Mike Norman Economics

Wednesday and a short blog post. I regularly work for unions as an expert analyst/witness in their struggles to achieve wage justice with employers who are intent on paying as little as possible. Often these are private employers but at the moment I am helping a union with their campaign to win a reasonable wage increase against a state government. The logic deployed by the government in relation to their fiscal affairs and their wage setting behaviour is a classic demonstration of how...

This is just a fact.

The FT has just run an article saying that exponential growth is a pipe dream, but it was behind a firewall.This article is from Max Keiser's site. The revelation that strikes me is the insanity of pursuing eternal economic growth, not as an option but as the only possible path: there is literally no alternative to extracting ever greater quantities of the planet’s resources to enable ever greater consumption by the planet’s 7.7 billion humans. Stripped to its essence, this mad drive is...

I've been staying away from linking to the Epstein affair other than with respect to finance. There are many unanswered questions about Epstein's finances and his links and relations with the financial world, which seem to be many.Here are two links that are worth knowing about. I'm sure there will be more unless it gets buried. The underbelly is getting exposed, and it's not pretty.Wall Street On ParadeJeffrey Epstein’s Death Adds to the JPMorgan Body CountPam Martens and Russ Martens...

China tops the U.S. in number of companies on Fortune's Global 500 list published on Monday with 129 companies listed, exceeding the U.S., which had 121 companies listed, for the first time since the debut of the list in 1990, and becoming the first country to defeat the U.S. since WWII.  The overall turnover of the top 500 firms reached 32.7 trillion U.S. dollars, 8.9 percent higher over a year earlier. Up 14.5 percent year on year, the gross profit hit a record high at 2.15 trillion U.S....

Pretty funny, and very apt. Tulsi is the only foreign policy realist that is running against endless, so far at least.Duffel BlogMaj. Tulsi Gabbard receives surprise deployment orders to Antarctica [satire] Yossarian

Not Saul Alinsky, but good places to start.Oxfam Blogs — From Poverty to PowerTwo new Manuals for Activists, with some useful lessons Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB

— Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent testimony was a reminder that Russia attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and very well may try to do so again in 2020. — This begs the question: Is there any evidence that Russian interference may have impacted the results, particularly in key states? — The following analysis suggests that the 2016 results can be explained almost entirely based on the political and demographic characteristics of those states. So from that...

But if Germany’s manufacturing woes were not sufficient in and of themselves, then combined with the threat of trade war with Trump, the prospect indeed is bleak for Europe: And the likelihood is that any of that ECB stimulus – promised for this autumn, as Mario Draghi warns that the European picture is getting “worse and worse” – will be very likely to meet with an angry response from Trump – castigated as blatant currency manipulation by the EU and its ECB. EU Relations with Washington...

Cultural paradigms and national models. Andrei Martyanov doesn't go into how the US is trying to impose its traditional cultural paradigm and it contemporary national neoliberal model on the rest of the world in an imperial fashion and how this is not going to work, but he alludes to it in the its assumption is the basis of his post. He focuses here on the incompatibility of the Russian and Chinese cultural paradigms and their respective national models as incompatible. I have...