Mike Norman Economics

Bill Mitchell has just posted the first instalment in a two-part series on Marx and MMT. I was unaware of that while preparing the body of this post, but some of what follows bears incidentally on the topic. Bill Mitchell’s series is in response to a Marxist in the audience of one of his presentations who apparently claimed Marx’s theory as proof that government, through its spending, is powerless to do anything about employment in a capitalist economy. The unfortunate phenomena of some...

#MTFCCarlos Mucha (beowulf) gets a shout out too.Quartz (of all places)Is Joe Biden a trillion-dollar coin kind of president?Tim Fernholz

Afghanistan’s US-run government was the world’s largest producer and exporter of opium, morphine, and the end-product, heroin.As it did after first seizing power in the mid-1990’s, Taliban, the Islamic anti-drug and anti-communist movement, is shutting down the Afghan drug trade. Billions worth of heroin, opium and morphine that had been flowing into Central Asia, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Southeast Asia will be sharply reduced. Afghanistan’s drug-based economy is now in dire...

 Caitlin Johnstone sure knows how to write a good rant.CaitlinJohnstone.comThere Is No ‘Good’ Form Of Capitalism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative MatrixCaitlin Johnstone

 Expect no change. Neoliberalism remains solidly entrenched.Brave New EuropeMathew D. Rose – All Quiet on the German Front

"War Is a Racket" is a reference to Gen. Smedley Butler's statement of the same name.MintPress NewsWar Is a Racket: Ex-State Department Official Matthew Hoh Speaks OutLowkey

The increasing nationalism of Chinese consumers, as much as supply chain issues and Covid-related disruptions, is the reason international firms are moving overseasChina will lose some foreign talent, but domestic demand will shift towards perfectly good locally made products. The real winner, though, is VietnamThe irony, of course, is that Vietnam is a communist country.SCMPChina is decoupling from the world, not the other way aroundNeil NewmanRelatedTASSVietnamese top diplomat says Hanoi...

Ray McGovern responds to "Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks",I sent a quick tweet to alert those many readers, who are malnourished by the corporate media, to the subliminal but clear subtext; the Big Lie that Assange was a Russian agent. (After all, he published DNC emails "hacked by the Russians" to hurt candidate Clinton and throw the 2016 election to Trump. Right? "Hacked"? = Wrong.)…Isikoff and his co-authors are...

 This is good! Michael Hudson says Soros and his boys are dissapointed that China did not follow Western neoliberalism and privatise everything, because they wanted to go in, grab the lot, and then engage in rent extraction like they did in Yeltsin's Russia. Money can be got cheap in the West when banks can create it out of thin air, so it's easy to raise the cash to buy everything up. This is winner take all capitaliam, unrelated to work or merit. With China’s increasing wealth, Western...

I gave a talk at the Resist Event in Brighton UK last Sunday evening. On the panel was a person who dismissed Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as irrelevant to the real challenges that arose under Capitalism and he invoked Marx a lot. It was not a very illuminating interchange because not only did he misrepresent what MMT was but, in my view, he also seemed to think that we could extrapolate Marx’s scant ideas of money directly into the situation faced by nations today. Marx considered money to...