Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Flirting with Armageddon: the US and Ukraine

Saturday, August 13th, 2022

It is now almost six months since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and with each passing month the Biden administration has ratcheted up US participation in the conflict. That ratchet process has the US flirting ever closer with nuclear Armageddon, a momentous development that has gone almost uncommented and uncontested. It is as if the US is sleepwalking, eyes wide shut.

The political background

US engagement in the Ukraine war has been driven by the Democratic Party, enthusiastically supported by its traditional allies in the mainstream media and establishment intellectual class – also known as the liberal blob. That has made criticism of the war difficult for two reasons.

First, the liberal blob has promulgated an edict of silence against those who challenge its explanation of the war and the case for US participation. The edict applies to conservatives who argue “it’s not our war”, and to independent critics who argue the war has been “made in the USA” via a thirty-year slow-motion attack on Russia conducted through eastward expansion of NATO and regime change subversion in the republics of the former Soviet Union.

Second, the US is engaged in a life and death struggle for its own democracy, with the Republican Party having gone off the rails through its embrace of Donald Trump’s protofascism. That struggle poses an awful dilemma, as criticizing the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy risks opening the door for the protofascists.

With nuclear Armageddon a possibility on the horizon, the stakes are too high for silence. The truth about the war, the Democratic Party, and the liberal blob must be spoken. There is still time to reverse course, and public opinion is capable of mastering two issues. It can both reject Republican protofascism and demand reversal of the policy of Ukraine escalation.

Toxic takeover: the Neocon capture of the Democratic Party

The starting point is blunt admission that President Biden and his national security team have put the US within spitting distance of nuclear armageddon. That has been done for a war with no bearing on US vital national security interests.

Worse yet, it is not an accidental misjudgement. Instead, it reflects the comprehensive capture of the Democratic Party by the most extreme Neocon foreign policy thinking. That thinking calls for the US to seek global military hegemony, which Democrats have wrapped in a cloak weaved of the lie of democracy promotion and the delusion of US moral exceptionalism.  

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Neoliberalism and the Road to Inequality and Stagnation: A Chronicle Foretold

Friday, April 29th, 2022

My latest book has recently been published by Edward Elgar.

The book explores the impact of neoliberal policies on the US, Europe, and the global economy. It shows how the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession were predictable outcomes of the neoliberal policy experiment, as is the emergence of global “race to the bottom” competition. It also explains how Europe’s economic fragility is connected to the neoliberal design of the euro. Neoliberalism creates a particular variety of capitalism and is a political choice. That means society is tacitly engaged in a “war of ideas”, the outcome of which will influence our future political economic trajectory.

The book is available HERE. The cheapest option is the e-book purchased via Googleplay (price = $13.11).

More on the critique of New Developmentalism

Monday, April 11th, 2022

Oreiro and de Paula’s (2022) reply to my article (Palley, 2021) further convinces me that New Developmentalism (ND) substantially misconstrues the development challenge and ND’s policy recommendations lean in a Neoliberal direction. The critique of ND is not its emphasis of the importance of manufacturing. It is the regressive inclination, the narrowness of policy recommendations, neglect of the transformation dimension of development, and neglect of the implications of the shift to a post-industrial era.

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Ukraine: what will be done and what should be done?

Thursday, February 24th, 2022

Preamble/Postscript:

While rightly condemning Russia for its invasion, the mainstream media continues to selectively report the history behind these events. In my view, its omissions are intentional and contribute to the tragedy. They inflame public understanding, render a diplomatic resolution more difficult, and lock us into a worse trajectory.

Let me make further clear my argument: (1) President Putin is head of the Russian state which is under slow-motion implacable attack by US-led NATO. (2) After failing to secure a satisfactory diplomatic resolution, he has taken action to head off that attack.

If you accept those two propositions, the Ukraine story is massively more complicated than simply claiming Putin is an aggressor and we (the US) are good. There will be no lasting peace until that complexity is fully engaged.

What will be done and what should be done?

The inevitable has happened. Russia has invaded Ukraine. It was inevitable because the US and its NATO partners had backed Russia into a corner from which it could only escape by military means.

In effect, Russia confronted a future in which the US would increasingly tighten the noose around its neck by further eastward expansion of NATO, combined with military upgrading by the US of its Eastern European NATO proxies.

Accompanying that militarization was the prospect of a ramped-up propaganda war in which western media fanned the flames of public animus against Russia. Side-by-side, US government financed entities (such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the German Marshall Fund) would seek to influence European and Russian politics with the goal of regime change.

At this stage, there are two questions. What will be done? And what should be done?

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American Exceptionalism and the Liberal Menace: the US and Ukraine

Sunday, February 13th, 2022

American exceptionalism is the most dangerous doctrine in the world, and it has been on full display in the current Ukraine crisis. Worse yet, the loudest advocates have been America’s elite liberal class.

The doctrine of exceptionalism holds that the US is inherently different from and superior to other nations. That superiority means the US is subject to a different standard. Its actions are claimed to be benevolent and above international law, and the US is entitled to intervene at will around the world, including building a global network of military bases and garrisons that it would never permit another power to have.

The Liberal Menace

In today’s United States, liberals are the most extreme proponents of American exceptionalism. In contrast, Republicans and conservatives are inclined to justify foreign policy by appeal to raw power, with the US doing what it wants because it can.

For myself, I have long been leery of American liberals. I term them the “liberal menace”. That is because they have been a major obstruction to progress toward a social democratic society for the past forty years.

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Theorizing varieties of capitalism: economics and the fallacy that “There is no alternative (TINA)”

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022

The VoCs approach to capitalism has the potential to transform economics. It tacitly emphasizes the plasticity of economies, whereby their character and outcomes are significantly a matter of choice. This paper augments VoCs theory to include a distinction between varieties and varietals of capitalism. Drawing on biology, varieties correspond to species and varietals correspond to sub-species. The paper proposes an analytical framework that unifies VoCs theory. It adds a mesoeconomics that links macroeconomics and microeconomics. That mesoeconomics concerns the institutions, behavioral norms, rules and regulations, and policies that characterize the economy and influence its performance. The mesoeconomic structure is described using the metaphor of a box, the six sides of which correspond to the major dimensions of capitalist economies. The design of the box is the product of societal and political choices, which places politics at the center of VoCs analysis. Policy space and policy lock-in are important concerns as they impact the choice set. The fact that economies inevitably involve choice means there is an inescapable normative question regarding what type of capitalism society will have.

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2022 Godley – Tobin Memorial Lecture: Professor Paul Krugman, “The enduring relevance of Tobinomics”

Friday, January 21st, 2022

The Review of Keynesian Economics is pleased to announce that Professor Paul Krugman will give the 2022 Godley – Tobin Lecture. Professor Krugman is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has also taught at MIT, Princeton University, and Yale University. Like James Tobin, Professor Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (2008) and the American Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal (1991).

Professor Krugman’s work has focused on international economics and macroeconomics. He is a prominent American public intellectual who is widely recognized for his regular column in The New York Times.

The title of Professor Krugman’s lecture is “The enduring relevance of Tobinomics”.

The lecture will be held at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA on April 20, 2022, at 5.00pm and it will also be live streamed.

A crisis made in the USA: why Russia will likely invade Ukraine

Sunday, January 16th, 2022

Preamble. Living in the US and writing honestly about US-Russia relations (and China too) is very difficult. That is because the US is the aggressor, but Russia is an authoritarian country. That split is used by the US establishment to shuffle discussion away from US aggression on to Russian authoritarianism. Side-by-side, anyone calling the US on its aggression is labelled pro-Russian. In that way, the US establishment cleverly inoculates itself against criticism and taints its critics.

President Vladimir Putin confronts a decisive historical moment. Talks with the US and its NATO partners have shown that the US has no intention of reversing its grinding long-running campaign against Russia. The US wants regime change in Russia. That does not mean democracy, talk of which is just camouflage for the true strategic objective of a permanently weakened Russia. All that matters is Russia be weakened, and the well-being of Russians is truly of no consequence in Washington.

That is the landscape Putin confronts. The implication is Russia’s position is unlikely to strengthen in years to come. Consequently, now may be the most favorable moment to take actions that both strategically strengthen Russia and achieve its own secondary long-term political goal of partial reunification of the historic European component of Russia (i.e., reabsorption of Belarus and Eastern Ukraine).

Implacable US antipathy

The baseline for the argument is recognition that the US has an implacable antipathy to Russia. That antipathy has a long history. In 1918 the US invaded Siberia, intervening in the Russian civil war between the Tsarist Whites and Reds. The invasion set the stage for pre-Cold War hatred of the Soviet Union.

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Federal Reserve Insider Dealing? R.I.P. Central Bank Independence

Tuesday, January 11th, 2022

Federal Reserve Vice-Chair Richard Clarida has shot himself in the foot with what appears to be insider trading. That comes on the heels of prior concerns about inappropriate trading by regional Federal Reserve Bank Presidents Robert Kaplan and Eric Rosengren. Albeit unintentionally, the good news is these indiscretions may have done working families a favor by helping disprove the notion of central bank independence.

For years, many of us have argued that central bank independence is a charade aimed at facilitating control over central banks by financial interests. Here is a link to an article of mine titled “Central Bank Independence: A Rigged Debate Based on False Politics and Economics”.

In that paper I wrote every central banker “inevitably brings her own preferences, views, and prejudices to the policy table (p.77)”.  The implication is clear: appoint people with a Wall Street background and they will bring Wall Street policy preferences; appoint well-to-do financial economists with large stock portfolios and they will bring a personal concern with the stock market and asset prices.

Federal Reserve Presidents and Governors tend to be drawn from the banking community, Wall Street, and neoliberal academic economists. For decades, activists have requested that they be drawn from a broader political economic swathe of society to give working families better representation, but that request has been dismissed as lacking justification.

The Clarida-Kaplan-Rosengren affair argues otherwise. It is suggestive of how private interests are always in the room. It is also indicative of why handing the keys of the central bank to so-called independent bankers does not magically solve the problematic of monetary policy decision making, which is why analytical diversity is a matter of public import.

Messrs. Clarida, Kaplan, and Rosengren will survive and prosper. Wall Street will also continue to taint policymaking via its pre-pensation/post-pensation incentive model. The silver lining in the episode is the opportunity to bury the ideological doctrine of central bank independence and open the Federal Reserve to a broader set of ideas and personnel.

Economics vs QAnon: who’s crazy now?

Wednesday, December 29th, 2021

I’m hoping this year we will make progress getting some of the crazier stuff out of the room.

Here’s a little YouTube teaser from Down Under (give it a minute to get to the punchline):

Who’s crazy now?

All the best in 2022,

Tom