Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Asking the Wrong Questions: Reflections on Amazon, the Post Office, and the Greater Good

The author of this post which was published in April 2018 on Save The Post Office is Mark Jamison, a retired North Carolina Post Master. From time to time, I have featured both Marks and Steve’s post office advocacy on Angry Bear. Steve is a literature professor who teaches “place studies” at the Gallatin School […]

Global Networks and Financial Instability

by Joseph Joyce Global Networks and Financial Instability The ten-year anniversary of the global financial crisis has brought a range of analyses of the current stability of the financial system (see, for example, here). Most agree that the banking sector is more robust now due to increased capital, less leverage, more prudent balance sheets and better […]

Real Military Pay

Real Military Pay Donald Trump lies about everything including military pay: Trump Brags To Troops About A Fictional Giant Pay Raise He Got Them – The president told military personnel in Iraq that they’ll get a raise of over 10 percent, their first in a decade. But it’s 2.6 percent, and they get a hike every […]

The US Postal Service in a Parallel Universe

The US Postal Service in a Parallel Universe Imagine that, instead of the dinosaur of a postal service we have today—the product, among other things, of congressional insistence that no government outfit can compete with private business in lucrative new markets—we had an entrepreneurial, innovative public dynamo.  In this other universe, the USPS was always […]

Goodbye To Goodlatte And The GOP Going From Lincoln To Trump

(Dan here…Paul Ryan’s farewell speech, Jeff Session’s targeting ‘consent decrees’, and what else?) Goodbye To Goodlatte And The GOP Going From Lincoln To Trump Outgoing Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte is my Congressman.  I even know him, having had civil almost friendly relations.  He has been in office for 26 years.  But […]

Twelve Dimensional Chess

Barack Obama just won Gallup’s man most admired by US adults poll for the 11th straight time. Also, in spite of the Republicans’ determined efforts including elimination of the mandate, Healthcare.gov signups are only 4% fewer than last year’s. Finally, I am thinking about “eleven dimensional chess”. This was a joke about Obama and Obamaniacs […]

Paul Ryan wouldn’t recognize a free market if one bit him

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Paul Ryan wouldn’t recognize a free market if one bit him Robert Costa and Mike DeBonis wrote an excellent retrospective on the career of Paul Ryan‘He was the future of the party’: Ryan’s farewell triggers debate about his legacy They are quite harsh, but not, I think, quite harsh […]

Man of The Year

“WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Capping an extraordinary 2018, Donald J. Trump announced on Thursday that he had been named Man of the Year by the terrorist organization known as ISIS. Trump made the announcement after receiving the news from the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom Trump called ‘a terrific, fabulous guy.’ ‘I got along […]

Neoliberalism as Structure and Ideology

Neoliberalism as Structure and Ideology As someone who has looked at the world through a political economic lense for decades, I am restless with the “cultural turn”.  Once upon a time, it is said, the bad old vulgarians of the left believed that economic structure—the ownership of capital, the rules under which economies operate and […]