Mike Norman Economics

The power of the mass market. The difference in wealth that is not inherited lies largely in access to the mass market and control of intellectual and artistic property.FortuneTaylor Swift Made $54 Million for 6 Days Work. How’d You Do? Chris Morris

Russian politics.Russian and Eurasian PoliticsPUTIN 5.0: Tea LeavesGordon M. Hahn, analyst and Advisory Board member at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, member of the Executive Advisory Board at the American Institute of Geostrategy, a contributing expert for Russia Direct, a senior researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, Akribis Group, and; and an analyst and consultant for Russia – Other Points of View

Robert Paul Wolff is largely correct here, but "the deep state" cannot be equated with bureaucracy as a political factor ensuring constancy and stability, as Max Weber described. He apparently did not so a search on the term "deep state," which seems to have originated with respect to Turkish state and intelligence services and senior administration under Kemal Ataturk. In Russia is this is known as the siloviki (senior career intelligence and military) and nomenklatura (senior...

And then there are the mini-Bots, a parallel currency system very reminiscent of what Yanis Varoufakis proposed for Greece. Basically, they would allow the government to pay some of its domestic obligations (suppliers etc.) in the form of IOUs, which could then in turn be used to pay taxes and -other- government services. They would leave what is domestic, domestic.There’s a lot of talk about this being a first step towards leaving the euro, but why should that be so? The main ‘threat’ lies...

Michael Hudson reports on his recent trip to China for a conference.  Not only Chinese housing but US as well. Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of NeoliberalismChina’s housing: It Doesn’t Have to be This WayMichael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking...

Jobs and Defense... Striking a strong blow on behalf of working men and women, Donald #Trump's policies are bringing jobs to destitute towns like Ashland, Ky., while revitalizing American manufacturing. #tariffs, #aluminum, #steel https://t.co/yueQlavAla — USA TODAY Opinion (@usatodayopinion) June 1, 2018

Links and commentary.Russian ObserverRussian Federation Sitrep 31 May 2018 Patrick ArmstrongalsoRussia FeedRussia launches its new hyper-sonic warhead from submerged submarine (Video)

What the article says about Xi is also true of Putin. They both have traditional, legal, and charismatic authority.  When this is true of leaders of great powers, they become world-historical figures. Xi and Putin are already emerging as key figures in the history of the 21st century.  Andrew Batson's BlogA Weberian analysis of Xi Jinping’s power Andrew BatsonSee alsoRussia InsiderExcellent New Russian Biography Film of Chinese Leader Xi Reveals His Thinking Mark Boden

Excellent backgrounder. It's mostly about the intricacies of the Lebanese voting system and Lebanese politics, but this is an interesting aside on the US showing that "democratic elections" are not so democratic in the developed world as well as the emerging world. In the U.S., there is still a clear agenda to suppress wide political participation. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world which holds the vote on a working day—and in the winter where much of the East coast is...

You can't really look at GDP to figure out what is really going on...The Trump tax reforms of this past January 1 at least removes financial incentives for the multinational firms to cause this type of financial result.So even the recent weakness in both the UK and EZ prints of GDP could easily be the result of a change in tax reduction strategy by the US multinationals in response to the Trump corporate tax policies.And not some nebulous "austerity neoliberal conspiracy lies!"...