Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

A Footnote to IT WAS BEDLAM! Lewis Corey was a pseudonym for Louis Fraida, one of the founders of the U.S. Communist Party. In a letter to Marcuse dated August 16, 1960, Raya Dunayevskaya replied at length to his request for references to the American literature dealing with the issues of “the transformation of the laboring class under the impact of rationalization, automation and particularly, the higher standard of living.” This was in...

RJS, Focus on Fracking, Largest one-week price jump on record leaves oil prices at a 13½ year high Oil prices increased for the tenth time in eleven weeks this week, and finished at a 13 1/2 year high, after a combination of sanctions, the threat of sanctions, and threats to shipping in the Black Sea had taken more than half of Russian oil off the market . . . after ending last week up 1.5% at $91.59 a barrel after earlier hitting $100 with the...

IT WAS BEDLAM!  From The Decline of American Capitalism by Lewis Corey (1934): Capitalist production saves on labor and multiplies the productive forces. But two contradictions arise which constantly torment capitalist enterprise. Saving on labor decreases relative wages and limits the conditions of consumption. This sets in motion the forces of excess capacity, sharpened competition, and mounting distribution costs. These costs absorb much, if...

The Blindfolded Scaffolding Begins to Unfold We sense too little for the process of containment to unfold. Yet phenomenologists focus on early representations from the scaffolding for subsequent events in front of the now not-blindfolded infants. Infants looked at longer aspects of the psychoanalytic scaffolding: how reverie can be and is being a weird kind of blindfold.  Since our dynamical, reciprocal exchanges unfold and lead to changes —...

Vladimir who daren’t dismount III. Estragon is french for sunflower. How in the hell, Samuel? These days, fossils are paying good money for carbon capture stories. More for the hacks. Lord knows we’ve them aplenty. The €13 billion-plus overruns Nord Stream in a time of global warming was silly. The commitment to fossils, sillier. Being dependent on Russia, was stupid. Nord Stream II was doubling down on silly and stupid. Enough Carpe Diem. Too...

“March 5, 2022,” Letters from an American, Professor Heather Cox – Richardson Whenever something good is going down, there are nut jobs popping up making demeaning statements about what is occurring. Here is one of Trump’s acolytes taking a shot at Ukraine’s Zelensky’s courage. “Yesterday, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) referred to the “Putin wing” of the Republican Party when she shared a video clip of Douglas Macgregor. Macgregor was...

February jobs report: a Big Win!, NDd There were two main trends I was looking for in this jobs report:  1. Is the pace of job growth beginning to decelerate?  2. Is wage growth holding up? Is it accelerating? The answers were: 1. The 6-month average of monthly gains, which was running at 548,000 in the 2nd half of 2021, increased in February to 582,000. 2. Wage growth, which averaged 5.9% in the 2nd half of 2021, is now up 6.7%...

The cleric Th. Chalmers, in the otherwise in many respects ridiculous and repulsive work… has correctly struck upon this point, ‘Profit,’ says the same Chalmers, ‘has the effect of attaching the services of the disposable population to other masters, besides the mere landed proprietors, . . . while their expenditure reaches higher than the necessaries of life.’ The above quote is not the point Marx considered correct in Chalmers’s “otherwise…...

Monetary Sovereignty, Sanctions and Russian Economic Policy The central role of economic sanctions in the US/EU strategy against Russia has returned international political economy to the center stage if it had ever left it.  Here are some thoughts occasioned by Adam Tooze’s interesting analysis of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as perceived by the Russian economic policy apparatus, connected to the role of monetary reform in the anti-colonial...

RJS, Everything Got Worse . . . US oil supplies at a 13-year low; SPR at a 19 1/2-year low, total oil + products supply at a 94-month low after across the board draws; distillate supplies at a twenty-seven-month low The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending February 25th indicated that after a big jump in our oil exports and a drop in our oil...