Mike Norman Economics

… the main task today remains to prevent a global war, which is increasingly seen in the US by some as the only way to avoid a day of reckoning. Needless to say, this war is seen as possible in the US by people who have zero knowledge and qualifications in serious military issues and it is not a bad idea to keep reminding all kinds of neocon trash which runs Empire today from their comfy country clubs and offices that many of them will have their own personal conventional 3M14 or X-101 with...

Warning to the US and UK (Anglo-American Empire) and their European vassals in NATO that there will not be regime change in China resulting from ongoing liberalization? China is committed to going its own way, which is unique to its history and conditions, so get used to it. “The practices of reform and opening up in the past 40 years have shown us that the Chinese Communist Party leadership is the fundamental character of socialism with Chinese characteristics … east, west, south, north,...

Both reports look at the usage data and the content themes the IRA run pages provided. Both claim that the intent of the IRA was to influence the election and to sow discord within the U.S. population. But there is no, none, nada, zero evidence in the data that the IRA had such an intent. Nor is their any testimony or statement on it. In contrast the Muller investigation, which looked into the case, found evidence that the IRA had a commercial intent. Unfortunately this is mentioned...

Contemporary liberals are temperamentally conservative — and what they want to conserve is a morally bankrupt political order.,,, A characteristic of neoliberalism? Maybe I was predisposed to democratic socialism; I always considered myself to be “on the Left,” even as a teenager. In any case, it’s become clear in retrospect that watching the liberal class respond to events over the past decade has been a powerful stimulus in my politicization. Which is to say, I didn’t acquire radical...

A major aspect of the CIA’s detention and interrogation operations has been purposefully hidden from view, primarily due to secrecy guidelines that make it illegal for anyone “read into” the program to reveal even its very existence. Recent declassified documents make clear that there was not one, but two CIA torture programs. These programs used different interrogation techniques, responded to different bureaucracies within the CIA, and had very different levels of oversight. This...

Colonialism and "the white man's burden." The story of the East India Company and how transnational corporate totalitarianism began. The rest is history that is still unfolding in accordance with this paradigm that has been adapted to neoliberal globalization and how capitalism is uplifting the masses, in particular those who are not of European descent. There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India - as horrible as it may have been - was not of any...

Zimbabwe!Tim Worstall doubles down.(Tim covers himself in the concluding paragraphs though.)Continental TelegraphThe Problem With Modern Monetary Theory – Explained For Children So MMT Enthusiasts Can Understand Tim Worstall

The economic forecast has been looking gloomy for some time, but last week the IMF warned that “an economic downturn lurks somewhere over the horizon”. Unfortunately, while workers have endured a lost decade since the 2008 financial crisis, the economy has not been repaired in that time. So without decisive action – and soon – there are five reasons why we should fear another global recession. 5. Lessons from 2008 still haven’t been learned Workers are all too familiar with...

It's very long and detailed, well, Mark Blyth is a university/ college professor and so there's a lot of research here. Now we know the type of work that gets done behind the scenes.How the  Conservatives messed up our ecomony, and yet millions of people vote for them believing they know what's best for the country. ABSTRACT Using newly declassified documents from the British Public Records Office, we argue that the finance-dependent growth regime that typified the UK economy in the...

FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver, a fairly reliable establishment loyalist, tweeted today about the new Russia report saying “If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I’m not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there’s not much evidence that they were effective.” “For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob...