Baby boomers like myself remember urban Main Street America. In our neighborhoods of Brooklyn N.Y., we had the appearance of little villages. The main shopping avenues were lined with Mom and Pop retail stores. You wanted bread, we had Italian, Jewish and German bakeries. You wanted fruit, you went to the neighborhood fruit and produce store. Needed women’s wear — a ladies shop.
No-no-no more Bill McKibben, please. He is capitalism lite, loving each climate change bubble of CO2, nitrous oxide and toilets a flushing as part of COP 21. Can he stay home and teach? Do we need parading after parading of the usual suspects – Naomi Klein, Billy-boy, Prince Charles, Mark Ruffalo, Björk, David Bowie, Coldplay, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, Colin Firth , Emma Thompson Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow ou encore Nathalie Portman Sean Penn, Leo Dicaprio.
“You’re retired, aren’t you?” the 29 year old says to me today, while I am with a friend, 62, who used to be my board president over at United Cerebral Palsy, just one of several jobs I’ve been sacked from by the Controllers – this time, unfortunately, by two insecure, anti-male-in-the-workplace self-described Jewish women who could not square that I was smarter than they were-are and that I had a passion for representing my people, clients living with severe disabilities, developmental and intellectual and psychological.
Economically speaking, in today’s world of nations-without-borders, an extraordinarily potent Transnational Capitalist Class, with no allegiance to individual nation-states, determines the fate of society at large.
However, in order to keep their “house in order,” these transnational capitalists may want to consider supporting quasi-socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, aka: “The Bern.”
Awakening once again to songs of mourning doves and the clanging of numerous church bells, I’m counting my last few precious days here in the heart of Mexico. Ornately painted calacas (skulls), elegantly clad skeletal Catrinas, ten foot tall mojigangas (giant puppets), fireworks and parades of Dia de Los Muertos are finished. Now it’s back to life as usual the streets of San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato.
In December of last year we published an intriguing article by Dmitry Kalinichenko, “Grandmaster Putin’s Trap,” which has drawn far more attention from readers than we ever expected. It continues to be cited by many international political and economic experts. That article addressed Russia’s latent strategy to get rid of US bonds and use its petrodollars to buy monetary gold.
Are you confused by the Middle East? Here are some things you should know. (But you’ll probably still be confused.)
Confusion reigns in the Democratic and Republican primaries. Huffington Post political reporters write, “It’s Time to Admit: Nobody Knows Anything about the 2016 Campaign,” now that “the old ‘rules’ of presidential politics no longer seem to apply.”
In college, Economics 101 is often described as the social science discipline that deals with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. MIT Economist Paul Samuelson liked to focus on scarcity, or more specifically, the allocation of scarce resources. “Abundance” was always a pretty word with an idyllic connotation for Professor Samuelson.
With Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at US $ 2.94 trillion (2014), the UK has the fifth largest economy in the world after Germany and Japan. It also suffers from acute income and wealth inequality and, according to Oxfam, who know all about poverty, “one in five [or 20%] of the population live below our official poverty line, meaning that they experience life as a daily struggle.”
