Mike Norman Economics

A strong legacy of U.S. leadership and engagement in global politics has been reduced today to what I call kinetic diplomacy – diplomacy by armed force. The ConversationFewer diplomats, more armed force defines US leadership today Monica Duffy Toft | Professor of International Politics and Director, Center for Strategic Studies, Fletcher School, Tufts UniversitySee also Higinio Polo has for a long time predicted the current tension in international relations. He spoke about this, in...

The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 led to the outbreak of World War I. The Gulf of Tonkin incidents on August 2 and August 4, 1964 enabled what we call the Vietnam War This carefully research article by Professor Graeme McQueen presents a timely historical viewpoint which is  routinely “censored” by the mainstream media as well by the search engines. The danger of World War III is not front-page news. Kindly consider forwarding Professor McQueen’s article to your...

If you can stomach anymore of it, there's a whole load here.Professor of Sociology Edward Curtin discusses the attempts by the US, Britain, NATO and Israel to create false pretexts for an invasion of Syria and war with Russia. He discusses how the Deep State has concocted RussiaGate and how media and propaganda make it difficult to tell fact from fiction.Edward Curtin: False Flag Operations Will Start New War [embedded content]

It's gets scarier, even Iceland is in on this nonsense. How can Washington have so much influence when it is so evil? Surely most people are sensible and can smell a rat? Surely the Europeans want to live?RT - Iceland to diplomatically boycott 2018 World Cup in Russia

In a fast-changing world, governance systems must support rapid decision-making under conditions of radical uncertainty, while maintaining accountability. That – not the Western expectation of what a governance system should look like – is the standard by which we should be assessing political developments in China.… Exactly so. Same for other countries like Russia. American objections to the type of government in China, Russia, Iran, etc. are disingenuous when compared with widespread...

This is isn't capitalism, this is crime; it's like a protection racket. The military-industrial complex invents enemies to scam the tax payer into buying more weapons. Unlike corporations that sell to consumers, Lockheed Martin and the other top contractors to the US Government are highly if not totally dependent upon sales to governments, for their profits, especially sales to their own government, which they control — they control their home market, which is the US Government, and they use...

I hate to obsess over the Resistance’s obsession with this whole Russia thing, but: This week brought (1) a fresh reminder that Russia is far from the only country whose influence on American politics bears watching; and (2) a reminder of the (as economists say) “opportunity cost” of spending so much time watching Russia. On Wednesday the New York Times reported that the United Arab Emirates had steered $200 million to a Republican National Committee official, apparently in an attempt to...

Good one. Worth a full read. Social EuropeIs The US Hypocritical To Criticize Russian Election Meddling? Thomas Palley | Founder of Economics for Democratic & Open Societies

As of this writing, #StormyDanielsDay is the top US trend on Twitter. I don’t know what #StormyDanielsDay is. I don’t care what #StormyDanielsDay is. Neither should you. Neither should anyone else. Please stop this shit, America. If the US war machine goes after Iran or Russia it will likely mean a world war against multiple nuclear-armed countries, which could very easily send our species the way of the dinosaurs should a nuke get deployed in the fog of war. We don’t have time to focus on...

For decades, an increasingly loud chorus has claimed that economic inequality is primarily driven by class, with other possible reasons for disparities, such as race, playing a lesser role. They say that it is counterproductive to focus on inequality between races—instead, it is better to consider the inequality between all of America’s poor and its increasingly rich elite. A new study (pdf) by economists at Stanford, Harvard, and the US Census Bureau seems to refute that idea. The paper,...