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A short political glossary
Some rules help with a simple guide that can provide rigorous analysis of politics
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Saint Bernie and that horrible woman: why the “left” is so reactionary.
On the eve of the fateful 2016 Presidential election, in a pre-election “explainer”, Dissent magazine told its readers a completely false story that St. Bernie Sanders was bringing us socialism, whether we deserved it or not, but evil neoliberal Hillary Clinton was a fanatical devotee of the harshest form of…
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“Neoliberal” is a dishonest word
“Neoliberal” was coined by Milton Friedman in the 1950s as a friendly seeming marketing rebrand for the same old conservative economics policies. What Friedman and his colleagues really meant was that working people needed to be made to suffer to accept lower living standards through a rerun of conservative economic…
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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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Inventing the minimal state
Economists, even liberal economists, generally consider the United Kingdom in the 1820s to be the exemplar of the minimal state which is a strange way to view a gigantic empire that ruled half the world thanks to a dominating military. In reality, the Imperial State was tyrannical and huge, its…
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The Jim Crow iceberg and the end of Bilbo populism.
There is popular but catastrophically false “left/progressive” narrative of post WWII history in the US that ignores or minimizes the role of racism and race privilege. The New Deal fell apart in the 1940s when Jim Crow Democrats in Congress crossed the aisle to work in common cause with right…
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The Celebrity Apprentice Left and health care
Democrats have been attempting to pass universal national health in the USA since the Truman administration proposed national health insurance and other reforms in 1945. “Under the plan I suggest, our people would continue to get medical and hospital services just as they do now — on the basis of…
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Agency, neoliberalism, and anti-neoliberalism.
What caused US manufacturing to off-shore and the white working class to abandon the Democrats? During the 1970s a massive change in technology particularly communications and transport (like container shipping) made it easier to manage production at a distance and move goods by sea. More importantly, economic advances in India…
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How the New York Times helps elect Republicans
[from 2016] The NYTimes will, most likely, endorse the Democratic nominee for President but their News Desk is and has always been working full time to elect the Republican mostly by reinforcing the Republican brand. Most people do not vote based on issues papers, but on their impressions of the…
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Economics and the mathematics of the Koch brothers.
Robert Lucas won the Nobel Prize for Economics and is widely cited as an authority. One of his more important papers from the 1990s discuses tax policy and uses a mathematical model of the economy to supposedly show that taxing capital gains is a bad idea. The mathematical model is…
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Economics on the slant
[ This essay was first published at the People’s View Feb 2011 and has some notes as updates]. Most of us think of economic theories as lining up from left to right, from communism to free-marketism, but there is a whole other school of economics that is on a slant…
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José and Pharaoh in Austin
José’s brothers were jealous of him because he learned and studied while they just drank beer and hung out all day and he was the favorite of his hard working parents. So the brothers sold José to narcotraficantes who made him carry drugs up into Egypt Tejas, where he was…
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Robert Reich’s paper wizard economics
During the worst of the financial crisis when the Obama administration was rescuing the auto companies and the UAW in the teeth of bitter Republican opposition, Robert Reich, as usual, was there to offer an assist to the Republicans: “ The answer is not to bail out GM. It is…
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Rapture of the Republicans
In my dream, the dead flew up from their graves to the Judgment of Republicans and the Angel of Mercy put out a hand and cradled them against the pull of the void and the weight of their sins. The Judging Angel asked: You have heard “So God created the…
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What passes for thinking on the right (and at NYPD)
There is a sad web site for current and former New York City cops called “Thee Rant”, where you can learn quickly why NYC has such a huge yearly bill for lawsuits against the police from the angry, resentful, entitled, and most of all stupid material posted. Recently some member…
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Adolf Reed is yelling at clouds
Adolf Reed specializes in sharp attacks on arguments nobody has made. Even Larry Summers has been calling wealth inequality a danger to the social fabric for at least 20 years, but Professor Reed denounces: a contention that the lesson from Trump’s victory is that it’s not practical, or moral (the…
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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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