Mike Norman Economics

The Trump administration's conflict with China has little to do with US external imbalances, closed Chinese markets, or even China’s alleged theft of intellectual property. It has everything to do with containing China by limiting its access to foreign markets, advanced technologies, global banking services, and perhaps even US universities.… The Trump administration, not Huawei or China, is today’s greatest threat to the international rule of law, and therefore to global peace....

In reading this, it is good to realize that feudalism was justified by the religious paradigm then prevalent in Europe. It was based on the great chain of being, with God (the Lord) at the top and the king as God's earthly simulacrum. This implied the divine right of kings, kings being temporal lords.Today, the great chain of being has been replaced by naturalism as the overarching paradigm owing to science replacing religion as authoritative. The concept of person has been submerged in the...

I would suggest there are three things we know. The first is that climate change is real. The result is that nothing can stay the same.The second is that neoliberalism has reduced most people to living in states of profound insecurity. Ignore that poverty is supposedly being beaten. This is almost for nought if the result is disabling fear for future well-being. This cannot persist because people will not tolerate it. We are seeing that, very widely. Third, our economic and social orders...

Last week’s (December 7, 2018) release by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – November 2018 – showed that total non-farm payroll employment rose by 155,000 and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 3.7 per cent. Participation was steady. While the US labour market is reaching unemployment rates not seen since the late 1960s, the participation rate is still well below the pre-GFC levels and a substantial...

This is not on politics or economics, so this comes under the 'anything' category that Mike Norman said was okay. It's important to me because my dad suffered from multiple sclerosis most of his adult like.  [embedded content]

Sure sounds like incipient fascism to me. But, hey, it couldn't happen here, could it?The DuranThe EU and the warning signs of Fascism Kit Knightly | co-editor of OffGuardian (UK)

What is really at the basis of the ongoing civilizational conflict between the US and China, a feud which many say has gradually devolved into a new cold war if few top politicians are willing to call it for what it is, are China’s ambitions to be a leader in next-generation technology, such as artificial intelligence, which rest on whether or not it can design and manufacture cutting-edge chips, and is why Xi has pledged at least $150 billion to build up the sector. But, as the FT notes,...

While the mainstream is defined by an insistence on method, the heterodoxy is defined by a concern with reality. What is so powerful about the conception, and what seems to have been almost entirely ignored, is what comes next. The implication of Lawson’s conception is that heterodox economics encompasses all those researchers that desire to study economic phenomena in accordance with our best understanding of how social phenomena exist. What method they decide to use is not a factor in...

At the top are some pretty nasty people. The world is a dangerous place. By Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor Anybody who thinks Trump is out to drain the swamp and bust the Deep State just got a dose of reality medicine, in the form of Trump’s nomination of swamp monster William Barr as our next Attorney General. According to former Bush-CIA black ops specialist Chip Tatum, Barr was part of Operation 40, an Agency-linked criminal gang that moved huge quantities of drugs and was...

Putin did it?Planet Free Will“The Police Were Out For Blood”: Viral Video Shows French Police Toss Man In Wheelchair to Ground During Yellow Vest Uprise