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Breaking news: Donald Trump is a fucking monster.
Since 2000:
The share of Switzerland's economy from manufacturing has stayed at 18%.
The US has gone from 15% to 10%
The UK has gone from 13% to 8%.
Amazing that rich, advanced services economies like Singapore (20%) and Switzerland have such high GDP shares in manufacturing
"Ukraine offers NATO the greatest deal ever presented in military history: It is singlehandedly destroying the alliance’s greatest rival at the cost of no NATO lives."
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This piece by James Emanuel Shapiro is really important and I hope folks give it some thought. Basically: the business landscape for indie films has totally collapsed—thanks to the closing theatrical window, the collapse of transactional business (both in terms of VOD and physical media sales), and decreasing prices for streaming sales—a…
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I’m absorbing that news conference after meeting our deadline. I wish I knew what to say. Embarrassed for Zelensky who misread the room. Ashamed that my president and vice president berated a man who has endured three years of brutal attack by a much larger and more powerful nation.
But it was a clear window into the worldview of Trump and Vance: Putin has been victimized by leftist Europeans and neocons. Zelensky is an ungrateful war-monger who is lucky we haven’t already thrown him to the wolves. But we will soon.
Vance is "a persistent ethnic demagogue. He associates immigrants with separatism, crime, and disease. He knows that many Americans don’t like the languages and customs these people bring, and he’s happy to exploit that friction."
"He’s also selective and opportunistic," as his latest tweet shows. "While castigating Ukrainian Americans wh…
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Sometimes, I honestly wonder how Lindsey Graham’s face isn’t black and blue — from Trump’s balls constantly slapping him in the chin. Here’s hoping the ghost of John McCain tells his ex-little-buddy to go to hell. But of course, Lindsey Graham is already in a hell of his own making. The one in which he has to be the gold-plated phony that is himself.
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"The situation facing Democrats is different from the first Trump administration, in which the grassroots was mostly in harmony with elected leadership." A common enemy is not enough.
Today's Morning Shots from , , and :
RIP Gene Hackman. I mention about six or seven great movies in this obit and I could've written probably two entirely different obit focused on twelve entirely different movies. (I didn't even mention THE CONVERSATION or HOOSIERS!) His oeuvre was amazing and extensive.
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Another article from a former YouTuber talking about the grind of making YouTube videos and losing money in the process. Don’t become a YouTuber, kids!
Hey, Brett! Something that I have appreciated about your work for a long time is your pointing out of how we confuse outcomes (of systems, of ways of thinking) for causes, as in the case here with your point about the way that "traits like heightened egotism and selfishness are outcomes of that society, not causes of it. In reality, economists were simply noticing an aspect of human nature that starts to bloom when people find themselves totally immersed in - and dependent on - the insecure and fluid flux of a market vortex."
Your mention of the different "Homo"s here reminds me of my frustration people who support universal healthcare who think that powerful people's opposition to universal healthcare is about a fear of having to pay more taxes and how they (these universal healthcare advocates in question) are only reflecting Homo Economicus back onto rich people, when they should see Homo Dominandi in them. As I often say, opposition to increased taxes has nothing to do with my powerful people oppose universal healthcare, but it's a convenient figleaf, and we should stop supplying that figleaf!
Your paragraph about your anecdote about working in the financial sector and the paragraph preceding it makes me think of the folly of liberal and progressive politicians and pundits using "taxpayer" and tax-to-spend thinking when discussing and debating government budgets. Here in the USA, so many public services are funded via taxation at the state and local level, and a big part of my project is explaining why that it is bad, why we should stop treating that arrangement as if it is somehow a law of physics, or something, as it validates "government should be run like a business" thinking, because it projects Homo Economicus onto the public good, which is poison! Here in Louisiana, there are Democratic Party politicians and pundits who speak about what is good for "taxpayers". No wonder we get the terrible outcomes that we do get!
"What’s important, though, is that those caring, playful, ecological parts of themselves struggle to express themselves in the market setting, and are pushed to the periphery in that context.
This has ideological implications, because Homo Economicus, as a central archetype in the system, also becomes a kind of Ideal that’s deployed by elites to justify and describe why they do the things they do."
That right there helps explain both why "taxpayer" identity and thinking is just Homo Economicus projected onto the government and why resisting that has been so difficult!
But resist it we must! The Public Money Framework, the Credit Theory Of Money, is how we can break out of that trap.
Thanks, again, for all of your great work.
