Questioning in the spirit of rationality and freedom the habits and tendencies of the zeitgeist. Looking through Kondratiev's lens.
Saskatoon, SASK
Joined December 2008
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Michael McAteer retweeted
Conservatives have governed BC under the names “Social Credit” and “BC Liberals” for 52 of the last 74 years. Uninformed people should stop portraying this as the first time BC has had a right wing govt in 100 years.
The explosion of scientific innovations will restructure markets. Look what lab manufactured diamonds did to DeBeers. Gold could be next. threadreaderapp.com/thread/2…
Even if Netanyahu’s intentions were only to punish Gazans for October 7, 2023, the world nevertheless stood up and said he has gone too far.
Funny how the cabal of Conservative sponsored “influencers” haven’t pounced on the perpetrator of the Belleville synagogue attack…because he’s one of theirs.
A dive into the terms of the security agreement regarding Greenland signed by the U.S. and the Kingdom of Denmark. diplomacyandlaw.com/post/us-…
There are Canadian Conservatives who conflate a local Confucious Institute with the so-called Chinese "police stations". Michael Jinghan Zeng: Inside a Confucius Institute open.substack.com/pub/peking…
Australia's proximity to China makes it doubly interesting to hear from Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister and lately a credited expert on Chinese affairs. The Importance of ANZUS in a More Dangerous World mrkrudd.substack.com/p/the-i…
There is a large contingent of the Conservative Party who think winning the culture war is paramount. The battle lines were set long ago. If you are labelled "woke", then you are the enemy. There is no place of conciliation.
That the Conservatives resolutely refuse to acknowledge the threat of global warming in denial of 50 years of climate science indicates a level of ideological obstinence that in my mind effectively disqualifies them from any position of governance.
Michael McAteer retweeted
1/2
A very important book that illustrates how rising debt and trade imbalances in the 1920s were resolved in the 1930s. Simmons discusses what happens when a country has an external imbalance under a fixed exchange-rate system, how painful the adjustment costs are and how they shared among the deficit and surplus countries.
She argues that domestic political institutions determine how governments respond to external pressure. Countries facing similar international constraints made very different choices about currency levels, tariffs, domestic demand, unemployment and deflation.
I can’t help but think of Beth Simmons’s, Who Adjusts? Under the interwar gold standard the burden fell on deficit countries, which were expected to deflate. And whether a govt accepted that was determined by domestic politics. Countries w/ strong unions refused to deflate wages and devalued or imposed capital controls. While countries w/ weak labor and an insulated central bank took the deflation.
Instead of gold and deflation it’s now about debt and unemployment, but it’s ultimately still the same question. Surplus countries w/ weak labor export the adjustment and everyone else either absorbs it through wages or breaks the link through tariffs.
Before the American Civil War, many northerners abided slavery so as not to disrupt the economy until the matter became an overwhelming one of personal conscience. How does one deny 50 years of climate science whose models of global warming were accurate in their predictions?
Trump and his minions are loudly proclaiming they are winning the war with Iran without revealing winning what.
Michael McAteer retweeted
If you can watch only one video to understand current geopolitics, make it this one by George Yeo, one of Singapore's longest-serving cabinet ministers (23 years!)
As Yeo explains, current global geopolitics is fundamentally driven by US "retreat" and "decline", forced by a financial reality that no US administration can reverse: its debt servicing already exceeding its entire defense budget.
To Yeo, this explains why the US insists so much that its "allies" in Europe and Asia spend more of their GDP on defense - to basically pick up the tab for an empire America can no longer afford - but it also means that, inevitably, "once your allies begin to have their own military capabilities, they will think differently, and they will not follow you in everything that you want to do."
As such, American decline becomes self-reinforcing: the more it asks allies to carry their own weight, the less reason they have to follow its lead.
Still, Yeo says that a similar dynamic to one that happened after the fall of Rome could occur where America - like Byzantium did - sheds its empire and consolidates around its own hemisphere, allowing it to remain self-sustaining and powerful for a very long time.
He believes it's the direction things are heading - which would also explain Trump's obsession with Canada and Greenland.
It remains however obviously an open question whether an American "Byzantium strategy" is even achievable: Canada, for one, clearly wants no part of it.
Full video available here: youtube.com/watch?v=NY2Vgiuh…
Michael McAteer retweeted
It was never hard to predict that most Venezuelans would oppose this deal. Most Americans should too. Putting Chevron in control of a substantial portion of the development, production and commercialization of Venezuela's oil reserves may be great for Chevron's shareholders, but it does nothing for American workers or the middle class. As it is, most Venezuelan oil is already processed in the US.
The point is that the only sustainable way to make Americans collectively richer is to increase the productivity of American workers, and unless Chevron sells all this oil to Americans at well below world prices (which I doubt either Caracas or Chevron's shareholders will allow), its control over Venezuelan reserves will not increase the value of goods and services produced in the US. In fact to the extent that the resulting net inflows strengthen the dollar, it might actually further undermine manufacturing in the US.
The administration should be focused on building industry at home, and not on boosting the foreign profits of American companies.
ft.com/content/b3c98ca2-fe67…
