Mike Norman Economics

Former Polish President Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the influential leader of the country’s ruling Law and Justice Party, has some frank advice for Kiev, telling Ukrainian officials that the country would never join Europe if it continued to try to build its national identity on the glorification of notorious Nazi-allied war criminals like Stepan Bandera. In an interview for the news weekly magazine Do Rzeczy, excerpts from which were published by other Polish outlets on Monday, Kaczynski...

One of the most ingenious propaganda weapons ever developed is that the powerful nations of the West—led by the United States—have a moral responsibility to use military force to protect the rights of people being repressed by their governments. This “responsibility to protect” (R2P) always had a dubious legal standing, but its moral justification also required a psychological and historical disengagement from the bloody reality of the 500-hundred-year history of U.S. and European...

Scary times. I use to think it might be a good idea for Europe to jettison the US, but what if Trump wants a world where every country on its own and winner takes all. And what if Trump is not an anomaly but represents the will and desires of  a large percentage of the American people.  “The fact that the U.S. is reducing its role in world affairs cannot be tied to the policies of a single president,” Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said last month in a stunning speech. “There...

An enduring myth among mainstream economists is that so-called ‘structural’ impediments in the labour market prevent aggregate spending initiatives from government being an effective solution to mass unemployment. According to this view, if the government attempts to reduce the unemployment rate below some ‘natural rate’ then accelerating inflation will be the only outcome. The ‘natural rate’ can, in turn, only be reduced by structural policies – attacks on trade unions, welfare state...

Putin is correct in this observation, although the West refuses to recognize it. Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Ivan Melnikov … said that “communists and all the leftist patriotic forces [in Russia] understand that communism is [as] close to Christianity as much as the form of capitalism that exists in our country and our economy today is far from Christianity.”... It's likely no accident that the candidate in the coming presidential election who is regarded as Putin's chief...

Say again which countries are "shit-hole" countries. Seriously, there are reasons that hell hole countries are the way they are. That is overlooked in the push to emphasis that the developed world cannot accommodate immigrating from the undeveloped world. Regarding undeveloped countries, the pressing questions involve 1) development economics, and 2) historical reasons and current policy of developed countries that contribute to the problems. However, there is no good reason for...

In-depth analysis of the Trump dossier. Much ado about nothing, but it's the ado that's interesting and relevant, as Andrew McCarthy shows. Maybe on a conspiracy against a presidential candidate and then president in the legal sense, but close and likely some would call it a conspiracy in the colloquial sense.  It certainly was collusion among people determined to undercut Trump owing to their own biases and affiliations. This appears to be the real threat to American democracy...

Since the combat deaths of four Special Forces soldiers in Niger in October, AFRICOM has been under greater media scrutiny than at any other time in its history. There have also been reports that Navy SEALs are being investigated in the strangulation death of another Green Beret in neighboring Mali (the site of previous shadowy deaths of special operators), and that U.S. personnel took part in a massacre in Somalia. The command has deflected questions about the killing in Mali, offered...

I’m late to Zeynep Tufekci’s excellent Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. It analyses the impact of social media on political events such as the Arab Spring – remember that? – and Occupy. Her thesis is that online organization is a powerful political tool when combined with offline organization, but cannot substitute for it; and the evidence presented here from a range of mass protests certainly convinces me. The problem mass socially-networked protests have...

Trump followed in the footsteps of Obama and pardoned five megabanks—one of which he reportedly owes up to $300 million in outstanding loans. While Americans celebrated the holidays, President Trump followed in the footsteps of his predecessors by acting in the interest of Wall Street and using the distraction to do something that was not in the best interest of the American people. He pardoned five megabanks for rampant fraud and corruption, which is especially notable because of the...