Tag Archives: politics

June data starts out mixed: manufacturing strong, housing stalls, New Deal democrat June data started out this morning with the ISM manufacturing report. There was no big change from last month’s torrid pace. The overall index declined a very slight -0.6% to 60.6, while the leading new orders component declined by 1 to 66:Any number over 60 implies a very strong economy, so this report indicates that the manufacturing sector is still red hot....

Gotta give credit where credit is due. If not for my morning readings at other sites, I would not have run across this gem at Crooks and Liars as done by Chris capper Liebenthal. This gentleman, ahh redneck, paints the situation a bit differently than what I or other more learned (than I) people might do having a tendency to speak in elegant, technical, and formal verbiage. It is said plain and simple in this case. Now if you can not stand a few...

New jobless claims: a surprise to the positive side I have been paying particular attention to new jobless claims this year, as being the most important weekly economic datapoint to correlate with vaccination progress. My ultimate target for claims is an average of 325,000 or below, which would signify a return to normal expansion levels in the past 30 years. Lasts week I wrote that “Unfortunately, that progress [in vaccinations] has largely...

Karl Marx did not use the phrase, socially necessary labour time (or its equivalent, labour time [that is] socially necessary) in the Grundrisse (1857-58 notebooks). He did, however, refer once to “the necessary labour of society”: As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The...

CMS bans Surprise Billing The issues here were medical services practitioners not being on hospital staff. Practitioners not subject to hospital billing practices and bargaining contracts with Healthcare insurance were billing at their rates to recover what they deem to be reasonable. In the end, the patient pays whatever can be worked out. Radiology and Anesthesiology are two of the practices which come to mind. _________ The Biden...

“A Review of “The American War in Afghanistan,” Carter Malkasian, Foreign Affairs In 2008, I interviewed the United Kingdom’s then outgoing military commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, in a dusty firebase in Helmand Province, where international troops had been battling the Taliban on a daily basis for territory that kept slipping away. Carleton-Smith stated the war in Afghanistan could not be won militarily. He was the first...

Gen. Mark Milley responds to Rep. Matt Gaetz on Extremism & Critical Race Theory: "I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, non-commissioned officers of being 'woke' or something else." pic.twitter.com/P1x6vg9FUr— CSPAN (@cspan) June 23, 2021General Milley during the hearing: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a...

It is an unfortunate fact that many think tanks funded by conservative plutocrats and nominally devoted to spreading free-market ideas actively foster the politics of white grievance.  I believe the evidence for this claim is quite strong, but it is not always immediately obvious that this is happening.  Classical liberals and libertarians generally do not engage in overt race-baiting, and they make arguments with at least a thin veneer of...

Coronavirus dashboard for June 28: comparisons with one year ago as “delta” spreads Let’s begin this installment with a look at vaccinations by county from a different source that a reader pointed me to last week, COVIDactnow:  The urban/rural and Red State/Blue State divides are pretty obvious. Conor Kelly (whose work I was highlighting one year ago) also has a more detailed breakdown: He notes that income level also...

RJS at Marketwatch 666 reviews oil and natural gas pricing, June 28, 2021 Oil Pricing Oil prices set a new 32 month high for a fifth consecutive week, as negotiations to lift Iranian sanctions broke off and US crude supplies fell more than was expected for a fifth straight week. After rising 1% to $71.64 a barrel last week on rising demand and falling supplies, the contract price of US light sweet crude for July delivery opened lower on...