Economy/Economics

“Out! All of you!” That’s, more or less, a proper translation for the title of this article. It was the insurgent yell of the Argentine people directed at “their representatives,” all of them, when taking the streets in December 2001.
Yet, I don’t want to write about Argentina here, a country of which I empirically know only but a few areas. What I want to deal with is the country that I know best. More deeply than any other where I’ve been, worked and lived: Brazil.
“What is, or how is Brazil?”

According to Friday’s (January 8) payroll jobs numbers, almost 300,000 new jobs were created in December. Additionally, the previous two months were revised upward by 50,000 jobs. Apparently, the equity market did not believe the report, with the averages moving down today.
As I have pointed out almost monthly for what I think could be approaching two decades, the alleged job growth always takes place in nontradable domestic services, that is, in areas that do not produce exports and have no competition from imports. This is the job profile of a Third World country.

Kevin Zeese has long amazed me because of the number of things he does to make a better world. Mondays he does a radio program with Margaret Flowers called Clearing the FOG, which is one of the best alternative programs in the world, informing people of what is happening beyond the narrow scope of the corporate media.
Months before the Occupy Movement began, he was organizing activists in the City of Washington to occupy Freedom Plaza there.

With New Year celebrations barely in the rear view mirror, foreboding storm clouds are once again forming along the horizon.  The blackening skies are casting a dour mood over 2016, which in its mere infancy seems all but assured to see deepening global tumult, conflict, and crisis.
At the root of this palpable disquiet lies the still fragile state of the global economy, coming up on eight years after the financial collapse of 2008.

As Vermonters we are perhaps the most weather conscious people in North America. We feel the winter winds through the drafts of old farm houses, smell the melting snow when collecting our sap buckets, hear the birds of summer while tending our farms and gardens, and see the beauty of fall written across the hills in oranges, reds, and yellows. Many of us still work with our hands, be it as loggers, farmers, carpenters, midwives, or crafts-people.

Mark Weisbrot, a co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), has written an enlightening book that pulls together many of the analyses that CEPR has been producing over the past several decades.

You Can’t Fight City Hall?
Sometimes David is Patricia and Goliath is the FCC and AT&T. If anyone has been keeping an eye on rare articles printed in the Spokane (WA) daily and weekly, the reader might have seen the news about one neighborhood – the Grandview-Thorpe – losing the fight to stop Verizon Wireless from building a cell tower in their community, while another neighborhood group –Cliff-Cannon – helped put monkey wrenches (tiny ones) into the gear work of the cell phone-telecommunication engines.

Global developments in finance and geopolitics are prompting a rethinking of the structure of banking and of the nature of money itself. Among other interesting news items:

On May 19, 1916, representatives of Great Britain and France secretly reached an accord, known as the Sykes-Picot agreement, by which most of the Arab lands under the rule of the Ottoman Empire were to be divided into British and French spheres of influence upon the conclusion of World War 1. That this agreement was conducted in secrecy, reveals to what extent the voices of the inhabitants of this region were absent from negotiations. It was as if the voices of the ruling Colonial elites were the only ones that had credibility.

First of all I know many of you must be doing some soul searching right now. I’ve spent the past two years retracing my steps and trying to understand the nature of the Bolivarian project I once supported and why I supported it.