Janet Yellen Will Be Treasury Secretary

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The good mayor of El Paso is at wit’s end. He is worrying himself into the grave. The City’s hospitals and morgues are overflowing. Seems that the people have to work to eat, and, if they work, they get the virus and get sick, and, too many die. Damned capitalism is as deadly as the virus; together they are a catastrophe. Maybe, if he would just step across the border into New Mexico, better yet, hop on a plane to San Francisco, better to get as far away from Texas as possible, we could explain the problem to him without being drowned out by the ignorant Texas dogma coming out of Austin; crapola he’s heard his whole life.

In a functioning state, there are dozens of examples, the government would have handed out masks and hand sanitizer, and free food as the need arose. It would have worked out a deal on the rents. The government would have mandated the changes needed to make the workplaces safe. If the government had done these things, had functioned, instead of blithering on about capitalism and the American way, the people could have kept on working without getting sick and dying by the droves; and, the economy could have kept on working. What our government didn’t do is killing us by the hundreds of thousands; destroying the nation.

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(Dan here,,,I think worth looking at in American Affairs)

New Fault Lines in a Post-Globalized World

By Marshall Auerback and Jan Ritch-Frel

November 20, 2020The economic damage of the coronavirus pandemic has upended the global economic system and, just as importantly, cast out the neoliberal orthodoxy that dominated the industrialized world for the past forty years. But Covid-19 has only accelerated a process that was already well underway, impacting trade negotiations between China, the United States, and the European Union and spreading throughout the world’s largest economies. Although many defenders of the old order lament this trend, it is as significant a shift as the dawn of the era of global trade that began with the birth of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Economists, politicians, and pundits are often tempted to see new economic patterns through the lens of the past. Thus, we are likely to hear that we are returning to nineteenth-century mercantilism or that we will see a revival of 1970s-style stagflation. But this historical view misunderstands our present moment; the motives now are different, and so are the outcomes.

Instead, what we are experiencing is the realization by governments of developed countries that new technologies enable them to expand or initiate new and profitable production capacity closer to or within their own markets. The savings in transportation, packaging, and security costs that come with domestic production, along with benefits to regional neighbors and to domestic workforces, will increasingly enable developed nations to compete with the price of goods produced through the current internationalized trade system. American politicians from Donald Trump to Elizabeth Warren are increasingly joined by a chorus of European and Asian politicians who see the long-term political benefit of supporting this transition.

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Jobless claims: the beginning of a pandemic reversal?

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 – by New Deal democrat

Weekly Indicators for November 16 – 20 at Seeking Alpha

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Coronavirus dashboard for November 20: North Dakota “leads” the world

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John Locke: decisionmaking by standing rules set in advance is a foundational requirement for civil government

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Progressive websites and even the mainstream media have been surprisingly blunt in their reporting on Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election.  Many reporters and commentators have rejected bothsidesism and said openly that Biden has won and Trump is trying to steal the election.  Quite a few have gone further and emphasized that his behavior is a threat to the survival of American democracy.

One group that has not been so outspoken?  Libertarian economists.  Of course, it is difficult to prove a negative, but I follow several libertarian thinkers, and so far, it’s been nothing but crickets.  My observation is consistent with the discussion of conservative economists by Saldin and Teles in their book Never Trump.

What accounts for the silence of the libertarian economists?  I can think of two possible explanations; they are not mutually exclusive.

The first explanation is that libertarians genuinely do not believe that Trump poses a threat to American democracy.

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As you must know by now, I read the healthcare articles. One of my favored spots is MedPage Today where I pick up the less technical information on what is going on in healthcare.

November 22. 1963 is the day President John Kennedy was assassinated. My whereabouts were sitting in a high school study hall along with 100 other boys getting through my first year at Lane Technical H.S., an all boys school. November 22nd and the principal, who we called “froggie” because of the twangy noise from the school speakers pre-announcement, came across the school loud speaker announcing John F. Kennedy had been shot about the same time as the thought had passed through my head. Or at least, I remember it this way. It is hard to know what one would think at such an announcement or result at such an age. I wouldn’t till about 5 years later.

A medical question arises as to;

“How different might John Kennedy’s care be in 2020? Could modern medicine techniques have helped President Kennedy to survive if his shooting happened today?”

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