Cassandra on the only game in town?

This week on Facebook: I wrote (at some length) about The Money Tree in 2018, in the post I mentioned Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its claim that, with the political climate turning against the acceptance of austerity, it is time to reject the hegemony of neoliberalism. It is claimed that MMT economics never “run’s out of money” the way people or businesses can. The pandemic caused by Covid-19 has made MMT major topic of debate among politicians economists.

Covid-19 A Vaccine!

This week on FaceBook: I thought that I was going to leave Covid-19, but a comment made about the development of a vaccine on another site niggled away in my mind. It seems there is a global assumption that science and scientists have the answers to everything — even a vaccine¹ for the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, I posted the same thought on sciences and scientists developing a vaccine when the author made the following remarks:

Unless a vaccine saves us, quickly. Let us hope so. The politics of the pandemic

Covid-19 Global Lockdown

This week on FaceBook: My wife and I are under lockdown¹, I am not suffering from the blues as in (1) but my wife lives in fear of a taser attack by the police. My sons keep telephoning us to see if we are alright during this lockdown and I guess we should be grateful for that. My younger son persuaded me phone up the NHS as I think that I have the mild form of Covid-19. The NHS help line, as far as I can make out, is overwhelmed by people who think that they might have the coronavirus. My son telephoned to check up on me, telling me that people lied about their symptoms, resulting in them being taken to hospital by ambulance and to be tested for a Covid-19 that they didn’t have.

Would a lockdown have been effective during the black death, it would probably have not been so, however we will never know as people were unaware of the causes of the black death. People were equally unaware when the Derbyshire village of Eyam went into lockdown during the 17th century, it is claimed that doing so saved many lives outside of the village, at great cost to those remaining. Covid-19 may require a political response, but the enemy is a pandemic with flu-like symptoms carried by a virus as at Eyam.

Today the story is different, which lead me to two articles that I read recently, the first was The microbes, the animals and us and the second Microbes in Motion: Touring World History, both viewpoints leading to problems that a vaccine cannot cure. Nevertheless, as is remarked on an Australian site, while Covid-19 calls for solidarity it also begets deeper conflicts and while history may repeat itself, globally the development of a vaccine to save us takes precedence over any other conflict:

 But more importantly, the basic distributive conflicts that characterise politics will rise to the surface. Unless a vaccine saves us, quickly. Let us hope so. The politics of the pandemic

Covid-19 Pandemics & Politics

This week on FaceBook: Covid-19 has fuelled the pandemic and social media¹ by reporting on the coronavirus outbreak with information that satisfies everyone from conspiratory theorists, people who have turned it into a modern anxiety crisis², to so called ‘normal people’. However, what is meant by ‘normal’ is debatable. I have a friend who believes that everyone who appears to be ‘normal’ has a ‘problem of some sort’ —  something that most ‘normal people’ learn to live with.

I remarked in my post last week (Covid-19 global consequences) that this is grist for the mill to politicians especially — (from my perspective, hardly normal people). Nevertheless, this is not the first global pandemic³, nor is it the first to appear in the social media. Perhaps its appearance on the social media has made politicians, their economic advisors and The World Health Organisation (WHO), the first to induce the global anxiety crises that it has. Of course the global anxieties caused by other pandemics are not so apparent and where the blame for any anxiety they may cause globally is speculative.

Where not directly complicit themselves in the process of engineering crises for political purposes, elites and their ideological lickspittles reveal time and again a tenacious capacity to exploit legitimate crises—if not for proactive personal gain, then to avoid responsibility for creating them in the first place. The Political Uses of Pandemic

Covid-19 global consequences

This week on Facebook: Perhaps the worst consequence to the global pandemic introduced by Covid-19, is that  having spent all that inflationary money to combat the pandemic it ends not with a bang but with a whimper. The pandemic has produced, for the most part, common political solutions involving inflationary measures to boost their economies. As I remarked in my post last week (Global Covid-19), there will be a recovery from this pandemic (for some of us) leading to a global scramble for growth. This recovery will lead to the internal economic measures (a euphemism for austerity) and external beggar thy neighbour policies introduced by the pubic administration.

Covid-19 Global

This week on Facebook: Covid-19 is very much a global political and commercial pandemic and I am posting political and economic articles related to Covid-19¹², known globally as the coronavirus. My reprise posts on the fiscal crises that the world finds itself in post the introduction of fiat money in 1971 — the advent of global deficit financing and a global fiscal deficit are covered by this global pandemic.

A financial and economic crisis will tend to arise from a fiscal deficit if government debt levels contribute to a loss of market confidence in a national economy, reflected in turn in instability in currency and financial markets and stagnation in domestic output. A political and social crisis will tend to arise if both the fiscal deficit itself and the necessary corrective measure implemented to eliminate that deficit result in further losses of employment and output, falling living standards, and rising poverty. Britannica — Fiscal Crises

International Law: Does it exist?

This week on Facebook: The notion — and last week’s post — led me the concept of international law and eventually Plato. International Law can be a avery boring subject in which finding articles that interested me (let alone any readers) was very difficult. Occasionally it gets a diplomat gets arrested for something other that avoiding parking fines, but for those who may be interested in international law there are Jstor references cited at ¹·².

USA & China

This week onFacebook: Heralds a new era in the balance of power, it now being a global issue rather than a European one. With the end of  WWII the United States and Russia wielded their economic hegemony in the West. This western world largely ignored the territorial advances of China. The Russian failure at European economic hegemony has now been replaced in the last forty-years by a resurgent China and the economic growth of oriental states. The balance of power that the USA and China¹·² now share is likely to lead to a conflict for economic and military dominance on an unprecedented global scale.

Aasof on democratic government

This week on Facebook: I thought that I might find an answer to why governments don’t behave democratically! The somewhat obvious answer I arrive at is the possession of wealth, but this is not the primary factor according to the Pew Research Centre. In a democracy, which I post a lot about, you would expect the democratic process involve the electorate who vote politicians into office and in one sense it does. However the electorate is made up of voters who each have their own (usually selfish) reasons¹ for voting in the way that they do. Whether they hold capitalist or socialist views², these selfish reasons are usually a share in (however small) political views³ guaranteed in any political system and access to the political power held.

Aasof on the Elites

This week on Facebook: Perhaps the first question raised is, Who are the elites? They have always been a feature of all societies and have always been instrumental in suppressing the will of the people for a universal franchise¹. If Arrow’s impossibility theorem is correct in that it is generally impossible to assess the validity of a common good, then a social elite theory is also valid. But who are these elites² in a secular, urban and industrial modern society?

Although political science borrows heavily from the other social sciences, it is distinguished from them by its focus on power—defined as the ability of one political actor to get another actor to do what it wants—at the international, national, and local levels. Political Science