Mike Norman Economics

The ongoing Browder saga. Lucy Komisar is an investigative journalist who focuses on financial and corporate corruption, particularly the use of offshore bank and corporate secrecy havens. She began investigating William Browder nearly 20 years ago when she learned of his use of an offshore company in the Isle of Man to siphon off profits from the Russian company Avisma, cheating minority investors of dividends and the Russian Treasury of taxes. Her expose was published by 100Reporters, a...

'Government' in the UK...and elsewhere...is a function of a corrupt relationship between politicians and vested interests from the corporate sector and foreign lobbyists. Mark GB highlights the depths of the systemic problem. ******* You won’t find accountability on an organisational chart; because it is a function of character: it’s not about how ‘smart’ you are, it cannot be ‘bought’, and you’ve either led a life that has nourished it…or you haven’t. Clearly, this is not just a...

It is Wednesday and so a short blog. I am working on a number of things at present but getting the material sorted for my next book with Thomas Fazi is a priority at the moment. My snippet today though is about a study that has just come out in the American Political Science Review – Bias in Perceptions of Public Opinion among Political Elites – by two US academics. The title is indicative. They explore what they argue is a disjuncture between what the politicians think voters want and what...

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...