstein's rationale for her policy positions on climate...

While the wise and up-to-date observers declare the two state solution between Israel and Palestine to be deader than dead, I continue to think that morally it is the best solution for this deeeply difficult problem. However, one leading force in sending this solution into the grave is Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, who is up for reelection very shortly. He has for some time been pushing the situation towards a hard nationalist one state solution, with the current Trump admin...

"When we first came to Washington in 1933," FDR Labor Secretary Francis Perkins wrote in her memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew, "the Black bill was already before the Congress. Introduced by Senator Hugo L. Black, it had received support from many parts of the country and from many representatives and senators."  The Black Bill was the Senate version of the Black-Connery Thirty-Hour Bill. On April 6, 1933, the Senate approved the measure by a vote of 53 to 30. Perkins was scheduled to appear...

I’m a professor at Evergreen State College.  This year I assigned a new-ish book I hadn’t yet read to my class, and to my chagrin I discovered it was pseudo-scholarship instead of the real thing; so I wrote the following apologia. 

The Trump gang has kicked up a ruckus over its plan to insert a question about citizenship in the 2020 decennial census.  It’s a transparent attempt to reduce the response rate of immigrants, disenfranchising them in reapportionment and government spending formulas, despite the Constitution’s call for an enumeration of “persons”, not citizens.But why stop at citizenship?  When you think about, there is no government interest greater than its ability to collect taxes, the main obstacle to...

Here are some varieties of "socialism:" command socialism, market socialism, socialist market economy, social democracy, democratic socialism, right wing socialism, utopian socialism, corporate socialism, just plain vanilla socialism.  Here are some people who have claimed to be socialist, some of them selecting one or another of these types, but some just keeping it plain vanilla generic: Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping, Stefan Lofven, Nicolas Maduro, Bernie Sanders, Aexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). ...

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a political statement triggering evidence (mixed) about its own truth as dramatically as Ilhan Omar’s quip that pro-Israeli bias in congress is “about the Benjamins, baby”.  It’s as if you wrote a letter criticizing the Post Office and had it returned to you with a USPS message stamped on it.But let’s dig down one level.  The criticism, partly fair, of Omar is that she bought into (so to speak) the anti-semitic slur that Jewish money constitutes a secret...