This is a 40-minute discussion between Zain Raza and Professor Richard Wolff on a wide range of topics, but focusing on the effects of the U.S.‘s retreat from Europe on Germany, in particular.

Prof. Richard Wolff − The Decline of the US Empire & Germany's Economy by AcTVism Munich (YouTube)

At about 35:00,

“Zain Raza: We have seen the emergence of AI like China’s DeepSeek, which you mentioned, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And there’s a major transformation taking place across the global economy. Many industries are being affected. The world economic forum’s “future of jobs” report 2025... [More]”

Danielle BrianThe following 22-minute video is an excellent interview by Lee Fang with Danielle Brian of POGO (Project on Government Oversight) about corruption, waste, and fraud. Whereas you may deem anything the government spends money on that you don’t like or approve of as “waste”, “fraud” has a legal definition. Somewhere in the middle is “corruption”, which is when you’re paying far too much for services that you actually want or need. The major sources of corruption are the Pentagon budget and... [More]

First up is a one-minute video by Slavoj Žižek about how capitalism is a lie.

Slavoj Žižek Explains How Capitalism Tricks Us (YouTube)

“Each of us is now a small capitalist. Let’s say you have €5,000. You can freely decide how to invest them: buy health care, go to a nice holiday, pay special studium. […] What is actually a new form of anxiety—permanent stress—is sold to you as a new form of freedom.”

Next up is a great interview by Ben Norton with Michael Hudson. The discussion is much more wide-ranging than the title of the video... [More]

The article Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by Pam & Russ Martens (Wall Street on Parade) describes how, once again, the treasury secretary comes from the financial sector. Like so many other Democrat-adjacent sources these days, the article’s tone suggests that this is somehow more horrible because the “giant orange baby” nominated him, and Orange Man Bad.

“Scott Bessent: U.S. Treasury SecretaryWhat did Bessent do previously to qualify for this powerful position? He... [More]”

This 13½-minute video taught me quite a few things about tipping in the U.S. It got me thinking about how tipping works in Europe and Switzerland, too.

The Dark Truth About Tipping in America by Evan Edinger (YouTube)

1. The federal minimum wage for tipped workers was legally set at ½ of the federal minimum wage for everyone else in the 1970s.
2. The law was originally configured to keep the federal minimum wage for tipped workers locked to ½ of the federal minimum wage in perpetuity.
3. In the early 1990s, the law was changed to lock in the federal minimum... [More]

This is a six-minute video of Jonathan Pie going on a tear against the true criminals: the so-called ruling class that is making even people at the hearts of empires miserable.

The Corporate Con. by Jonathan Pie (YouTube)

“Most of our public services are now owned by private companies whose main purpose—and, in most cases, only purpose—is to make profit. They don’t work for you or the government or the council. They work for shareholders and nobody else. And it’s a pretty good system, if you own shares in that company.
... [More]”

The interview below is a podcast interview of Mark Blyth by some dude named Chris who sounds like Ira Glass somehow had a child with NPR, then raised it in a box, feeding it only the New York Times for 50 years.[1] Anyway, Chris doesn’t talk a lot because Mark just can’t stop spitting the truth. I only really disagree with Blyth about Biden’s economic accomplishments but otherwise the guy was on absolute fire. Highly recommended. I have, as usual, transcribed the bits I found to be especially... [More]

This is an excellent interview in which Hedges discusses Monbiot’s new book The Invisible Doctrine. As a result of this interview, I read the book and found it likewise excellent.[1]

The Secret History of Neoliberalism (w/ George Monbiot) | The Chris Hedges Report by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

At 05:00

“The three pillars of capitalism—commodified labor, commodified land, and commodified money—all came together simultaneously. And they came together to create this extremely effective and virulent new colonial frontier, which burnt through resources, burnt through human labor, with unprecedented speed,... [More]”

Lina KhanI’ve heard the argument that Lina Khan at the FTC is really good and making good guidelines. Fair enough. She’s not an elected official. She could work for any administration. The argument is, of course, that Trump wouldn’t hire her, so we therefore need to get Biden or Harris back in there, so that she can continue her good work. This is ridiculous. We have to put up with Biden or Harris so we can have a working FTC? That’s the argument?

That’s getting toward the bottom of the barrel of the... [More]

The article Bidenomics and Its Discontents by James Galbraith (Scheer Post) is from April but discusses several structural issues with the economy that persist today and many of which have become even more severe, despite simultaneously being desperately papered over by the song-and-dance of the markets and an administration interested in the economy sinking only after November 5th.

Wages rising; hours sinking

“Today’s typical American working household has several earners, sometimes in multiple jobs. If one earner loses a... [More]”

The article Americans Are Not As Poor As They Think They Are by Thomas Wells (3 Quarks Daily) writes,

“The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. They are objectively some of the luckiest people in world history. On the one hand all this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty is mildly annoying for the rest of the world to have to listen to. On the other hand, it reflects shared delusions about... [More]”

The article Javier Milei Tells World Leaders: ‘The State Is Not the Solution’ by Katarina Hall (Reason) start off with this sentence,

“Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei praised the virtues of free markets and warned political leaders about the dangers of collectivism in a speech at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.”

Talk about red meat for Reason magazine. I’ve been following this magazine for a while and I appreciate some of their content, but man they just can’t resist this bullshit. This obvious... [More]

The article Does Capitalism Beat Charity? by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten) does some decent analysis on the efficacy of the market mechanism for distributing societal benefits versus that of charity.

“[…] it doesn’t seem obvious that Instacart “causes” jobs. Suppose Instacart had never been founded. Then people would spend whatever money they now spend on Instacart on something else (let’s say booze and porn), which would also create jobs (for brewers, bartenders, and porn stars). There’s no particular reason to... [More]”

The article Team Billionaire is Winning by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) writes,

“And, for two of our super-billionaires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, we have Section 230 protection. This means that their Internet platforms are not subject to the same rules on defamation as print and broadcast outlets. Yeah, this is just the market, telling us to give special privileges to online platforms.”

I like me some Dean Baker. I disagree with him occasionally. This is one of those times because I wonder whether he’s not painting with... [More]

I read an article somewhere—I can no longer find the link that inspired this note—that said that you need an app in order to charge your electric car to make sure you pay for the electricity. If you don’t have cell service or wireless, then you can’t charge. The author was somewhere in Tennessee—I believe outside Knoxville, near the Smokies—where there was no reception. He couldn’t charge his vehicle with the standard chargers. The article went on to explain how to use the emergency kit... [More]

BidenomicsThe article Should People be Happy About the Biden Economy? by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) answers its own question with “yes.” I’m not so convinced, as I explain in my responses below. Baker’s analysis and my critique of it is several weeks old at this point, but it’s still applicable.

More recently, Paul Krugman has jumped on the bandwagon, accusing anyone who thinks that the economy sucks—only because it seems to suck for themselves personally—off supporting Putin. Baker doesn’t go that far, but he does swerve a lot... [More]

The following ~10-minute video presents a thesis on why malls in the U.S. are dying out whereas malls in Europe are still going strong.

Why US Malls Are Dying (And Why European Malls Aren't) by Adam Something (YouTube)

1. Purchasing power has increased in Europe, while the U.S. has allowed entire swaths of the country to drop precipitously—e.g., the Rust Belt, The Appalachians, The Rural South, and even large parts of the West Coast.
2. The U.S. absolutely drowned the market in oversupply, with e.g., 10x as much commercial space per capita than Germany. Europe generally has... [More]

DuoLingo is teaching my partner and I something about neoliberal capitalism.

She is in the Diamond League (very prestigious). It treats her like chattel. She has to do sooooo much work to stay in the league. I, on the other hand, am also in the Diamond League, but I have to do hardly any work at all to stay there. Sometimes I do one lesson a day for a couple, three days in a row. No biggie. No demotion. Nobody’s working too hard in my chapter of the Diamond League.

My partner, on the other... [More]

The United States is the absolute king of searching for ways in which you can suck just enough of the enjoyment out of doing something that it creates the most profit without alienating people to the degree that they stop paying for it.

That’s the topic of the article Perfidious Pricing by Michael Bateman (Passing Time), which deals with a practice he says is called Drip Pricing. I suppose it’s what the inventors deem to be a clever way of describing a process whereby, instead of being presented with a single price, the... [More]

The article Robert Reich Is Wrong: ‘Corporate Greed’ Isn’t To Blame for Egg Prices by Joe Lancaster (Reason) lays out all of its information, then comes to the wrong conclusion. Once again, people, revenue != profits. A corporation only very grudgingly declares profits. It must pay taxes on profits. Therefore, it looks for every single possible way to squirrel away profits into different parts of the ledger.

The article is about an over 100% increase in the price of eggs from January to December of 2022. My anecdotal... [More]

White-collar crime that sucks billions from millions of poor people is exactly the kind of violence that our societies tend to ignore. The guy stealing $40 from a 7–11 is where the focus lies. People are trained to care about the latter—increase the police!—and trained to ignore the former. Crime continues to be a huge concern—and there is crime, don’t get me wrong. There were just shots fired in a central parking lot in the small village where my family lives. Weird things are... [More]

The comic Explaining Capitalism to Aliens by Corey Mohler shows a top-hatted capitalist explaining our economy to two, much-taller, blue aliens with tentacles for arms and two extra tentacles extending from their ribcages. Their physiognomy isn’t relevant to the story, but that’s what they look like.

“Alien: “Explain to us: how do you decide how to allocate resources, and who does what work, on Earth?”

“Human: “So you see, on Earth we have a free market, so resources are efficiently allocated to meet the... [More]”

I recently read the article Stop Trying To Create a Zero-Risk Society by Veronique de Rugy (Reason), which included the following infuriating citation.

“Yet, as economist Steve Horowitz recently wrote to me on Facebook, “The reality is that we can never achieve” a zero-risk society, and “the costs of trying to are enormous, in terms of both material resources and human freedom.””

Honestly, just fucking knock it off. Nobody wants a zero-risk society. We just want to maybe not have a high-risk society because all the fucking... [More]

The article ECB to accelerate supply of ultra-cheap money by Nick Beams (WSWS) describes the main reason the U.S.—and the world—economy doesn’t seem to have noticed any downside in the last year and a half, despite the most devastating pandemic in living memory.

“It seems that whatever the state of the economy, the response of central banks is the same: pour more money into the financial system, so that investors and speculators can continue to make vast profits on the basis of ultra-low interest rates.

“When... [More]”

The video below is an interesting and worthwhile financial, political, and COVID analysis that includes both Europe and the U.S.

If There’s No Fear of Inflation, Why is GOP Against More Stimulus? – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth (YouTube)

At 17:54, Rana Foroohar spoke about the difficulty of doing anything big because any of the people with enough free time and energy to actually move the needle on how our society works in any significant way have been conveniently captured in it because they are heavily invested in it. They would have to literally put a decent dent in their (relatively) ample... [More]

The article A Gilead-Remdesivir Fix: The Ten Percent Solution by Dean Baker (Beat the Press) points out that it is absolutely not difficult to fix the so-called problem with remdesivir. It’s a short article, so I’ll just cite it in full, highlighting the most salient bits for those who need a tl;dr for a four-paragraph article.

“The Washington Post had an excellent piece documenting how the government put up most of the money for developing remdesivir, a drug that now offers the hope of being the first effective treatment... [More]”

The interactive side-scroller Wealth shown to scale by Matt Korostoff is an article that shows just how much money the 400 richest Americans (the .0001%) have—and what could be done with a relatively small fraction of it (e.g. use 6% to “refund all taxes for households earning under $80,000”).

Pro tip: Show the source of the page to read it without all of the scrolling.

You scroll horizontally along a nearly endlessly long page that discusses excessive wealth and the good it could do were it to be distributed.... [More]

I sometimes wonder what my younger self would think of what he’s become. I like to think that I’ve avoided a disappointed reaction, but it’s hard to say because I’ve always been a bit “judgey”. At the very least, there are several things I couldn’t have predicted. One is that I actually have a list of favorite economists. 20-year-old me couldn’t have imagined that in a million years.

In no particular order,

Dean Baker

He’s the founder of CEPR, the voice of sanity and national treasure of... [More]

The article How to Survive End Times by Ted Rall (CounterPunch) discusses what kind of people are needed once society collapses or changes significantly, based on experience in Afghanistan.

“You make yourself useful in a failed state exactly the opposite of how you do in ours. In the United States in 2020, it pays to have excellent skills in one or two areas, to be the best at what you do in your specialty. Not in Afghanistan in 2000. Dangerous places work best for people who are renaissance men and women, those with a... [More]”

The article Mark Zuckerberg is a Rich Jerk by Dean Baker (Beat the Press) takes issue with the media’s love affair with plumbing the depths of billionaires’ minds.[1]

“It is bizarre that so many people look to the country’s billionaires to tell us how the world should be constructed or think that these people have any great insight into such matters. Being a billionaire means that you were successful at getting very rich. There is no reason to believe that billionaires have any more insight into major policy issues than... [More]”