Mike Norman Economics

The Iranians are considered to be some of the most friendliest people in the world.  It's in their culture to offer strangers and newcomers food as once it was a centre of trade in the region and foreign traders were always welcomed.In the video below a young British man rides his Honda C90 through Iran and couldn't believe how friendly they were, especially after all had read about them in the corporate media. He simply loved the Iranians. Everyone in the West should watch his short film...

It's actually more than this. All of us have a world view, but we don't all share the same world view. Everyone takes their own world view to be "reality," and rejects other world views as erroneous, deceitful, degenerate, primitive, or uneducated, or primitive view of reality. Culture, including early upbringing and education, and especially group think heavily influence the formation of one's world view. Group think is fostered by narratives. Whoever controls the narrative controls the...

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that the European Union needs to create an independent analogue of the American system for transferring information on SWIFT payments in order to protect its companies from US sanctions against Iran.... “In this situation it is of strategic importance that we clearly tell Washington: we want to cooperate. But we will not allow them to act over our heads, to our detriment. Therefore, it would be right to protect European companies from sanctions from...

Narrative control. Once the internet became the central nervous system of the economy, research, news, and politics, the United States’ borders were extended across the planet. Only the U.S. and its corporations are sovereign, no other nation-state exists that could reshape the net by itself, to put a brake on Colonialism 2.0, despite local anti-monopoly laws and clear policies supporting sustainability on the social, ecological, economic, and technological order–much less build a viable...

Being the reserve currency has consequences.

Clearly, from the very outset, Trump has been “perceived by the globalist neo-liberal order as a mortal danger to the system which has enriched them” Jatras observes. The big question that Jatras poses in the wake of these events, is how could such collective hysteria have blossomed in to such visceral hostility, that parts of the ‘Anglo’ establishment are ready to intensify hostilities toward Russia – even to the point of risking “a catastrophic, uncontainable [nuclear] conflict”. How is...

The narrative rules. Whoever controls the narrative controls high ground regarding the opinion of politicians and the public. The second point is that this academic debate had zero impact on politicians. In that sense Cooper’s article is of purely academic concern. Austerity was not begun because politicians chose the wrong academic macroeconomists to take advice from, and the fact that the Keynesians won the debate therefore had no impact on what they did. The academic debate was in this...

My home town (where I was born and still spend a lot of time) is Melbourne, Victoria. It is a glorious place, at least the inner suburbs within about 3-4 kms of the city centre where I hang out mostly. It recently ‘lost’ its top place in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index (most pleasant place to live) to Vienna (Source). One wag thought it might have been because the Economist got confused between Australia and Austria. Economists are easily confused! But the reason...

Paul Craig Roberts writes about Mosanto's Roundup and how it's ingredient glyphosate maybe causing cancer. Monsanto's scientists say no but independent scientists say out does and is now so widespread and in nearly all our food. PCR says that our present capitalist system has become too expensive to be viable where too many costs have been externalised.   Or consider something simple like a pet store. All the pet store owners and customers who sold and purchased colorful 18 to 24 inch...

Not one of his best, but Pepe is always worth the read. It's August, so not much happening to report anyway. Asia TimesSo what will The Sanctioned supergroup do? Pepe Escobar