Mike Norman Economics

This week Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that Russia recognizes the acting president of Bolivia, Senator Janine Agnes as head of state, but only until an election is organized. This decision was made due to the fact that it was she who was to take the place of the interim head of the republic in accordance with the law after the resignation of the leadership. At the same time, the events preceding the change of power in the country, the Russian side regards as a coup....

Trump should be impeached for using his office for corrupt purposes. Not for challenging the national security consensus. In the US, the president sets foreign policy, not the Blob or the Borg (Deep State).The NationThe Foreign Policy Establishment Is Hijacking Impeachment Jeet HeerSee alsoJohn Solomon ReportsThe 15 essential questions for Marie Yovanovitch, America’s former ambassador to Ukraine John Roberts

Backgrounder.Council on Hemispheric AffairsBehind the Racist Coup in Bolivia Danny Shaw, lecturer of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender courses at the City University of New YorkSee alsoMore background.TricontinentalBolivia Does Not Exist Vijay Prashad, historianSee also CounterpunchBolivia and the Loud Silence Clark T. Scott

When the dust settles in a month or two, the House of Representatives will have impeached President Donald Trump with a one-sided partisan vote and then the Senate will have exonerated Donald Trump with a similarly one-sided partisan vote. But at the end of the day, the United States will have acquired a new strategic ally in Central Europe: Ukraine. The very first day of the impeachment hearings in November has been responsible for an important national security decision that had no input...

On November 7, 2019, for the 28th year in a row, the entire United Nations General Assembly, gathered in one room, voted overwhelmingly against “the Economic, Commercial, and Financial Embargo Imposed on Cuba by the United States.” The final tally was 187 in favor, 3 opposed (Brazil, Israel, US), 2 abstentions (Colombia, Ukraine), 1 not voting (Moldova).... Dissident VoiceThe 2019 UN Vote Against the US Blockade of Cuba Ike Nahem

Did it live up to expectations? Yes and no. The starting point of the book is the ‘global victory of capitalism’ – ‘the entire globe now operates according to the same economic principles – production organized for profit using legally free wage labour and mostly privately owned capital, with decentralized coordination.’No credible alternatives currently exist out there in the real world. So far, so Fukuyama. But then he goes on to explore two broad branches of contemporary capitalism and...

Economic warfare was widely used in WWII. When one country blockaded another’s supply of essential goods or bombed the industries producing them, why did the adversary’s economy fail to collapse? This column, part of the Vox debate on the economics of WWII, reviews Mançur Olson’s insights, which arose from the elementary economic concept of substitution. He concluded that there are no essential goods; there are only essential uses, which can generally be supplied in many ways. Also a reason...

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has quietly rolled out a new social network that is intended to get right what Facebook and Twitter have so far been getting wrong.The new social network, WT:Social, which Wales announced had 25,000 members on November 6, now has about 78,000 members who are at least intrigued by the idea of a social network that combats fake news.... Check it out here. WT:Social.TechaPeekWikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival social networkTap Team

'Private good, public bad'Proportion of properties connected to full fibre broadband:??98%??97%??10% South Korea has a state-owned broadband service.  Doesn’t this illustrate the failure of the neoliberal market model to deliver public goods? 

An excellent article, one of the best critiques of neoclassical economics I've read for a while.David Graeber says how finance crashed the economy, while at the same time Britain had one of the finest education systems in the world. So what did the government do, rather than reform finance along the lines of Britain’s university system, it financialised the education system instead? Before long, the Bank of England (the British equivalent of the Federal Reserve, whose economists are most...