Socialdem. 21st Century

And so immediately we must ask: why do so many Marxists seem to ignore this fact and assault us with data on profit rates from c. 1945 to today, when their starting point was a period with abnormally and unusually high profit rates and this skews their data?Robert Brenner’s data for the US non-financial profit rate from 1929 to 2007 is in the graph below, as taken from this post here. I am unsure where the data actually comes from, but perhaps Brenner (2002) or (2006). Notice the spike in...

Buchanan understands Trump very well, because Trumpism is a kind of Pat Buchananism reborn – an anti-free trade, protectionist, anti-open borders paleoconservatism.Yes, there are plenty of toxic aspects to Trumpism and Buchananism, and Trump seems to want a more militaristic foreign policy than Buchanan did (without going to the neocon extreme), but at the heart of Trumpism is: the failure of neoliberalism in America. Part of that failed neoliberalism was open borders and mass immigration,...

Or at least Donald Tusk the president of the European council has, as described here, here and here.Astute people should have realised late last year that perhaps about 50% or so of the migrants are not genuine refugees, but economic migrants. Now the EU realises that mass deportations need to be carried out, as was realised by a number of European governments last month.Apparently 2,000–3,000 migrants are arriving in Greece every day. It is now clear that Austria and the Balkan states have...

An interesting discussion here.The bottom line: (1) the long-run trend of warming since the late 19th century is real, but climate science seems to be in its infancy and much is not properly understood;(2) the IPCC’s climate models that were used to predict the rise in global temperatures (CMIP-5 being the model used in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report of 2013) have been revealed to be wrong in their predictions;(3) there has been either a flattening out of global temperatures or a...

In the passage below: “Indeed, a ‘free market’ necessarily implies total respect for and protection of private property. But this means that rights of private property must always be preserved. This implies not only a cracking down on assault and murder, but also on all forms of theft and fraud, including counterfeiting. Counterfeiting must be prosecuted fully by the law and, more than that, must be scorned and condemned by public opinion. As an advocate of 100 percent reserve banking, of...

Given in the clip in the video below by Michael F. Scheuer, a former CIA intelligence officer who worked at the CIA for 22 years and was the chief of the bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999.This is in the context of America, but could so easily be applied to Europe of 2016.[embedded content]

Details here. People on the left: take careful note of this. Many neoconservatives may even desert the GOP for Hillary Clinton.Trump also caused hysterical outrage by the mere suggestion that maybe – just maybe – when running for US president he should display “neutrality” on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And now the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) – an organisation of neoconservatives and US evangelical Christians who think their ticket to heaven depends on Israel...

Steve Keen gives a lecture below on the macroeconomics of loanable funds and endogenous money using his program Minsky.[embedded content]

In the video below on RT.[embedded content]

But why should people on the left?From Rothbard’s Power and Market: Government and the Economy: “Laborers may also ask for geographical grants of oligopoly in the form of immigration restrictions. In the free market the inexorable trend is to equalize wage rates for the same value-productive work all over the earth. This trend is dependent on two modes of adjustment: businesses flocking from high-wage to low-wage areas, and workers flowing from low-wage to high-wage areas. Immigration...