Category: Uncategorized
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Gerontocracy and gullible liberals
The Republican leader in the US Senate, 80 year old Moscow Mitch McConnell has done more to block climate change legislation than any person on earth other than Republican mega-funders like 91 year old Rupert Murdoch and 86 year old Charles Koch. Chuck Grassley, the 88 year old Republican Senator…
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Regressives at the New Republic and the imaginary generation gap.
An American who is age 60 in 2020 entered the workforce in 1980 after the OPEC oil embargo during the Reagan recession where unemployment went up to 10.8%, an era the regressives (who call themselves progressives) consider utopian. Jeet Heer @HeerJeet ·Apr 8 3. Here is the reality of the…
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What Hillary Clinton should say
Ahem: The scandal about my email server is a great example of how nobody in the news media or the Republican congress knows how to do any work or cares about doing their jobs. The email system in the state department is a pile of junk – it was worse…
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The right wing “progressive” finance bubble
During the financial crisis, the progressive and left media was dominated by “experts” who told a story that was totally false and dangerously reactionary. The truth, still unknown to most Americans, is that the Federal Reserve Bank and President Obama’s TARP bailouts saved the economy and made money for the…
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The Greek Bailout was another EU bank bailout.
In 2009 Greece owed €250 billion for bonds which it could not pay or even keep up with and €45 billion in other loans . The bonds had been sold in the free market to investors (mostly banks) that believed the higher interest rate on Greek bonds justified the higher risk.…
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Jon Chait’s forced gullibility
I have argued, controversially to some on the left, that it is important to grapple with ideas on their own terms before merely analyzing their motivations. American conservatism is historically intertwined with white racism in such a way that nearly any conservative idea could plausibly be understood as an appeal…
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The Greek debt crisis in short story form.
Once upon a time, a small, poor and poorly run country called Greece borrowed a whole lot of money, most of it from giant banks in Northern Europe, although some also went to banks in Spain. The weaknesses in the Greek economy were well known and the corruption of its…
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Dear Jon Chait: 2+2 is not equal to 5.
Jon Chait wrote: “conservatism is geared toward localism and views national-level government as inherently more oppressive.” Is it true that conservatism is based on this view? The conservative Bush administration doubled the size of the Federal Government, authorized torture, pushed through the vast expansion of Federal police powers in the…
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The Economists you have, not the ones you want
Thomas Sargent won the Nobel Prize in economics for works based on mathematical models which supposedly provide a scientific basis for understanding how real economies work. One widely cited paper on the causes and cures of South American hyperinflation includes near the beginning a claim to have identified two points…
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eccentric-opinion: clawsofpropinquity: If (‘if’) the title to a plot of land was obtained by the driving off or the killing or the enslaving of its inhabitants, no amount of buying and selling will launder that title and transform it into a moral claim; the system as it exists can… Libertarianism…