davel

European Court of Human Rights press release

Bullets:

• Western media outlets, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley are belatedly coming to the same conclusion: years of falling asset prices and cost of living has made China the most competitive economy in the world.

• Our top government officials, industry leaders, and columnists were predicting a collapse in China, because they completely misunderstood the long-term policy implications of falling costs across a modern economy.

• China was the only major economy to see long-term deflation in recent years, and the costs of housing, commercial rent, food, electricity, travel, and education were pushed lower because of soaring industrial productivity and efficiency gains.

• Now China is reaping the benefits of building a ruthlessly cost-competitive economy that dominates in most areas of manufacturing, raw materials sourcing, high technology, logistics, education, and health.

• Caitlin Johnstone: Thoughts On The Trump Team's Signal Chat About Bombing Yemen
• Aaron Maté: Uproar focuses on Trump team's Signal mishap, not bombing Yemen for Israel
• Sam Husseini: Yemen: Is the Scandal the Leak or the Slaughter? [NSFL images]

“The left and right take the same reality-based view of the world but respond to it in different moral terms. Liberals, on the other hand, live in an alternate universe – of pure make-believe”

Warren Mosler, The Founder of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), comes on 1Dime Radio to talk about MMT, what Elon Musk's DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) gets wrong, Trump's tariffs, inflation, and an alternative for a better tax system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Mosler

Relevant 1Dime playlist: Understanding Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

Yesterday Google bought Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz for $32 billion.

The acquisition will mark the single largest transfer of former Israeli spies into an American company. This is because Wiz is run and staffed by dozens of ex Unit 8200 members, the specialist cyber-spying arm of the IDF.

Unit 8200 wrote the programming and designed the algorithms that automated the genocide of Gaza and was also responsible for the pager attack in Lebanon. Now the men and women who helped design the architecture of apartheid are being swallowed by the US tech-surveillance complex. The identity of the Wiz founders, all former Unit 8200, is fairly well-documented (by Israeli media at least). Less well-documented is the fact that a huge chunk of the Wiz workforce, from office managers, to software engineers to product analysts, are also former Unit 8200. Following my investigation earlier this year into the former Unit 8200 members working in key AI positions for tech companies, I have identified nearly fifty Wiz employees as being ex Unit 8200 operatives.

It’s also worth noting that the Wiz deal represents a huge tax coup for Israel. It will bring around $5 billion dollars in revenue for the war economy, or around 0.6% of Israel’s entire GDP. Zionists have already expressed the benefits in terms of the war planes and missiles it will pay for to conduct genocide.

The valuation is curious, a huge 64x multiple of Wiz’s most recent annual sales. As someone noted, you could buy Delta Airlines or Brazil’s oil company Petrobras for this money and have change left over. The overpriced valuation is likely as much about politics as economics. Google is heavily invested in Israel. It opened offices there nearly 20 years ago, has bought a number of Israeli start-up tech companies in recent years, and former CEO Eric Schmidt has cosied up to Netanyahu on numerous occasions over the years. All the key figures at Google and its mother company, Alphabet, are proud Zionists. From Schmidt to current CEO Sundar Pichai to founder Sergey Brin to Anat Ashkenazi, the chief financial officer of Alphabet. At a time when Israel’s economy is faltering, the country is experiencing an outflow of people, the IDF can’t win in Gaza and Netanyahu is in deep trouble, the Wiz deal provides a much needed tonic. It helps paper over the economic and political cracks in the country and acts as a vote of confidence in Israel’s early-stage technology sector, the only sector of the Israeli economy that produces anything of note.

Without the Unit 8200-to-tech-startup pipeline, Israel’s economy would be screwed.

The Wiz deal then looks like a favour from Google to Netanyahu. It keeps a critical business sector for Israel ticking over and provides a reassuring sense of business-as-usual in a blood-soaked land.

Interactive map

Near the start of this episode, Yeva Nersisyan talks with Steve about leftist economists who are still wedded to the belief that government spending relies on taxpayer money. She says if an academic on the left uses the ‘taxpayer dollar’ framing, then you cannot be surprised when the right uses it too – to say they’re saving taxpayer money, cutting wastefulness, cutting inefficiency. It’s why being consistent is so important. If one side can use it, the other side can too.

“It leads to the Elon Musks of the world using this taxpayer money trope to basically take a sledgehammer or a chainsaw to the public sector.”

Yeva and Steve revisit some basics of MMT, including the understanding that a government is not like a household.

Our own spending doesn’t really affect our own income. We’ll still get our wages, we will still have that, and then we will continue consuming, but consuming less and therefore end up with more savings.

But it doesn’t work for the economy as a whole. Because for the economy as a whole, if spending goes down, that means there is now less income, and less income means someone somewhere is earning less and therefore they have to cut their consumption and they also have to cut their saving. And it becomes this cycle where, okay, someone cut their consumption, now someone else is earning less or the grocery store is earning less, right? And now they have to fire their workers. Now their workers don’t have income and they are spending less, and so on and so forth.

Yeva and Steve go into other insights of MMT, including sectoral balances and the reality of the so-called national debt.

They unravel the absurd dynamics of current economic policy and look at the implications of proposed spending cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Fallout from the government’s ruthless abandonment of social programs will be disastrous.

Yeva Nersisyan is an associate professor of economics at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. She received her B.A. in economics from Yerevan State University in Armenia, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics and mathematics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is a macroeconomist working in the Modern Money Theory, Post-Keynesian, and Institutionalist traditions. Her research interests include banking and financial instability, and fiscal and monetary theory and policy. She has published a number of papers on the topics of shadow banking, fiscal policy, government deficits and debt, and the Green New Deal. Nersisyan is currently coediting The Elgar Companion to Modern Money Theory with L. Randall Wray.

Find her work at <levyinstitute.org/publications/yeva-nersisyan>

Bullets:

• The war in Ukraine consumes vast quantities of arms and ammunition, supplied almost entirely by the US and the EU.
• Battlefield demands in Ukraine far outstrip the combined production of the entire Western bloc.
• Arsenals across the EU are empty, and the United States is far more reluctant today to supply the Ukraine war effort.
• But Europe faces severe problems in their efforts to rearm, and to make good their public support and promises to Ukraine.
• Despite having a far smaller economy than either the US or the EU, Russia easily produces more ammunition and war materiel than the NATO countries, combined.
• Meanwhile, Russia's close ally China has the world's most productive industrial sector, and monopolies on the supply chains necessary to build armaments.
• Last year, China cut off exports of antimony, a critical component of explosives, and antimony prices have more than quadrupled in less than a year.

As our thrilling national descent into fascism proceeds day by day, along with it comes an increasingly frantic search for the answer to the question: “Who will save us?” The more ruthlessly the crank of oppression turns, the larger the pool of citizens becomes who begin casting their eyes to the horizon of American society in search of saviors. Where will we find those fabled heroes of civil society, those true believers in freedom and democracy, who will form the firewall to stop what is happening from happening?

None of us can predict the future, but it is possible to make some well-informed guesses about where we should—and should not—expect to see The Resistance forming in earnest. In any situation like ours, where a vindictive and dictatorial figure with no regard for law or morality is centralizing power in his own hands, it does not take a crystal ball to know how different groups will respond. It only takes an understanding of incentives, and of human nature. Here is one thing that I feel very confident in saying: The people and institutions in America who have the most will do the least in this fight. Do not be surprised when your search for saviors among the pillars of society fails.

Business will not save us.

Rich individuals will not save us.

The law will not save us.

Congress will not save us.

Universities will not save us.

Unions. Will unions save us? Organized labor is the most robust form of resistance to the type of oppression that is coming. That will not change. The existing union establishment, though, is vulnerable to the same forces that are pressing other institutions down into their holes. Big unions are entities completely enmeshed in a legal framework that the government is capable of manipulating or scrapping altogether. The administration just tossed out an existing union contract covering nearly 50,000 TSA agents. Is that “legal?” Maybe, though that is an illustration of the inadequacy of the law more than anything else. Is it an outrageous and existential attack on union power that demands a strike in response? Yes. But a strike would be illegal, and the workers could be fired, and the union itself could be subject to enormous fines and penalties, and it is extremely unlikely that a strike will happen. (I do not mean to portray this as an uncomplicated choice. Some of the most aggressive strikes in labor history have failed and destroyed entire unions and harmed worker power for decades to come. The dangers are very real.) What existing unions already have acts as a disincentive for them to take risks, lest they experience an abrupt and major loss. Instead, they will subject themselves to slower, more gradual losses: The government will make it hard to organize new members, easy for employers to retaliate against union drives, and public sector unions will be stripped of every last scrap of influence. I believe in the labor movement, but it would be dishonest not to observe that our own institutions have the same weak points as those discussed above.

So where does this leave us? If the most powerful and wealthiest parts of society will not form the vanguard of the resistance, who will? It is a question that answers itself. Grassroots movements made up of regular people are where the resistance has to happen. Ideally, enough pressure can be created from below to bolster the fearful institutions into joining the fight. But they will not lead it. At best, they will get on the right side of the fight when they make the judgment that doing so is a bet that has a reasonable chance of success. Allow your disappointment in this fact to be leavened by the knowledge that you, yourself, are the most important determination of what America’s future will look like. If you, and millions of people like you, resolve to stand up, we will win. We have the numbers. If you and I sit around waiting for all of those Respectable Institutions to take the lead, we will be spending the next few years doing nothing except being crestfallen by the inaction from above. I guess we might as well get to it, then. Don’t be sad you’re not rich. Be happy that you’re free.

The ghosts of the 1930s are no longer mere shadows in history books. They walk among us, wearing suits instead of brown shirts, speaking of “immigration control” rather than racial purity, but their message remains fundamentally unchanged. In Germany, where the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) now commands support from one in five voters, we see one of the most chilling examples of fascism’s resurgence in the heart of Europe.

The AfD’s rise mirrors a broader pattern across the Western world – a pattern that liberal democracy seems powerless to stop, or worse, actively enables. Just as the Weimar Republic’s center-left SPD compromised with conservative forces in a misguided attempt to maintain stability, today’s liberal parties across Europe and America are legitimizing far-right discourse under the guise of “pragmatic politics.”

Liberals Prefer Nazism over Anti-Capitalism

What remains unspoken in polite society, yet becomes glaringly obvious through historical analysis, is liberalism’s consistent preference for fascism over genuine social and racial equality. When faced with a choice between Nazi collaboration and communist resistance during World War II, many liberal democracies chose the former. Today, this pattern repeats itself with chilling precision.

Consider how quickly liberal media accommodate far-right talking points in the name of “balance,” while consistently demonizing even modest left-wing proposals for economic justice. The New York Times will run sympathetic profiles of neo-Nazis to “understand their perspective,” while dismissing socialists as dangerous radicals. This is not accident or oversight – it is policy.

The liberal establishment’s response to the AfD in Germany epitomizes a broader European pattern. While publicly denouncing the party’s most extreme statements, mainstream parties have steadily absorbed and legitimized its anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. This phenomenon stretches across the continent – from the Netherlands, where mainstream parties echo Wilders’ anti-Muslim sentiment, to France, where Macron’s government increasingly mirrors Le Pen’s harsh stance on immigration. In Britain, the Conservative Party has embraced Brexit’s nativist undertones, while Belgium’s traditional parties adopt ever-stricter immigration policies to compete with the far-right Vlaams Belang.

Yet these same liberal establishments react with unified horror at any serious proposal for wealth redistribution or challenge to corporate power, dismissing such ideas as dangerous radicalism. The asymmetry is stark: while far-right movements have been allowed to fester and grow, even within police forces, for the past decades liberal governments have expended enormous resources and energy to systematically dismantle left-wing movements and unions, criminalize anti-capitalist thought, and marginalize voices calling for economic justice.