Much of the news from the last few weeks has been about Covid, the Delta version, the Delta versions impact on the unvaccinated, and the lack of resources to care for those with Covid. Medical resource capacity is very low in some states. Hospitals are shipping patients to other cities and or states for care […]

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time XI, Capital, volume II Aside from a comment on the “labour socially necessary” in Engels’s preface, there is no other mention of socially necessary labour time in volume II of Capital. That preface is where Engels wrote of Marx saving The Source and Remedy from oblivion, albeit with only a single, short innocuous quotation (see […]

Initial claims: simply, good news The bottom line for both initial and continued claims this week is simple: unadulterated, absolute good news. Initial jobless claims declined 29,000 to 348,000, 20,000 below their previous pandemic low. The 4 week average of claims declined by 19,000 to 377,750, 6,750 below its previous pandemic low of 384,500: Significant […]

July housing permits and starts: yellow flag for economy in 2022 Last month I noted that, from here on, the comparisons with 2020 in housing would become much more challenging. And so they have. While permits (gold in the graph below) did increase this month, their declining trend remains intact. Starts (blue), and more importantly, […]

Industrial Production Rose 0.9% in July After Prior Four Months Were Revised Higher, RJS at MarketWatch 666 The Fed’s G17 release on Industrial production and Capacity Utilization for July indicated industrial production rose by 0.9% in July after rising by a revised 0.2% in June and a revised 0.8% in May, and is now up 6.6% from a year […]

Prof. Joel Eissenberg: “Zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 remains the most plausible hypothesis” There’s a saying in research science: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Given what we know about the origins of nearly all viral pandemics — that they resulted from a virus jumping from an animal to a human host (zoonotic infection)–the null hypothesis for […]

A lot more intense economic commentary and detail coming by way of blogger and commenter R.J.S. MarketWatch 666 CPI Rose 0.5% in July on Higher Prices for Food, Energy, New Vehicles and Lodging The consumer price index rose 0.5% in July, as higher prices for food, energy, new vehicles, and lodging at hotels and motels […]

One of the narratives taking hold was that hydroxychloroquine was a cheap, easy and safe cure that scientists were hiding in order to profit from federal dollars for vaccine research.

Three “Fragment[s] on Machines”: überflüssig ist notwendig An excerpt of a passage from the Grundrisse, in the notorious “fragment on machines,” has become iconic in contemporary Marx studies: Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure […]