Mike Norman Economics

The Guardian had an article the other day saying how Assad has tortured and murdered hundreds of people in his prisons and this crime cannot go unpunished. Who knows if it's it not, but in times of war crimes are committed by all sides. So, was the Guardian saying that we must support the Jihadist terrorists in their fight against Assad, who, if they win, will cause a bloodbath and turn the country into another Libya?  And who started this war, the Guardian must know it was Saudi Arabia,...

Forget about the Mueller investigation. It is irrelevant. Trump’s Presidency hinges on what he does in Syria in the coming weeks. The choice is unambiguous. Maintain his commitment to non-intervention that spills over into nation building or start acting like George W Bush and Barack Obama. Either Trump meant what he said during the campaign or he was lying. He has no middle ground here. Part of the problem afflicting Donald Trump is his reliance on his media image as a tough, hard nosed...

The impetus for the current U.S. offensive against the ICC is that its judges are currently considering whether to authorize the prosecutor to investigate alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan, including by the U.S. military and the CIA. The potential scenario of Americans being prosecuted by an international court for crimes committed abroad is exactly the scenario Bolton and other opponents warned about in the court’s early days. The US is against anything and anybody it does not...

Funny. Trump gets some of the basics of MMT, which the article mentions. Gary Cohn, not so much.Business InsiderBob Woodward book: Gary Cohn was 'astounded at Trump's lack of basic understanding' about the federal debt Bob Bryan

Dances with BearsTHE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME – THE SECRET IN THE CLINTON-YELTSIN PAPERS WHICH THE KREMLIN SPOKESMAN REGRETS TO SEE EXPOSED IS THE LOVE OF SUBMISSION John Helmer Fort Russ PressNYT LIES! “China Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers” Dennis Etler Sic Semper TyrannisWill World War III Start This Week? Willie B Edward Curtin — Behind the CurtainA Diabolic False Flag Empire: A Review of David Ray Griffin’s The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? Edward CurtinProject...

This just came down as an email, so no link, I'm afraid, unless you want to read it in German. So here it is in full. I thought it was rather good. KV In the autumn of 2008 events unfolded in Wall Street that the crushing majority of people around the world had been led to believe could never occur. It was the financial equivalent of watching the sun spinning out of control soon after it rose above the horizon. Humanity watched on in collective disbelief. The ancient Greeks had a term for...

A group of veteran intelligence officers calling themselves the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, have composed an open memo to President Donald Trump, warning of the very real possibility of a US-Russia conflict in Syria. They assert the need for Western voices to call for the remnants of al-Nusra and al-Qaeda to surrender, rather than continuing to support them, and highlight the dangers of accidental escalation should the US (or their allies) attempt to strike Syrian...

My office was subject to a random power failure for most of today because some greedy developer broke power lines in our area. So I am way behind and what was to be a two-part blog series will now have to extend into Wednesday (as a three-part series). That allows me more time today to catch up on other writing commitments. The three-part series will consider a recent intervention that was posted on the iNET site (September 6, 2018) – Mainstream Macroeconomics and Modern Monetary Theory:...

Another Iraq WMD tale. The Wall Street Journal has just published a bombshell on Sunday evening as Russian and Syrian warplanes continue bombing raids over al-Qaeda held Idlib, citing unnamed US officials who claim "President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has approved the use of chlorine gas in an offensive against the country’s last major rebel stronghold."… That's right, unnamed US officials are now claiming to be in possession of intelligence which they say shows Assad has already given the...

A giant end-of-month spending spree in August has ballooned the Federal defiicit to $980 bln and 4.8% of GDP.This is the largest nominal deficit since 2009 and the largest as a percentage of GDP since 2012.The MMT gods should be cheering this. They're not. Weird.