Here is a quote from a letter from last summer by 45 volunteer doctors and nurses who went to help in Gaza.
Here are some quotes by Israeli leaders, officials and public figures about the war in Gaza.
Which side are you on? Those who try to save lives or those who call for more killing?
LINKS
The Little Things That Kill Lots of People by Indrajit Samarajiva for indi.ca.
Israel Is Winning the Genocide and Losing the War by Indrajit Samarajiva for indi.ca.
Dead children in Gaza. Image via @AlnaouqA on X.
Last July, a group of 45 American physicians and nurses who’d volunteered to help in Gaza hospitals sent a letter to President Biden about the horrors they’d witnessed.
Two of the physicians, Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, separately wrote a long article about it.
The horrors they described are shocking to any person of normal human feeling and also against international law. But I’m going to focus only two things: Palestinian children with gunshot wounds to the head, and Palestinian physicians who’d been subjected to traumatic torture.
First, a quote from the group letter to Biden:
We urge you to realize that epidemics are raging in Gaza. Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas with no running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking. I
It is virtually guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five. We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months. Most of them will be young children.
Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter treated children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.
Now a quote by Perlmutter and Sidhwa:
While touring the hospital we walked through one of the ICUs and found multiple preteens admitted with gunshot wounds to the head. One might argue that a child could have been injured unintentionally in an explosion, or perhaps even forgotten when Israel invaded a children’s hospital and reportedly left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit.
Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter.
We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die.
Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.
The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”
A large percentage of the population of Gaza are children, so it is unsurprising that a lot of children would be among those killed by Israeli missile strikes, bombings and artillery strikes. Shooting young children in the head is a new level of atrocity. What purpose could it serve except to decimate the population of Gaza?
The Presidential debate format, going back to the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, is not designed to inform the voters in the best way.
Having reporters ask questions and expecting the candidates to immediately respond within a couple of minutes only tests the candidates’ abilities to think on their feet and remember talking points.
What I would like to see is an actual debate, with an impartial moderator. Candidates could speak for 20 minutes in turn on a particular topic, such as foreign policy, get 10 minutes each for rebuttal and then make brief closing statements.
But in the debates of old – Bush vs. Gore, Reagan vs. Carter – the candidates at least responded to questions and refrained from personal attacks, unlike on Tuesday. On the other hand, compared to the Biden vs. Trump back in June, the recent debate was relatively coherent and did provide some snippets of information.
I give Donald Trump credit for pointing out the danger of nuclear war, even though his record on this issue is poor.
During his administration, he withdrew the United States from two key agreements to protect against the threat of nuclear war – the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. He also withdrew from the agreement under which Iran agreed to refrain from uranium enrichment above a certain limit.
But Joe Biden did not restore any of these agreements and Kamala Harris seems oblivious to this danger. Instead, she raised the discredited claims that Trump and Vladimir Putin are working together. Neither candidate is anti-war, but, based on the debate, Harris is more consistently pro-war than Trump.
I’m hearing that the 2024 presidential election will be the most consequential one in American history. I don’t see it.
I think the choice in 2024, as in 2016 and 2020, will be between two persons committed to continuing the wars and protecting the status quo. I won’t be surprised if 2028 is the same.
As for “our democracy,” one party, the Republicans, tries to rig the elections by suppressing and disqualifying voters and another, the Democrats, that tries to rig the elections by disqualifying candidates and censorship of social media.
Last night’s debate did not change my mind. The two candidates and also the two moderators were detached from reality as I understand it.
In this post, I will give my thoughts on what the debates showed about the views of the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and then my thoughts on their possible effect on the outcome of the election.
On questions of war and peace, Harris is even more of a militarist than Trump. She said she wants a military that is “lethal,” which means murderous, rather than “strong” or “efficient.”
Donald Trump was marginally better on the Ukraine issue because he said he would negotiate an end to the conflict while Kamala Harris ridiculed him as a weakling.
Trump’s record shows that he is not a master negotiator, to say the least, but the larger problem with Trump’s position, as with the 1968 opponents of the Vietnam intervention, is that he says and they said the issue is negotiation when the real issue is admitting defeat.
Harris, on the other hand, hopes to end the Gaza massacre through negotiation, while continuing to provide unrestricted military aid to one side, Israel.
To negotiate with someone, you have to be able to offer them something or threaten them with something. Harris and Joe Biden cannot give Israel or threaten Hamas anything more than it is already doing. But Trump is even more belligerent than they are.
On economic policy, Harris proposes to help everyday Americans through relief for certain categories of taxpayers. The claim that the relief will be “up to” certain amounts is revealing. It means that most taxpayers won’t get that amount. Poor people, who don’t pay significant taxes, won’t get anything.
Trump promises to help everyday Americans by raising tariffs on imports and deporting unauthorized immigrants. Contrary to what he said, tariffs raise prices on imported goods and thereby increase the cost of living. This may or may not be offset eventually by benefit to domestic industry by protection from foreign competition.
His proposed policy on immigration has more or less been copied by the Biden administration. The current administration now stops asylum seekers before they enter the U.S. and intends to beef up controls along the Southern border. What more would Trump do that has any practical effect?
Well, the makers of this documentary spell Rothschilds wrong and some of the numbers may not be quite right. It’s hard to get information about powerful people who want to keep it secret. But the video contains a lot of astonishing detail that was new to me and may be new to you. There’s a scale of wealth in which the rich, figuratively speaking, live not just in a different world, but a different universe, from me and probably from you. This is a rare look into that world.
The share of U.S. wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent peaked last year.
Source: Visualizing Wealth Distribution in America (1990-2023) by Marcus Lu and Miranda Smith for Visual Capitalist.
Data Source: Forbes 2024 World Billionaires List by Rob LaFranco, Grace Chung and Chase Peterson-Withorn.
Source: The Richest People in the World in 2024 by Niccola Conte and Bruno Vinditti for Visual Capitalist.
In any given time period, some billionaires do become less wealthy. But they’re not typical.
Jeffrey Sachs
Jeffrey Sachs was a Harvard economic adviser to Russia right after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
He has said for years, and repeated in an article written a few days ago, that the U.S. government never intended to help Russia get back on its feet. It always intended to keep Russia down and, contrary to its promises, extend NATO to include Ukraine.
Matt Taibbi, lived in Russia at the time, published and commented on Sachs’ article on his Substack. Ryan Grim also published it.
I think this information is very important. I quote highlights from Taibbi’s article and then provide links to Jeffrey Sachs’ article and Taibbi’s full article. Taibbi wrote:
In Moscow on the morning of July 24th, 1993, I fixed a cup of tea, rubbed the hangover out of my eyes, and walked out to look for breakfast. I was living then above the Metro station at VDNKh, the ex-Soviet equivalent maybe of New York’s World’s Fair grounds, and saw right away something was wrong. Old women on the street were bawling, a group of men was shouting at a beat cop, and sidewalks were full of people walking in a daze, as if a neutron bomb had gone off.
The government of Boris Yeltsin had decreed it was withdrawing all old rubles from circulation. Russians who’d stuffed rubles in mattresses for decades would be wiped out, unless they could fight through huge bank lines to exchange bills. Worse, the maximum amount was 35,000 rubles, or roughly $30-$35, about 60 percent of a Russian’s average monthly salary of 58,700 rubles. Those who exchanged the full 35,000 had passports stamped barring all future exchanges. I’ll never forget seeing a burly woman yelling, to no one in particular: “Vori, blyad!” (“Fucking thieves!”).
Scenes in Russia after 1993 currency devaluation
Sachs describes repeated attempts to convince U.S. policymakers to make a sincere effort to bring Russia into the fold as a democratic partner. His idea, both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was a Marshall Plan-style stabilization effort that would have included temporary debt freezes and targeted investment to keep the country afloat during its transition.
Why not? They’d supported them in Poland, after all, and they’d worked there. “I thought, ‘It’s the same,’” he recalled today on Breaking Points, laughing. “Just multiply it by four.’”
However, ideas U.S. and European leaders supported for Poland were rejected for Russia. In this portion of his essay, Sachs describes what happened after he advised Gaidar to ask the G7 for debt relief:
In November 1991, Gaidar met with the G7 Deputies (the deputy finance ministers of the G7 countries) and requested a standstill on debt servicing. This request was flatly denied. To the contrary, Gaidar was told that unless Russia continued to service every last dollar as it came due, emergency food aid on the high seas heading to Russia would be immediately turned around and sent back to the home ports. I met with an ashen-faced Gaidar immediately after the G7 Deputies meeting.
After Yeltsin was in office in what was now democratic Russia, Sachs thought for sure authorities would change their minds. No go. Here, he describes meeting with former George H.W. Bush Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger after proposing his “Marshall Plan” on TV:
In early 1992… I was on air with acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. After the show, he asked me to ride with him… Our conversation was the following. “Jeffrey, please let me explain to you that your request for large-scale aid is not going to happen… Do you want to know why? Do you know what this year is?”
“1992,” I answered.
“Do you know that this means?”
“An election year?” I replied.
“Yes, this is an election year. It’s not going to happen.”
Matt Bivens, M.D., an emergency room doctor and blogger, has published Part 3 of his series on the opioid crisis.
This one is about how the Joint Commission on accrediting health care organizations decreed that every hospital patient be asked about their level of pain, on a scale of 1 to 10, whether they felt pain or not, and be given medication for their pain.
What is the implication of being repeatedly asked, on a schedule, to focus all attention upon your pain?
Imagine being asked out of nowhere to “rate your headache.” Surprised, you say, “Well, I don’t have a headache!” A little later, the nurse comes back, because it’s time to talk again about your headache. Do you think you might eventually feel a little headache coming on? If so, the good news is that we have a for-profit medication for that.
Never mind. The Joint Commission went further, and arbitrarily declared that the symptom known as “pain” was now a vital sign. It was to be checked regularly, right alongside the actual vital signs of blood pressure, respiratory rate, heart rate and temperature.
The result of this policy was a rise in the demand for pain prescriptions, a fear on the part of doctors of refusing to prescribe and a surge in opioid addiction.
Over the years, as the overdose cases poured in and the death toll soared, the Joint Commission began to have second thoughts. The “right to pain relief” posters came down. Everyone tried to pretend that the “pain is a vital sign” campaign had never happened. … …
[Emergency Department] doctors began to push back, and to criticize colleagues who’d negotiate with terrorists. In some places, new posters went up on the walls, declaring this was an “Oxy-Free ED” — warning patients up front not to expect to leave with an opioid prescription. (My physician group in Massachusetts tried to put such posters up in 2015, but the lawyers said we couldn’t.)
Either way, the new hard line — don’t expect to leave with an opioid prescription unless your shattered femur was sticking out of your thigh — corresponded with a relatively rapid disappearance of the manipulative, demanding opioid-seeker.
They mostly stopped coming. At this same time, OxyContin® was reformulated to make it harder to grind up and inject; and CDC reports a second wave of the Opioid Crisis kicked off with the rise of heroin. Just as threatened, they all did go buy heroin instead.
LINKS
Part 1. Truest Crime: a deep dive into the sociopathy of the opioid crisis by Matt Bivens.
Part 2. The Conspiracy to Game the Medical Literature by Matt Bivens.
Part 3. The Conspiracy Widens by Matt Bivens.
Honest Government Ads are produced by thejuicemedia in Australia.
The chart is from The Economist. Here is an excerpt from that article.
Although the reversal of the direction of travel is striking, a young black American born in 1992 to poor parents was still four percentage points more likely to remain in poverty than a poor white peer, down from a 15 percentage-point gap for those born in 1978.
And while the near doubling in rates of mortality among young, lower-income white Americans is deeply alarming, mortality rates for their black counterparts have increased too, and they are still (a bit) more likely to die young. …
While there has been a reshuffling of opportunities for Americans trying to escape the lowest rung, there has been no progress at all for routes into the upper class.
For the vast majority of poor black children, who continue to have a 3 percent chance of rising from the bottom to the top quintile, and poor white children, whose chances have fallen from 14 percent to 12 percent, that door remains firmly shut.
The misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Chips and Science Act were President Joe Biden’s $400 billion plan to make American manufacturing great again. Recently the Financial Times of London published an article about difficulties in launching the plan.
Difficulties are to be expected in any new project. It took decades of bad economic policy to hollow out American manufacturing capability and to de-skill the American work force. It may take decades to bring it back. It won’t be easy.
But how is the plan coming so far? Here are some highlights of the FT article.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act together offer more than $400 billion in tax credits, grants, and loans to revitalize the country’s industrial heartlands and rival Beijing on the technologies required to reduce the emissions behind climate change and electrify the world’s largest economy.The two laws have catalyzed manufacturing investment, spurring a fierce contest between states to attract corporations eager to build factories and take advantage of the often uncapped federal support. U.S. Census data shows that spending on construction for manufacturing sits at record highs, and the FT estimates that large-scale manufacturing commitments surpassed $225bn in the first year.But as the two-year anniversary arrives for the legislation, many of these factories face roadblocks linked to deteriorating market conditions, overproduction in China, and a lack of policy certainty in a high stakes election year. [snip]A Financial Times investigation revealed that 40 per cent of manufacturing investments of at least $100 million announced in the first year following the passage of the two laws face delays or have been paused indefinitely. Out of 114 large projects tracked by the FT worth a combined $227.9 billion, some $84 billion are delayed.The setbacks raise questions about whether the American manufacturing renaissance set out by Biden can be delivered as promised. They also underscore how difficult it will be, both practically and politically, to reconfigure America’s economy to compete in the industries set to dominate the 21st century. … …The question now is whether these delays are simply a hiccup to be expected in such a broad recalibration of industrial policy, or evidence that the process will take longer than anticipated to come to fruition, putting its overall success at risk through multiple economic and political cycles. … …When he came to power Biden vowed to revitalize the sector and compete with China on advanced technologies. “Where is it written that America can’t lead the world once again in manufacturing? I don’t know where that’s written, and we’re proving it can,” he said in December 2022.The Biden administration describes its model for the industrial transformation of the US as “government enabled, private sector-led.”While IRA and Chips Act incentives work to direct investment into specific sectors, companies often cannot access funding until they achieve certain milestones for production. Many have to secure their own financing through traditional capital markets and deal with structural hurdles like slow permitting and a tight labor market. … …
Innocent civilian bystanders were killed by Hamas raiders on Oct. 7, 2023, but it is hard to remember this, considering the lies that supporters of Israel have told and the scope of the atrocities committed by the Israeli government since then.
LINKS
German envoy admits spreading lies about Oct. 7 mass rapes by for the Electronic Intifada.
Will Rogers was a beloved American character in the early 20th century – a vaudeville performer, actor, standup comedian and homespun philosopher. But he also was famous for his technique with the lasso, as we see.
Chart: the great mystery of US foreign policy has finally been solved. Quickly, what is it that unites Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Russia, and Libya in the minds of US foreign policy officials?
Well, the officials, most of whom are currently engaged in a racist genocide in Palestine, would say that these nations are all ‘authoritarian.’
With billionaire donors and the CIA currently ‘overseeing’ American elections, the contrast that gave the fear of fascism its punch is looking more like a merging of interests.
Source: worldometers.info and Ron Urie. More excerpts from Ron Urie below:
For 15 years, under three administrations, the cost of living, has gone up.
The cost of living is different from the Consumer Price Index, which includes luxuries as well as necessities.
Both are different from economists’ definition of inflation, which has to do with the money supply and not with price increases due of scarcity or business monopoly.
I don’t say that Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Barack Obama are individually to blame for the rise, but I do say that none of them had an answer and I also say that, to the extent they denied the problem, they were lying or willfully ignorant.
As for myself, I don’t know enough to say that monopoly pricing is the only explanation or main explanation for the rising cost of living, but I do know enough to say that monopoly pricing exists.
Source: Never Mind Bogus Measures of Inflation—Purchasing Power Is What Counts and It’s Decaying by Charles Hugh Smith for Of Two Minds.
Dem nominee Humphrey, right, and running mate Ed Muskie at 1968 DNC
In 1968, the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago. The incumbent Democratic president had decided not to run for re-election, and the Democrats nominated the sitting vice-president, who had not won any votes in a primary. The VP campaigned on a “politics of joy.”
The U.S. was losing a proxy war in a distant land, and the President, rather than accept the loss, had decided to escalate and commit the full force of American power to win. The convention hall was surrounded by police to keep anti-war protestors out.
Critics of the military intervention were accused of serving the interests of a foreign power, and also of making a Republican victory possible. Also, an avowed white nationalist was running for president.
As somebody said, history doesn’t repeat, but it sometimes rhymes.
I finally got around to perusing the Joe Biden impeachment report, which was submitted to the House of Representatives on Monday.
It presents strong circumstantial evidence of influence peddling, money laundering, conflicts of interest and obstruction of justice by the President, his family and his family.
But evidently I am one of a very, very few who thinks so. The news media unanimously treated the release as much ado about very little. I have not come across any commentary at all from any source—right, left, center or off-the-spectrum.
The main charges:
- Joe Biden, Biden family members and their associates received $27 million from foreign individuals and “entities,” including thousands from the Chinese government, much of which was channeled to Biden through shell companies and alleged personal loans.
- His son, Hunter Biden, received millions of dollars in business dealings in Ukraine, China, Romania and Kazakhstan, in return for his father’s influence on their behalf. Much of this flowed back to the Biden family and Joe Biden himself through shell companies.
- The Biden family received more than $8 million in personal loans from Democratic benefactors, none of which was paid back or intended to be paid back.
- Biden obstructed the corruption investigation and also protected his son Hunter from prosecution on criminal charges.
The release was timed to coincide with the opening of the Democratic National Convention. I don’t think this was by chance. I think it is obvious that the Republican majority in the House planned it this way.
Little did they expect that Biden would have stepped aside as a candidate for re-election and the political impact would next to nil. But if he had run, this would have been a big blow to his campaign. I suspect, although I can’t prove, that this was an important reason for Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race.
I am not a constitutional lawyer, and I don’t claim to know whether there is a legal case for a vote of impeachment. I do know that “bribery” is specified by the Constitution as one of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that justify impeachment.
Source: RTE News.
Yesterday Moscow was bombarded with nearly a dozen drones – the biggest, although not the first, Ukrainian attack on Russia’s capital city. These excerpts from an Axios news service report tell the story.
Driving the news: The drone attack on Moscow was part of a broader series of overnight strikes on Russian soil.
The other side: Russia launched its own volley of aerial strikes against Ukraine overnight. The Ukrainian Air Force said in a Telegram post Wednesday that it had destroyed 50 out of 69 Russian drones launched by Moscow overnight.
Flashback: This isn’t the first time the Russian capital has been targeted since the start of the war, though attacks on Moscow remain rare.
There also are terrorist attacks on Russians that Russians blame on Ukraine.
The increasing tempo of attacks on Russia proper is a dangerous escalation in the Ukraine conflict, increasing the likelihood of a general European war.
You may say that since Russia has invaded Ukraine, there is nothing wrong or strange about Ukraine taking the war to Russia. If the war was merely a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with the USA and its NATO allies standing on the sidelines, I would agree.
But the USA and its allies are active participants in the war. They supply intelligence, targeting information and instruction on how to use the advanced weapons they have given Ukraine. They cannot pretend to be bystanders.
Russians reported hearing radio transmissions in English, French and Polish by Ukrainian forces in Kursk.
The U.S. government increasingly acts as if it was in a declared war against Russia, and so does Russia against the USA, in everything but open battle between their countries’ uniformed troops. This is very dangerous.
Russia so far as not used its full force against Ukraine. It is slowly grinding down Ukraine’s electrical and railroad grids, in hopes of inducing the Ukrainian government to surrender.
It could destroy the electricity and transport system all at once, if it chose. It could flatten Kiev. None of this would require nuclear weapons.
It has chosen not to do so because complete destruction of Ukraine is not in Russia’s interest. The best outcome for Russia is a belt of neutral countries on its borders and withdrawal of all weapons that could hit Russia without weapons, not a region of chaos.
The purpose of these attacks is to goad Russia into retaliation that would provide justification for a wider war.
There was a time when cars with electric motors competed with cars with internal combustion engines. At one time, the electric car was sold as a women’s vehicle, because of its comparative ease of use (prior to the electric starter) and limited range (women supposedly not needing to go as far as men did.)
Would the world be better off if the automobile industry had been based on the electric motor rather than the internal combustion engine? What do you think?
Hat tip to Adam Tooze’s Chartbook.
The Paradoxical Commandments People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway. |
I find this surprising. When I was a young fellow in the 1950s, teetotalers were as rare as non-smokers.
ANTI-SYSTEM POLITICS: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies by Jonathan Hopkin (2020)
A specter is haunting rich white capitalist democracies – the specter of populism.
Political elites in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union say democracy itself is threatened by popular political movements – radical nationalists on the right and radical progressives and socialists on the left.
These two kinds of movements are opposites in many ways, but they agree that their countries’ political and economic systems are rigged against the common people by powerful elites, who should be overthrown.
They also agree in rejecting globalism – an international order set up to give business free rein and protect corporations from nationalist or socialist governments.
Jonathan Hopkin’s Anti-System Politics is a big-picture look at this, with a focus on the USA, the UK, Greece, Spain and Italy. These are the countries in which anti-system politics (a term he prefers to populism) were strongest in the late 2010s because, according to him, their governments did the least to shield them from the impact of the Great Recession of 2008.
Here is Hopkin’s account of how and why of anti-system politics arose.
The rich white democracies enjoyed unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in the three decades from 1945 to 1975. Economies produced enough to enable corporations to be profitable and governments to provide good public services and a strong public safety net.
Then growth slowed down. Ronald Reagan in the USA, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and conservatives in other countries said they could revive economic growth by what came to be called neoliberalism.
This was a combination of deregulation of business, cutbacks in public welfare and government services and lower taxes for corporations and the rich.
These policies were largely copied by Bill Clinton in the USA, Tony Blair in the UK, Gerhard Schroeder in Germany and other proponents of a supposed “third way” movement between left and right.
This created what Hopkin called a political policy cartel. There was no alternative – at least not within the existing party system.
For a time, neoliberalism seemed to stimulate stagnant economies, Hopkin wrote. But it created a widening gap between economic winners and losers, and, over time, the losers came to outnumber the winners.
An illusion of prosperity was created by a poorly-regulated financial system. Stock prices rose beyond any objective measure of their worth. Government debt and consumer debt was allowed to pile up beyond any possibility it could be repaid.
All this came crashing down in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the worst economic crash since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
“Inconceivable sums of money were mobilized to bail out banks and insolvent governments, while ordinary citizens were asked to pay increasing taxes on their stagnant or falling wages, all while government spending was being cut,” Hopkin wrote.
“It would have been surprising if there had not been a political backlash, but, even so, most politicians, opinion leaders and academics contrived to be surprised by it.”
People in northern European countries with strong social safety nets weathered the storm best, he wrote, although the backlash occurred to some extent in all the rich white capitalist democracies.
The ones that fared worst were the USA and UK, with their weak social safety nets, and Greece, Spain and Italy, indebted southern European countries subject to the austerity measures of the European Union.
Over three administrations – Obama, Trump and Biden – the United States has quietly risen to the position of the world’s top oil and gas producer. That’s good news for US Americans, while it lasts. The chart is from Adam Tooze’s Chartbook blog. (NGL stands for liquified natural gas.)
Phil Ebersole's Blog 